Rackspace, Magento Partner on Open Source Ecommerce eCloud Hosting

What can online retailers do that their brick-and-mortar can't? Besides not charging sales tax (in many instances, at least, and for the time being), they can leverage the cloud to expand into new geographic markets and handle fluctuations in sales volume in particularly effective ways. And a partnership announced this week between Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and Magento is designed to make it easier to do exactly that.

Rackspace, which provides cloud hosting services based on flexible open source technologies that it touts as protection against lock-in, already has a strong presence among ecommerce sites. It is the most popular hosting provider for Magento deployments across the world, according to BuiltWith, and is also the No. 1 host for the Internet Retailer Top 1,000 websites.

The partnership between Rackspace and Magento, which the companies announced Monday, will expand the former's reach into the online retailer space even further. According to a statement, the collaboration aims to provide ecommerce sites with "a low-cost entry into new markets around the world without the cost of establishing a physical presence."

It also promises to be of value for retailers who need to handle periodic spikes in operations due to major sales or events such as Black Friday. Cloud hosting from Rackspace will provide the infrastructure to deal smoothly with such fluctuation in a way that wouldn't be possible through more traditional approaches.

From a broader channel perspective, there are two key points to note from this news. First, it underlines the growing convergence between cloud computing and online retailing, which hasn't always been at the top of the list of cloud applications. That's changing as more and more commerce shifts online, and companies seek to operate in larger markets that may involve less consistent traffic patterns.

Meanwhile, the open source community can chalk this up as another win for commercializing the products it gives away for free. Since Rackspace is strongly invested in open technology, the increase in its collaboration with online retailers through the Magento partnership will further entrench open source solutions within the world of ecommerce—and, by extension, the cloud more generally.