Rackspace enters the enterprise collaboration market

Rackspace is known first of all as the top Amazon competitor on the Cloud Computing platforms market (Amazon Web Services vs Rackspace Cloud). But while Amazon continues developing its IaaS niche (Infrastructure for third-party web services), Rackspace decided to create its own Web services for the enterprise market. In May they launched Rackspace Email - hosted email server, and today they released Rackspace Cloud Drive - the enterprise file collaboration solution. Interesting that Rackspace also provides hosted Exchange and Sharepoint (that compete with its own services), but positions the own apps between the cheap but possible less robust Google Apps and the top-shelf Microsoft options.



Rackspace Email for 1$ per month provides 10Gb mailboxes. It provides the rich web-interface and can sync with the main mobile clients (BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile). On the desktop you can use MS Outlook or any other mail client. Rackspace Email ensures high security (SSL, backups, virus and spam protection) and reliability (after all, it's one of the most reliable hosting on the Web). In addition to email management, service includes a contact manager, group calendar, tasks and notes.But, compared to Exchange, it lacks task management features and shared folders.

Everything is ok with folders sharing in Rackspace Cloud Drive. It provides version control and access control systems. Besides, it includes a desktop client and can sync files and folders between multiple computers and mobile devices. Rackspace Cloud Drive also can be used for online backup creation. And its payment scheme is very similar to Amazon S3 - you pay only for the resources (memory, traffic), which actually used. All this makes Rackspace Cloud Drive a very serious competitor to the leading file collaboration tools, such as Box.net. Cloud Drive is powered by Jungle Disk, which Rackspace acquired last year.

See also: Top 10 Cloud Storages