Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there are quite a few commercial database vendors that offer parallel and clustered RDBMS products, and many of them appear to be quite good. Unfortunately, they've got a terrible marketing problem. Before 1998 or so, a relational database was an expensive product that you got from a vendor like Oracle. Since then, a generation of people have grown up that think about using a commercial RDBMS the same way most…
If I want to trial Oracle or Clustrix, well, I'm going to have to start a contact with a sales organization and then they need to pre-qualify me, and then they need to qualify me and then I'll spend a few hours on the phone talking to people (which might take a few weeks in wall-clock time.) If Clustrix offered cloud-based deployment of their database, they could have a small free tier for people to play around with.…
Since they only launched their product quite recently, it is understandable that they would want to test it with several customers before offering it as a service.
In fact, if the product scales well enough, it would be perfect for deploying as a cloud-based service and could be very successful as such.