According to Network World, “Amazon Web Services is a juggernaut in the infrastructure as a service market [IaaS], but GoGrid, a midsize IaaS competitor that aims to be the cloud for big data, says it wants to offer an alternative to AWS’s platform. And it’s hoping to do so through open source databases.”

According to GoGrid CEO, John Keagy, if an organization wants to use a true open source database, like MongoDB, Basho’s Riak, Hadoop or Cassandra, AWS won’t provide them to you.  Thus, GoGrid sees open source databases as their niche.

GoGrid has had trouble staying on the IaaS radar in the last several years as larger and better-funded clouds dominated the space.  Now it sees a way to grab and hold onto an area of the market, and access to open source databases appears to be their approach.

There is a hunger for database-as-a-service in the emerging cloud computing space, including access to cloud versions of open source databases.  However, when decision-makers review their options, the choice of a cloud computing service will go beyond just the features of databases in the cloud.

AWS has a strong database play, and while the “open source” banner may drive some enterprises to GoGrid, the “as-a-service” aspect of these database services are more important selling features than if they are “open source” or not.