Rackspace(s rax) built its managed hosting and cloud businesses on its promise of “fanatical support” above and beyond what people could expect from, say, Amazon(s amzn) Web Services. But it’s pulled back on that messaging and is now pushing performance, performance, performance. One indication of that is its recent announcement of new high-performance cloud servers.

But there’s more:  In a letter sent to customers on November 4,  Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier  drove the message hard. He wrote:

 Our goal is more than just providing you with the fastest architecture — it’s to help you perform at the level that your users and your business demand. Architect faster, build faster, deploy faster, test faster, and of course run your applications faster.

He pointed readers to this Rackspace page for more information. The letter came out a few days after Napier published a blog post hinting at the shift to come.

It’s…