Roundup: Rackspace's Cloud Acquisitions update from October 2008

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm calls Rackspace's acquisitions "a move aimed at boosting its Mosso cloud offerings in order to step up competition with Amazon’s Web Services. But whether or not Rackspace can successfully transition from being a hosting provider to a provider of a truly on-demand cloud offering remains to be seen."

Does Rackspace want to transition? Not so long as customers are split between the two formats. "Rackspace has the opportunity to combine the best of both worlds, bringing cloud and traditional hosting together," CTO John Engates tells Information Week. 

Gartner analyst Lydia Leong says Rackspace's announcement "signals an intent to be much more aggressive in the cloud space than I think most people were expecting."

Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch says the Rackspace expansion is good news for developers. "Amazon has been the dominant force in this space for some time, and competition will only decrease prices and (hopefully) lead to an arms race in features, stability, and performance," he writes.