RAX has its roots in managed cloud, but they moved away from that. They got into IaaS, but have retrenched. Here's RAX's mapping of AWS to RAX P&S for IaaS [0]. That's a lot. RAX has decided to return to its roots (managed cloud) and seek differentiation because it can't compete on IaaS.[1] That'll be tough.

RAX's going private to shift its P&S mix and turn things around.

edit: I'll also point to jsode's great comment above.

[0] https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/mapping-of-amazon-web-s...

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/article/2461361/iaas/rackspace-b...