With OpenStack almost finished, Rackspace has taken its own initiative to rebrand itself in order to put emphasis on open cloud. Although it is keeping its Rackspace Hosting name, there’s going to be a new logo as it moves to offer open cloud computing.  The announcement is made in time for the release of its 2^nd quarter earnings. With the introduction of OpenStack, Rackspace is set to directly compete with Amazon together with its partners, VMware and Microsoft, which also have plans of providing cloud computing services. Internap and Hewlett-Packard are also part of the OpenStack administrators.

According to Rackspace’s CMO Suaad Sait, the rebranding move is just an extension of its “fanatical support” mantra. The company will continue to be committed in the provision of deployment choice like public, hybrid, private and on-premise cloud alternatives.

It should be noted that Rackspace established OpenStack with NASA some 2 years ago. The company is now guiding OpenStack to be a foundation thereby relinquishing some of its control on the project. In April, Citrix, one of OpenStack original partner, founded its own CloudStack to be a direct competitor of OpenStack. Just some weeks ago, some key programmers moved to Nebula.

However, experts believe that all is not lost for Rackspace because it’s still too early to tell. There may be some other organizations which are waiting in the sidelines and quietly finding the perfect combination between service and technology. While Rackspace has developed the infrastructure, Amazon, on the other hand, has developed its business services together with its partners.