Rackspace® Hosting, (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, today announced it has been named, along with one other vendor, a Top Performer by Forrester Research Inc. in its new report, “The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud Q1 2013.” The report evaluated Rackspace’s full Private Cloud portfolio including Managed Virtualization and Rackspace Managed Private Cloud powered by OpenStack.

As part of the research firm’s analysis, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of eight selected cloud computing companies against 25 criteria. Rackspace received among the highest scores of the eight cloud companies when evaluated in the subcategories for planned enhancements and the highest score among all vendors for third-party ecosystem. The Forrester report also noted that “Rackspace brings its experience from the hosting and public cloud space to this market, giving it significant geographic presence, a reputation for fantastic customer support, and a large existing customer base from which to draw.”

“The Rackspace open cloud continues to offer choice and innovation to our customers. We’re very pleased to receive recognition from Forrester for our Private Cloud efforts with Managed Virtualization and Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack,” said John Engates, CTO at Rackspace. “The software is free and available to anyone to use in any data center of their choosing. Customers choosing Rackspace Private Cloud get the benefit of using the same code that powers the world’s largest OpenStack cloud along with dozens of private clouds. They can choose to deploy and run it themselves, or they can choose to let Rackspace support or even run it remotely for them in their data center or in ours.”

Rackspace, co-founder of OpenStack, today is running the largest, enterprise-ready open cloud platform in the world. The Rackspace open cloud based on OpenStack allows true choice and control without the fear of being locked-in to one vendor’s technology. With open standards and open source based enterprise and mobile computing now impacting the total IT landscape to a deeper and more expansive level than ever before, Rackspace’s vocal support of an open approach and open cloud development strategy has clearly helped the company stand above its competitors across the market today.

According to Forrester Research, “[As many as] 46 percent of enterprises are prioritizing investments in private clouds in 2013. While slightly more than half plan to build a private cloud in their own data center, more than 25 percent said they prefer to rent one.”

Hosted private cloud is an increasingly popular IaaS deployment model that couples the agility, expertise, and shifted infrastructure responsibility of public cloud with privacy and the configuration customization of private cloud.

Tapping into Rackspace’s progressive and strategic development of open cloud computing architectures designed to free customers from the dangers of vendor lock-in, the Forrester report said that Rackspace’s “strategy and market presence push it ahead” in the independent research firm’s analysis of hosted private cloud providers.

In addition to Rackspace’s managed offering in a Rackspace data center, a free version of the Rackspace Private Cloud Software based on OpenStack is available for download at http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/private/openstack_software/.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements about historical results or third party data that may suggest trends for our business or industry; any statements of the plans, strategies, and objectives of Rackspace for future operations or growth; any statements of expectation or belief regarding future events, and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the items mentioned. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected growth or success may not materialize because of Rackspace's failure to create a viable vision or its inability to execute on its vision, failure to execute on its operational plans, rapid technological changes that adversely affect the demand for Rackspace products and services, shifts in customer demand, customers' and potential customers' acceptance of Rackspace products and services, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2012, filed with the SEC on November 7, 2012. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

About Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace® Hosting (RAX) is the open cloud company, delivering open technologies and powering more than 197,000 customers worldwide. Rackspace provides its renowned Fanatical Support® across a broad portfolio of IT products, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For and is included on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Rackspace was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting.” Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio with offices and data centers around the world. For more information about the open cloud company, visit www.rackspace.com.