Company emphasises brand’s focus on delivering hosted IT services.

Rackspace, an IT hosting provider, today announced its new corporate identity reflecting its shift into IT hosting. As more organisations transition from purchasing in-house computing assets to leveraging service providers, company now offers a suite of hosted IT services that are more reliable and provide better value, including virtualisation, hosted mail, custom application support, back-end IT and storage.

The company states with its newly-launched name, it may drop the “Managed Hosting” terminology, signifying company’s new breadth of hosted IT services  supporting companies of all sizes. it further states that the new logo incorporates their popular ‘FANATIGUY’ icon, which better reflects its people-centric culture and award-winning Fanatical Support, and highlights the their transition from servers to services.

“Fanatical Support, our business philosophy, has been central to our managed hosting success for the past nine years and will continue to propel us as we expand our offering. Our new services will complement our existing portfolio allowing customers to easily offload more and more IT functions, and our new identity reflects this approach,” said Doug Loewe, Managing Director, Rackspace EMEA.

Company enhances the non-English speaking Internet by allowing individuals to register web site names with native Spanish characters.

Afilias, a registry services provider, announced that web hosting users can now register .INFO domain names that include the Spanish characters á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú, and ü. The introduction of these new domains, termed Internationalized Domain Names, now enables Spanish-speakers to establish Web sites using words commonly used in Spanish such as película.info, teléfono-móvil.info, Ídolo.info, Piñata.info, and others.

The registry states that this set of Spanish characters adds to their broad support of IDNs, bringing the total number of languages supported to ten. IT also states that these include scripts for Spanish, German, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian and Korean.

The company also explained that IDN registrations are based on a technical standard called Punycode that was approved in 2003. .INFO was the first generic domain to automatically accept standards-compliant registrations in 2004 and IDN adoption has slowly grown since all common Web browsers including Mozilla, Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 now allow users to natively type in IDN addresses and access these web sites. It also declared that those interested in registering .INFO IDN names should contact an ICANN-accredited and Afilias-authorized registrar of their choice.

“With over 100 million Spanish-speaking Internet users today, 13 million of which are in the United States alone, we believe that the introduction of Spanish IDNs represents an important addition for .INFO and for the growing base of Spanish-speaking users on the Internet,” said Roland LaPlante, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Afilias. “As the only truly global Internet extension, .INFO Web sites are a natural way for individuals, organizations, and institutions to convey information in their local, native Spanish language.”