Rackspace opens its cloud up to service providers

Vendor giving partners the chance to package up and sell the cloud technology used to power its Openstack platform

Cloud provider Rackspace is giving service providers what it claims is the "secret sauce" to its open cloud technology in the hope of enabling them to build and sell their own public clouds.

Rackspace plans to offer a select group of its global partners the chance to commercially package the technology it uses to host its own Openstack cloud in order to sell to their own customers.

The offer includes the hardware and software infrastructure, patching and monitoring help, go-to-market sales support and training.

The firm's chief executive Lanhan Napier said the move will help broaden the adoption of open-source technology.

He said: "We have had interest from service providers on nearly every continent to extend Rackspace's OpenStack-powered public cloud solutions and expertise to their customers. It is important to broaden the adoption of open-source technologies through partners around the world.

"The creation of this network allows for different providers, in different regions, with different service characteristics to link together to better serve the cloud users around the world."