Rackspace improves cloud management with Cloudkick buy

Rackspace Hosting has announced the acquisition of software firm Cloudkick in a move designed to improve its tools for managing cloud deployments for businesses.

Cloudkick delivers a single dashboard interface for the management of cloud-hosted services to give IT staff a simple means of managing, controlling and keeping track of server deployments and is currently used by some 1,500 businesses.

Rackspace said the technology would help companies stay on top of their ever-increasing cloud-deployments by automating server management.

Fabio Torlini, co-director of Rackspace, told V3.co.uk he thought the move was a "perfect fit" for the two firms as it would bring a layer of control to its services that was needed as cloud computing becomes ever more popular.

"Cloud is going through the roof – companies that were just dabbling in it now have multiple cloud systems and so this acquisition enables us to give these customers access to a great tool set that can bring everything together into one control panel," he said.

"The move also brings with it a great team and offices in San Francisco that we will use to help us continue to expand our businesses."

He added that he thought the move would give the company a more in-depth offering than its chief rival Amazon Web Services as it gave them the ability to offer users both dedicated infrastructure support and public cloud capabilities.

"Some customers are wary of putting everything in the cloud but we are able to offer a mix and match approach to their hosting needs, and with this acquisition we now have the management capabilities for this in one single, seamless control panel," Torlini added.

No financial details of the deal were announced. Torlini said he expected the firm to start offering some of the services from Cloudkick to its 100,000-strong customer base in the new year, but said it had yet to decide on any offerings or pricing set-ups.