Rackspace announced strong year-over-year revenue and earnings growth for the year’s second quarter and an accelerated trajectory on its path to expand presence in the cloud-based services market.

Rackspace CFO Karl Pichler said the company had made a lot of progress in its plans to broaden its products and services portfolio and promised more in the near future. “Keep your eyes open for more product announcements in the coming weeks and we look forward to updating you on our progress in November,” he said.

The new products and services will no doubt be of the cloud variety. The company recently launched a new cloud offering, built on the open-source cloud architecture and operating system OpenStack.

Rackspace named its new cloud offerings “Open Cloud”, also adding “the open cloud company” as a tag line to its official logo.

Open Cloud will eventually replace Rackspace’s legacy cloud infrastructure, which currently hosts a lot of the company’s clients’ applications.

The company’s CEO Lanham Napier said in a conference call that Rackspace viewed its OpenStack cloud as an opportunity to rise to the level of behemoths in the cloud market such as Amazon Web Services and VMware.

Rackspace’s revenue for the second quarter was US$319m, up 29% year over year. Its net income was $25m, or 43% higher than the company reported for the second quarter of 2011.