Rackspace Going Public Again a 'Likely' Scenario, Co-Founder Says

Brought to You by Talkin' Cloud

Rackspace co-founder and chairman Graham Weston thinks that the San Antonio-based cloud computing company could go public again, and it could happen as soon as the next five to seven years.

In an interview with the San Antonio Express-News, Weston said that Rackspace will “likely” go public again after going private in August in a $4.3 billion deal with Apollo Global Management.

Weston also said that Apollo was the “high bidder for a reason” and spent a lot of time “studying Rackspace and the opportunity of Rackspace’s future.”

Part of that opportunity, according to Weston, has a lot to do with the value and the differentiation that Rackspace’s professional sales team brings to the table.

“I think so many of our competitors didn’t believe in having live people to help customers make decisions and decide what to buy,” he said in the interview. “These systems are new, they’re still evolving. Amazon last year launched 750 different features. How do customers find their way through that number of features to figure out what to do?”

In an interview in August after the deal with Apollo was announced, Rackspace CTO John Engates told Talkin’ Cloud that the investment firm sees a huge opportunity in the transition from on-premises data centers to the cloud.

Read the full interview with Rackspace co-founder Weston at the San Antonio Express-News.

This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/iaas/rackspace-going-public-again-likely-scenario-co-founder-says