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by ghshephard
3587 days ago
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Re: "Business not in terribly good shape" - there are 4.3 Billion reasons to suggest otherwise. This isn't the type of business that gets purchased without a lot of due diligence, and, we're not really in much of a tech bubble right now - so I thinks it's reasonable to asses that the underlying revenue/profit of Rackspace was sufficient to justify the (impressive) valuation. |
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I believe the "not terribly good shape" is a measurement that's _relative_ to other competitors in the cloud infrastructure market.
Rackspace's yearly revenues ($2 billion) have gone nearly flat[1]. On the other hand, Amazon's AWS has seen so much growth[2] that they now pull more revenue per quarter ($2.5 billion) than Rackspace does for the entire year.
Back in the early 2000s -- before AWS hit the scene, Rackspace hosting was attracting customers with excellent datacenter uptime and "fanatical support"[3]. Those 2 factors are not meaningful enough to the cloud subscribers today which is why Rackspace tried various strategies such as promoting OpenStack (hey don't be locked into proprietary AWS!) and then eventually "consulting services" to help customers use AWS. Neither of those initiatives really moved the needle.
I'm currently a Rackspace customer spending $120 a year for them to host my email but customers like me are part of a dying source of revenue. (Everybody can use GMail for free!).
Rackspace is "mature" instead of being "hot growth" which often translates to "not doing too well".
[1]http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/rax/financials
[2]http://www.statista.com/statistics/250520/forecast-of-amazon...
[3]https://www.rackspace.com/en-us/dedicated-servers/promise