The rumor mill was driven into high gear back in May when it was revealed that hosting and cloud infrastructure vendor Rackspace (disclosure, Rackspace sponsored a vendor neutral cloud education program I developed a couple of years ago) had engaged Morgan Stanley to look at “strategic options” for its future. Most commentators saw this as the Rackspace board looking for a buyer for the business. And the reasons for this seem obvious, previously widely seen as the number two cloud infrastructure payer, their relative position against industry heavyweight Amazon Web Services (AWS) has gotten significantly poorer over time. At the same time other competitors have come to market with some compelling propositions, both existing vendors (Google, Microsoft and IBM SoftLayer for example) and new upstarts (DigitalOcean being the best known example). So finding a suitor in the face of difficult times is a natural, if difficult, option.
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