Rackspace today announced that it is partnering with AppFormix to bring that company’s cloud monitoring and performance optimization tools to its private OpenStack cloud customers.
Thanks to this partnership, Rackspace will now license AppFormix’s tools and bring it to all of its private cloud customers who use Rackspace to manage their clouds. This will give them access to AppFormix’s real-time monitoring, analytics and optimization tools (and Rackspace’s engineers will also use these to manage cloud for their customers).
For RackSpace, this is a somewhat unusual move. The company typically builds its own tools for managing the technical side of its cloud businesses (and it was the founding member of the OpenStack project, together with NASA). When I asked Bryan Thompson, RackSpace’s senior director of product management, for its OpenStack Private Cloud business, what made him choose AppFormix instead of building the product itself, he told me the company definitely looked at building its own tools.
“With AppFormix, we had a team that was solely focused on this,” he told me. “We met with the team and realized the caliber of the folks working on this. It was a great alignment with the things that we were trying to achieve and it accelerated anything we were trying to build ourselves.”
That’s pretty much exactly the same kind of reasoning I hear when I ask large companies why they acquired a startup and Thompson acknowledge that the thought of an acquisition had definitely “cross some people’s mind.”
As AppFormix CEO and founder Sumeet Singh added, his company isn’t solely betting on OpenStack either, of course, and also supports the Google-incubated Kubernetes container management service (though it’s worth noting that Kubernetes and OpenStack play together rather nicely these days).
AppFormix raised a $7 million Series A round led by August Capital last year and has since landed key partnerships with Intel and others to bring its service to more customers.
