Former AWS executive Peder Ulander is joining MongoDB as its chief marketing officer, the database company plans to announce Tuesday.
At AWS, Ulander served as the head of enterprise and developer marketing. But while MongoDB competes directly with his former employer in some areas, Ulander said the more relevant competition is with Oracle and Microsoft.
"If all of us are focused on the 3-5% of the market, we're focused on the wrong thing," he told Protocol. "This is about building awareness and taking share away from 95% of the market."
Ulander does think MongoDB has one advantage over AWS, as well as the other cloud vendors: The ability to support an enterprise's entire IT strategy, spanning the data, the data center, the cloud and the edge.
"In the case of the cloud giants, their technology focuses on one of those three areas," he said. MongoDB "built the case and demonstrated the proof that they can scale customers across that entire spectrum."