Rackspace has a great name. It is endemic to the cloud-based hosting category, it’s easy to repeat and understand for the lay person. It’s descriptive and mellifluous. Rackspace hired Robert Scoble to help put them on the map and make the brand more relevant a few years ago and it has paid great dividends. Now the company is one of the top players, along with Amazon, Microsoft and Google. But this rentable web platform space is about a couple of things: trust, cost and functionality. Trust that the platform and systems stay up. Cost because you are buying bandwidth and processing power by the pound. And functionality because technology is always about functionality.
The current Rackspace name does not do the brand justice. It smacks of raw, bare bones, generic computing power. His is where I might suggest – and you can bet the corporate officers are thinking the same way – that the company be renamed. Renamed to deliver more of a technically forward punch. But names are money. And I think the Rackspace name can be evolved. If the brand plan begins to define space and as outer space, with endless possibilities they will be on to something. The final frontier, indeed. As companies grow, so can their brands.
Love the name, but in 2013 and beyond, it needs a bit of a facial. Peace.