What does this mean?

Rackspace is competing with Amazon’s Web services. Microsoft is expected to launch other similar services next week at its PDC event. Rackspace will announce several new services both today and over the next few months.

Rackspace’s employees tell me they are making their services open so that their customers can leave and go to other company’s services.

Who is Jungle Disk? They are a service that’s wholly on Amazon’s Web services right now and offer their customers backup and storage. You pay per gigabyte per month to back up your hard drive. They will announce new storage services and will give their customers a choice of using either Rackspace data centers or Amazon’s. Or both. Now you will have access to your data even if Amazon’s servers are unavailable for some reason.

Who is Slice Host? They have thousands of VPS Hosting customers who are mostly web developers who want access to super fast and super reliable cloud services. They compete pretty directly with Amazon’s EC2 services.

More as I live blog the event, keep refreshing to see more over the next hour, or watch the live event.

Earlier this year I got a tour of Rackspace’s new headquarters and met several of its leaders in a video.

DISCLAIMER: Rackspace is one of the sponsors of my blog and FastCompany.tv.

UPDATES: They just announced that Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud services, will be renamed “Cloud Sites.”

We’ll do more live blogging on FriendFeed here because that lets me interact with people a lot faster than my blog does.