Cloud hosting company Rackspace has been up to a lot of things lately, and it seems some of its efforts are beginning to pay off. The company generated $230 million in revenues in the first quarter of 2011, compared to $226.3 million the year before. And, while net income came in one cent per share lower than analysts expected, Rackspace expects revenue growth in fiscal year 2011 to outmatch last year’s 24 percent.

“The company expects 2011 revenue growth to better last year’s 24 percent, as it adds customers and from its new product OpenStack — a collection of open-source technologies that helps in deployment of software online and provides support to business”

The open-source cloud, and more accurately OpenStack are on top of Rackspace’s mind, but a similar thing can be said on yet another cloud company who had its earnings call recently. VMware, which experienced two consecutive outages in its open-source PaaS Cloud Foundry, has also seen tremendous growth: a 33 percent year-over-year increase in revenue that added up to about $844 million in the first quarter of 2011.

QLogic has also been doing well, and reported during its earnings call that revenue from products and services was up 51 percent, and sales of converged and 10GbE products grew by 20 percent.

Companies all throughout the cloud have seen tremendous growth as demand expenantiolly increases, and open-source technology is accounting for a bigger and bigger chunck. Rackspace is in a leadership position in the open-source standards space right now, thanks to OpenStack, but the competition is steadily increasing. For one, Red Hat launched its cross platform multifaceted IaaS CloudForms last week, and then there’s Cloud.com and Eucalyptus.

When it comes to cloud standards, Citrix is also heavily involved. Our news editor Kristen Nicole interviewed Kurt Roemer, Citrix Chief Security Strategist, who is the Commissioner on the Cloud2 initiative. The latter aims to standardize the government cloud.