Rackspace Says 'No More Servers'

For many customers, the path to the cloud runs through social media. That appears to be a key strategy at Rackspace, which today launched an online community called No More Servers: The End of In-House Servers. The lead blogger will be long-time hosting industry analyst Andy Schroepfer, who recently joined Rackspace as vice president for strategy.

The initiative, which targets enterprise customers and advances Schroepfer's vision of an "all cloud enterprise," is the second online community Rackspace has launched to discuss the future of hosting. Building 43, a community led by Robert Scoble and focusing on Internet tools and services for small businesses, launched in June.

No More Servers will feature regular blog posts by Schroepfer, as well as links to relevant content from around the web. The site's focus will reflect "an evolution towards the world where people aren't buying in-house servers anymore," Schroepfer says in an introductory video. "It's not that the world's going to be without servers. They're just all going to be with people like Rackspace. We're trying to say (that) the end game is that you won't have any more servers in-house."

Schroepfer began his career on Wall Street, tracking the web hosting industry for Piper Jaffray and Goldman Sachs. He then founded Tier 1 Research, which specialized in analysis of the hosting and data center sector and was acquired by The 451 Group in in 2005. Here's a video in which Andy describes the vision of No More Servers.

Rackspace says the investment on social media reflects the need to help end users understand the shifts that are underway in Interent infrastructure and hosting. "We think the marketing world is changing as well," Rackspace Cloud president Lew moorman told us earlier this year. "We need to be more directly in dialogue about the future of technology."