Rackspace has been defeated.
Expect them to close/sell their cloud hosting division.
Expect them to close/sell their cloud hosting division.
Rackspace and HP needed OpenStack to take off in order to generate demand for their public clouds. When that didn't happen HP shut down its cloud. Rackspace couldn't do that, their cloud accounted for too much of their revenue, so what we're seeing is their fallback plan.
Interesting anecdote: yesterday the OpenStack Foundation sent out an email announcing the speakers for the upcoming OpenStack summit. The subject line: "Hear from Google's VP of Cloud Platforms at OpenStack Summit Boston".
The idead of a bunch of giant openstack public clouds is dying, but openstack as the solution to build private clouds still seems to be going strong.