Rackspace is launching its Cloud Tools portal, designed to bring together the various tools built using Rackspace's cloud API to make it easier for customers to find what they want and for partners to gain better access to Rackspace's customer base. The move comes a few weeks after Rackspace, which competes against the likes of Amazon.com in the burgeoning cloud computing space, rolled out a public API for its cloud computing platform.
Just weeks after releasing a public API
designed to make it easier for customers to manage their cloud deployments,
Rackspace is rolling out a portal that better organizes the myriad tools and
applications built by partners for its cloud computing service.
The Cloud Tools portal not only will make it easier for Rackspace Cloud
users to find and use these tools, but it also will give partners greater
access to Rackspace's customer base, according to company officials.
The portal, announced Aug. 25, organizes the various tools and applications
into four categories: monitoring and reporting, development tools, system
management, and client software. In the portal, customers can look at
screenshots, review products and watch videos of the products in use. If they
want to download any of the tools, they can access the partner Websites through
the portal.
"This tool-sharing service, along with our commitments to collaborate
with the community to build an open cloud, lays the foundation for a large
ecosystem," Jim Curry, vice president of corporate development at
Rackspace, said in a statement.
The Cloud Tools portal currently offers a range of products from about 20
partners, including RightScale's cloud management offerings, Cyberduck's
open-source file browser for Mac OS X and Mixpanel's interaction analytics
tool. Rackspace officials said they expect other partners to add their products
to the portal.
Rackspace, which
competes
with the likes of the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform, also has
created a section in the portal called "From the Community," where
independent software developers can publish their tools that were built with
Rackspace's cloud APIs.
Some tools are free while others can be bought from developers.
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