I think that abstracting away as much as possible and providing "everything as a service" is definitely the direction the cloud companies are all going (Rackspa

I think that abstracting away as much as possible and providing "everything as a service" is definitely the direction the cloud companies are all going (Rackspace included) so you're on the right track there. Not knowing anything about the market, there might be opportunity in building large custom clusters instead of just single servers, and use Open Stack as a base. Might make it look like a juicy acquisition for someone.