GoGrid Head Sets Eyes on Open Cloud Orchestration Engine

GoGrid founder and CEO John Keagy is hoping to bring together companies interesting in open source cloud that feel threatened by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create an open cloud orchestration engine. His project, which was recently unveiled, has been dubbed OpenOrchestration.org—more or less following suit with most open source cloud projects that have been launched over the last few years.

CRN broke the story about Keagy’s latest project, which it noted has been in progress and under wraps for several months. According to the article, Keagy has been slowly courting other major technology vendors in the hopes they’ll join the OpenOrchestration.org project to create a universal orchestration engine designed for clouds. And it’s clear he has AWS in his target sights.

Should Keagy be successful, the project could have a significant impact on the cloud market and on the partners that are serving it. Keagy is positioning the OpenOrchestration.org project as an alternative to proprietary cloud orchestration platforms, but whether he will be able to get the project off the ground and into the hands of enough partners and customers to really challenge Amazon is another story.

It’s an uphill battle for the project’s founder, as he has to woo not only his own technology and channel partners but also a variety of competitors who are duking it out with GoGrid and other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers for a share of the public cloud market.

Without all the right partners and a community that’s interested in collaborating, OpenOrchestration.org could fall by the wayside.

But open source cloud computing has been taking off. Even if the revenue isn’t necessarily there, the vendors, solution providers and cloud services providers are there to support it, for the most part.

But not always: Take a look at OpenStack as the best example. Some of its top collaborators are also backing other horses in the cloud platform race. And in OpenStack’s case, it’s backers have minimal impact on the public cloud market, where Keagy seems to be focusing on with the launch of the OpenOrchestration.org project.