Niche Player: Rackspace

The managed cloud provider was an early entrant in the IaaS market in 2008 after the acquisition of Slicehost, and played a pivotal role in the development of OpenStack.

Of late, Rackspace has tried to expand its IaaS reach with VMware and Microsoft-virtualized clouds, as well as a private offering delivering its own OpenStack technologies.

Rackspace was sold to Apollo Global Management, a private-equity investor, in late 2016.

No longer a publicly traded company required to reveal financials, Rackspace may find it easier to execute a strategic shift toward delivering cloud managed services on a variety of platforms. But the privatization can also make it harder for customers to assess risks, Gartner said.