Rackspace found a buyer, going private

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in internet on (#1S16B)
Cloud management provider and co-founder of OpenStack, Rackspace says it will be going private in a deal that will pay shareholders $4.3bn. Investment house Apollo Global Management will be paying $32 per share to buy out stakeholders and run Rackspace as a privately held company. Rackspace stock closed yesterday (prior to the announcement) at $30.19 per share.

Pending stockholder approval, the deal is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year. News of the deal hardly comes as a surprise - reports of an imminent deal to take the company private surfaced weeks ago, causing Rackspace's stock price to soar in the meantime. The acquisition could help Rackspace in its efforts against larger competition in the cloud management space. The company had entertained the idea of a buyout in 2014, but backed out of talks.
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Mall datacenter (Score: 2, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2016-08-29 21:50 (#1S1FJ)

I had hopes that Rackspace would open a neat datacenter in my hometown of San Antonio when they bought a large shopping mall to serve as their main point of presence. Sounds cool, right? Take down the JCPenny/Mervins/Sears signs and install rows and rows of computers, etc... However, years later, the site is still largely empty. Sure, they renovated a few areas to serve as a large cubicle farm for phone support personnel, but they don't actually host anything or run any servers in the building. They continue to use a few third party datacenters with remote-hands in Dallas for their server needs. As far as I know, they don't even have the transit from the network providers to host anything in San Antonio, even if they wanted to.

Plus, their main business has turned into selling you a really expensive full service experience. No build your own server or collocation options, you just tell them you want a webpage and they do everything for you. Kinda boring.

We used to host our local Linux group meetings there, but support from Rackspace rapidly waned, and lack of interest to continue to push for room every month means we stopped meeting altogether. If we ever continue, we will probably go back to meeting at the local community college and skip the Rackspace option - which is kind of sad for company that claims that it is "Linux friendly" and even originated the whole OpenStack thing.