Will and Jason hooked up one of the walls in our office last night with an 8-bit space invaders theme from whatisblik.com.  Check it out…

So our developers turned Pat’s office into a server room.  They even installed a ceiling exhaust fan and new breaker panel…

Former Governor and future Senator from Virginia, Mark Warner, stopped by our office on Tuesday.  We hosted an interesting, but albeit brief, discussion with him and several local technology leaders.  There is video of the discussion floating around somewhere, which I’ll post later…

Please update your links so we can get PageRank love.  We are no longer Webmail.us.  We are now Mailtrust.

We made this change for several reasons, which Tier1 Research explains well…

Rackspace has also rebranded its Webmail.us brand, picked up up recently via acquisition. Rackspace decided that there was little equity in the name, not to mention tons of negatives – ‘webmail,’ ‘.us’ vs ‘.com,’ and the connotation of a low-end product. The rebranding of Webmail.us to Mailtrust signifies a major move upmarket to enterprise, SMB and mid-tier customers who are now Rackspace’s bread and butter business. Webmail.us sound like it should be a free service, but who wouldn’t pay for ‘Mailtrust’? The importance of branding is sometimes lost on firms undergoing rapid growth like Rackspace, so T1R gives it a tip of the hat for keeping its eyes on the branding ball.

Mailtrust is the first step in the evolution to ‘IT Hosting’

The rebranding also signifies the last step in the completion of Rackspace’s first acquisition. Mailtrust, which now has 75 employees, will operate as the stand-alone mail arm of the company under Pat Matthews, who is the founder and CEO of Webmail.us . It will also adopt Rackspace’s Noteworthy brand for its proprietary mail platform.

Along with a new corporate identity, Mailtrust disclosed the introduction of a Microsoft Exchange offering. This is not a new offering per se, but essentially the transfer of the Microsoft Exchange product line from Rackspace to the stewardship of Matthews and Mailtrust (which also puts more a few dozen more employees from Rackspace that were focused on Exchange and mail, under Matthews’ watch).

Mailtrust, as T1R has discussed in previous research, will be offering both Exchange and Noteworthy. It has no intentions of trying to displace Exchange, but wants to target different sub-segments of the market. This will also allow Mailtrust to serve customers with diverse messaging needs that straddle both the Microsoft and proprietary platforms or when a single organization has needs that coincide with both platforms.

T1R believes this is a very strong move. Not only does Rackspace widen the scope of its market coverage, but it insulates the company from placing all its eggs in the Microsoft basket. The new messaging division also fits well with the Rackspace rebrand. Rackspace has ambitions of expanding beyond racking and stacking servers (yes, a relatively simplistic portrayal, but it illustrates our point) to being able to serve a wider range of IT infrastructure and application needs. Mail is a logical next step and Rackspace is taking a very deliberate, calculated and well-thought-out approach (as its its habit) to getting the email part of the equation done right before it moves beyond this.