Rax launched its ipo on august 7th , 2008 , promptly " tanked " ( fortune 's words , not mine ) , and kept going down from there ( you may recall , we had one of the largest global financial crises in history that fall ) .
At first glance , the trend may look ominous for in-house tech staffers , some of whose duties are already being outsourced to cloud providers like amazon ( amzn ) , dropbox , rackspace ( rax ) , and terremark ( acquired by verizon ( vz ) earlier this year ) .
Companies such as salesforce and web-hosting outfit rackspace holding ( rax ) may be essential to this sea-change , but their valuations are scarily high .
As you can see from the chart , rax delivered for its shareholders quarter after quarter , eventually rising approximately 10x from its lows a mere 32 months later .
I remember when rackspace ( rax ) went public in august of 2008 ( disclaimer : I have owned shares of rackspace in my personal account for several years ) .
Rax has traded down a bit in the past few months , but still sports a $ 4 billion market cap and is a recognized leader in the hosting and cloud computing industries .