Shares of Rackspace Hosting
Revenue, up 31% to $301 million, beat estimates by $1 million, but earnings were a different story. A 71% gain on the bottom line resulted in $0.17 in adjusted profits, a penny short of what Wall Street had hoped for. Whoops.
Could a single missing Lincoln really be the source of so much trouble? That's tougher to say, but margin seems to be the bigger issue. Rackspace converted just 33.4% of revenue as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization -- or EBITDA -- down from 36.1% in the fourth quarter.
In an interview, Chief Financial Officer Karl Pichler said hiring new staff has increased costs over the past two quarters. Rackspace has also added new space in the Midwest as it transitions its own cloud computing infrastructure to run on the OpenStack platform that it has long touted in concert with NASA.
Opening up with OpenStack
Think of it as a toolbox. OpenStack provides a series of software components any company can use to create and run "clouds" for virtual storage or computing at a basic level, and much more for those willing to experiment with the available code. As the name suggests, OpenStack is 100% open source.
Why adopt OpenStack? Two reasons. Rackspace isn't exactly youthful, having opened for business in 1998. Updating the Rackspace Cloud to take advantage of newer cloud technologies makes sense. Second, Pichler said OpenStack should allow Rackspace to offer more sophisticated features and, as a result, should help the company deliver EBITDA margin on par with its late 2011 performance.
CEO Lanham Napier expanded on this idea during yesterday's conference call with analysts: "Our belief here is that [the] new platform has greater capability to run larger and more complex apps on it than our current platform does. So we like our chances in terms of being able to serve bigger customers better, to increase their royalty rates and correspondingly, grow faster."
OpenStack remains in testing for now, available to only a select few Rackspace customers. Pichler said general availability should come in the third or fourth quarter, at which point customers will be simply moved over to the new platform. Earnings volatility is likely to continue until then.
Why OpenStack matters
Napier is right to focus on features and scale in his comments about OpenStack. A better, more durable infrastructure increases the chances of Rackspace taking on big clients with big needs. But having it be open source matters, too.
Why? Anyone can use the tools, which means -- unlike Amazon.com's
Think of it this way: When it comes to delivering infrastructure on demand, Amazon and AWS is to Rackspace and OpenStack, as Microsoft and Windows is to Red Hat
Does that mean AWS could lose customers who crave openness to Rackspace and OpenStack? Not necessarily, since these are two very different businesses. AWS is a host-on-the-cheap alternative; Rackspace is a high-touch, service-when-you-need-it premium operator.
Meanwhile, Amazon works with an OpenStack alternative in Eucalyptus Systems, and Citrix Systems
So even if the first quarter's miss didn't please investors, today's margin-thinning investments in technical staff and a newer, smarter Rackspace Cloud should pay off over the long term in the form of bigger, more profitable hosting deals. Of course, Rackspace isn't the only one profiting from the rising tide of data in the cloud. This company has just as much runway, thanks to big clients such as PayPal and 3M.
