As Amazon and Microsoft consolidate their hold over the public cloud, smaller providers are being forced to change strategies. Rackspace Hosting Inc. became the latest such contender to shift gears last week by accepting a $4.3 billion takeover bid from private equity firm Apollo Global Management LLC.

The deal will take the company off the stock market and enable its management team to pursue new growth opportunities without the pressure for short-term results that exists on Wall Street. As part of the effort, Rackspace is downscaling its core hosting business and refocusing on selling professional services to organizations that use cloud services from better-established providers. The provider recently sold its website hosting division to Liquid Web Inc. in a bid to speed up the transition.

Rackspace’s approach to adopt for the new reality of the public cloud stands in stark contrast with the strategy pursued by IBM, which is only intensifying its efforts to win market share from Microsoft and Amazon. The vendor last week took the fight to South Korea by opening a data center near Seoul that will provide hosting services to local organizations. In a bid to set its value proposition apart, Big Blue has recruited the help of local technology powerhouse SK Holdings C&C Co. Ltd, which will offer various value-added offerings to customers and help with their cloud projects. The companies expect their collaboration to produce over $200 million in revenue over the next five years.

While IBM is opening new fronts against Amazon and Microsoft, SecureAuth Corp. is launching a cloud push of its own. The company last week introduced a managed version of its widely-used identify management platform that works with more than 8,000 online services on launch. It allows workers to employ the same login credentials across every supported website and application or move their existing passwords to a secure digital vault protected by their companies’ IT departments. Seeing how the on-premise edition has been deployed at more than 1,000 organizations to date, the new service should be received well in the industry.

Image via Geralt