As covered earlier, private equity firm Apollo Global Management bought cloud-computing provider Rackspace for $4.3 billion. The privatization took place in August, earlier this year.
In an interview covered by telecoms.com, Rackspace CTO, John Engates spoke about how privatization made the company more liberal in its actions and that they could concentrate on their product more efficiently.
Engates commented :
I was personally in front of investors and analysts quite a lot over the years and my perception was that you could never do enough right for those folks to be happy. It was never enough and there was always criticism, but that’s business and that’s the public market.
They are interested in what you have done for them lately. In the private market you don’t have to think about next month or next quarter you can think about next year, or the next two years or three, because that’s what really matters to people like Apollo.
They don’t really care what happens next quarter, they care about the end product. Can we really turn this thing into something powerful and valuable? That’s what they are excited about.
The company had claimed that the acquisition was an outcome of solid analysis and that it would allow it to increase its product offering, help long-term growth and be more flexible in managing its business.