After just two years since starting its business, Cloudkick has been acquired by Rackspace. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
What this means for Cloudkick is a big ramp up in its operations. It will also establish a presence for Rackspace in San Francisco. That’s a first for the San Antonio, Texas company.
But perhaps more so it’s another smart, modern San Francisco-based cloud computing company getting acquired by one of the major cloud computing services. Last week, Salesforce.com announced its planned purchase of Heroku, a Ruby on Rails platform for developers.
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Cloudkick provides cloud server monitoring and management tools that support modern APIs and the elastic nature of the cloud.
Perhaps what it does best is take some of the complexity out of managing cloud environments. Earlier this year, Cloudkick launched a hybrid cloud model, which will give Rackspace more opportuntity with organizations seeking to extend its data centers into cloud environments.
The Cloudkick API is a core part of the service and illustrates its advancements in giving companies dynamic ways to manage its servers.
Visualization is a key feature of the company’s service.
Cloudkick likes to say it is offering a human friendly way to manage servers. Its tools reflect this philosophy and the people who started the company. The approach has apparently worked. Cloudkick says they have thousands of customers. They work with all the major cloud computing providers.
Salesforce.com gained tremendous intellectual capital in its purchase of Heroku. With Cloudkick, Rackspace alo gains some of the smartest minds in the cloud computing world.
Foe example, Alex Polvi is chief executive officer and co-founder. He is also lead contributor to libcloud, the open source library for developers to build portable cloud applications. Previously, he worked on open infrastructure projects for the Mozilla Foundation, Google, and the Oregon State Open Source Lab.
Rackspace offers what it calls fanatical support. Cloudkick offers what it calls fanatical programming. They’ve worked together and have balancing capabilities.
How will the two fare? Cloudkick tools do scale but the challenge will be in competing with long established companies such as CA, which acquired Nimsoft earlier this year. How the dynamics play out with Rackspace and Cloudkick will define how the two compete against a host of very large technology companies.
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