[caminante]

RAX's strategy has shifted to "different segments" directly as a result of competition from AWS [0]. Now, AMZN has considerable supplier power over RAX:

  "The deal would have been unthinkable just two years ago, 
  when Rackspace and AWS were fierce rivals. But in early 2014, 
  Rackspace, facing ever slimmer margins amid a cloud-computing price war, 
  withdrew from head-to-head competition with Amazon. Since then, 
  it has focused on offering higher-margin services."

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/rackspace-teams-up-with-amazon-1...

[crack-the-code]

Yes but even prior to this, Rackspace had been a managed cloud provider, meaning they offer services on top of the infrastructure. This is different than AWS.

[caminante]

RAX has its roots in managed cloud, but they moved away from that. They got into IaaS, but have retrenched. Here's RAX's mapping of AWS to RAX P&S for IaaS [0]. That's a lot. RAX has decided to return to its roots (managed cloud) and seek differentiation because it can't compete on IaaS.[1] That'll be tough.

RAX's going private to shift its P&S mix and turn things around.

edit: I'll also point to jsode's great comment above.

[0] https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/mapping-of-amazon-web-s...

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/article/2461361/iaas/rackspace-b...

[NetStrikeForce]

Rackspace's IaaS offering was never close to what AWS, Azure or even GCE offer.

It was more similar to DigitalOcean or Vultr, who are not really IaaS but VPS providers. I mean, where are the VPCs? the incredibly redundant load balancing? the VPN gateways, etc?

Disclaimer: It has been 2 years since I evaluated RAX's offerings.

[bluedino]

Rackspace offers most of the services Amazon/Google/Microsoft does - but you're right, they did start out as Slicehost which is a Linode competitor (back in what...2009?)

[bluedino]

Isn't 'managed cloud' kind of contradictory?

Shouldn't your cloud based application manage itself? That's kind of the point, not having to 'manage' it?