Rackspace CEO: 'We're Playing a Different Game' than Amazon

The Rackspace Cloud is now based fully on the open source OpenStack platform. I recently spoke with CEO Lanham Napier, who discussed how his company doesn’t necessarily see Amazon Web Services as a direct competitor, and how OpenStack is changing his company’s entire business.

For Rackspace, there’s no turning back from OpenStack now. As of Wednesday, all new customer workloads will deploy on the company’s open source cloud computing platform, leaving the company’s legacy platform for existing customers that want to take their time transitioning to the new cloud. Now, the competition to dethrone cloud king Amazon Web Services really begins. Or does it?

I recently spoke with Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, who shared his vision for how OpenStack is changing his company from the inside out and how he doesn’t necessarily view Amazon as direct competitor.