Technology Market Critical Mass

This article from the WSJ on RackSpace partnering with Amazon AWS caught my (Bob) attention:

Rackspace Hosting Inc., a seller of cloud-computing services, is teaming up with Amazon.com Inc. to make it easier for corporate customers to move computing operations from their own facilities to Amazon Web Services, the retailer’s cloud computing platform.

RackSpace had been a bitter competitor with Amazon. They had started hosting websites and servers before Amazon started offering a similar service. Amazon AWS has gone onto dominate in the Cloud infrastructure market.

RackSpace has figured out that they do not have the technology or cost advantages Amazon has built up with a much larger market share. So instead of trying to fight them, they are finding interesting ways to add value and use the Amazon AWS Cloud Infrastructure.

The reason this is interesting to RunSignUp, is that we have worked with a couple of companies already to help them migrate out of the race registration market to focus on other parts of the market like marketing or consulting services. As we pointed out in our blog about the future of the race registration market, smaller vendors will come under increasing pressure. Much like Amazon AWS, we want to be a friendly partner for companies, who much like Rackspace refocus on other areas of expertise and work with them and their races cooperatively with our open platform.