Rackspace Rebrands With Cloud Buzzword

Coinciding with the launch of its OpenStack offering, Rackspace now describes itself as the "open cloud company."

According to a statement published by the hoster, the change reflects "the company’s leadership position in open source cloud development and its continued focus on delivering open source technologies."

While cloud has turned into one of the most recognizable words in the IT industry these days, it has also been criticized as one of the most overused buzzwords that easily can dilute or question a brand if used in direct connection with it. However, while the cloud is literally a "cloudy" and somewhat intangible word with unclear meaning for the consumer, the case may be different in the corporate world.

Rackspace itself said that the branding change "enhances" the company's "brand identity to visually reflect our commitment to delivering production-scale open cloud solutions that give businesses choice and innovation while eliminating the threat of vendor lock-in." The presence of the word "cloud" in brands is still limited and we are seeing more companies trying to find alternatives for a buzzword that could potentially fade away with an emerging trend. However, given Rackpace's strategy to push OpenStack, it may not be such a bad idea to refer to the "cloud" in its logo.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

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