Rackspace announced today that it has acquired CloudKick. I am already getting calls and emails for my thoughts on this as folks are naturally curious what this might mean for AppFirst so I thought a quick post might be a good idea. In short, we think this is great news for AppFirst.

First of all we want to extend our congratulations to Alex and the entire team at CloudKick as we think this is a great outcome for them.  Based on their server level monitoring offering, which many would estimate is around 90% of what Rackers look to monitor, and the history that Rackspace has with them going back to their launch at UTR 2009 this appears to be a solid fit.

For AppFirst, the announcement came as no surprise and we find it flattering that now Rackspace along with Amazon have already copied our free Basic Server offering.  AppFirst remains the industry’s only comprehensive cloud monitoring & management solution that works with any & all applications, independent of language no matter where the servers are running on premises, in the clouds or hybrid.

On their site & in today’s press release CloudKick is being positioned as a solution for multiple IaaS clouds (all of which are competitors to Rackspace).  To the CloudKick users that are not running their servers or cloud instances at Rackspace that have been tweeting their concerns today, my message is simple:  AppFirst is your answer and we’ll not only provide you the server monitoring you were getting but we will provide you a view of your entire application as it’s running that nobody else can show you.

We’ve heard loud and clear through our rapid customer adoption that a pure, independent, cloud monitoring & management platform built entirely as SaaS, is the best model to power the continued growth and success of the cloud computing industry. We made a decision when we founded the company in 2009 and we remain committed to that path of execution.  We think the amazing traction we’ve had since launching AppFirst last April is a testament to that vision.

And so to our customers, partners, friends and employees, you can rest assured that we will continue to be the innovation leader in this space and stay true to our vision.  We are committed to all applications performing to users expectations and enabling the technical people responsible for making this happen to be both pro-active and to drive down the price of delivering this performance at the lowest cost.  Only AppFirst provides the 100% visibility required to identify what parts of your application can you run for less.  Our customers don’t have to guess and or settle the so called “good enough” tools that provide incomplete data thus really aren’t “good enough.”