Home Another Giant Gets Another Sexy Startup: Rackspace Acquires Cloudkick

Another Giant Gets Another Sexy Startup: Rackspace Acquires Cloudkick

Just two years after starting its business, Cloudkick has been acquired by Rackspace. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

What this means for Cloudkick is a big ramp up in its operations. It will also establish a presence for Rackspace in San Francisco. That’s a first for the San Antonio, Texas company.

But perhaps more so it’s another smart, modern San Francisco-based cloud computing company getting acquired by one of the major cloud computing services. Last week, Salesforce.com announced its planned purchase of Heroku, a Ruby on Rails platform for developers.

Cloudkick provides cloud server monitoring and management tools that support modern APIs and the elastic nature of the cloud.

Perhaps what it does best is take some of the complexity out of managing cloud environments. Earlier this year, Cloudkick launched a hybrid cloud model, which will give Rackspace more opportunity with organizations seeking to extend data centers into cloud environments.

The Cloudkick API is a core part of the service and illustrates advancements in giving companies dynamic ways to manage servers.

Visualization is a key feature of the company’s service.

Cloudkick likes to say it is offering a human friendly way to manage servers. Its tools reflect this philosophy and the people who started the company. The approach has apparently worked. Cloudkick says it has thousands of customers. It works with all the major cloud computing providers.

Salesforce.com gained tremendous intellectual capital in its purchase of Heroku. With Cloudkick, Rackspace also gains some of the smartest minds in the cloud computing world.

For example, Alex Polvi is CEO and co-founder. He is also lead contributor to libcloud, the open source library for developers who build portable cloud applications. Previously, he worked on open infrastructure projects for the Mozilla Foundation, Google and the Oregon State Open Source Lab.

Rackspace offers what it calls fanatical support. Cloudkick offers what it calls fanatical programming. They’ve worked together and have balancing capabilities.

How will the two fare? Cloudkick tools do scale but the challenge will be in competing with long-established companies such as CA, which acquired Nimsoft earlier this year. How the dynamics play out with Rackspace and Cloudkick will define how the two compete against a host of very large technology companies.

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