>> It's The Cube,
covering AWS Summit New York 2018.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hey, welcome back everyone.
This is The Cube's live coverage here in New York City
with Amazon Web Services AWS Summit 2018.
I'm here with Jeff Frick, I'm John Furrier.
Our next guest is Sahir Azam, Senor Vice President
of MongoDB for the Cloud products.
Mongo's been very successful.
Everyone knows it in the developer community.
If you've done anything building Agile, Mongo's been there.
Great to have you on.
>> Happy to be here, thanks guys.
>> So Mongo's been one of those success stories where,
if you look at the LAMP stack days,
and you now look at Agile,
it's been the database for everybody.
It's been scaling up nicely.
Some people were saying, oh Mongo doesn't scale.
Well, hello Cloud.
You guys have done very, very well.
Amazon's a big part of what you guys are doing.
What's new with your business and The Cloud?
>> It's been quite a story, to be quite honest.
We were launched as an open source technology,
just about 10 years ago, which was right around the time
Amazon really came to market.
So in many ways, we've always been well deployed,
heavily used in The Cloud.
If you look at the massive community phenomenon
that is MongoDB, the majority of that actually sits in AWS.
But the strategic sort of move that we made
a couple years ago, based on customer input was,
to start delivering MongoDB as a service,
directly on Amazon Web Services.
Now we're actually available in over 14 regions on AWS,
and it's had a tremendous effect on our business.
We launched it, obviously, with 0% of our revenue.
It's now, two years later, 14% of our revenue,
over 44 hundred customers, and it's just a rocket ship.
>> It's such a great trajectory,
but I want you to take a minute to explain
the dynamics of the database market.
Because clearly Amazon's always taking shots at Oracle,
you get any chance it's always making fun of Oracle.
Because you have the big old school database,
but with IoT, databases are proliferating everywhere.
And they're really critical part of Agile.
How is the database landscape looking like,
and how has Cloud taken it up a notch?
How has it changed it?
>> Yeah, definitely.
I think there's sort of two angles I think we see
that are really interesting.
One is, I think the thing that always drove
and still does drive the developer adoption among ODB,
is the fact that it's much more natural for a developer
to work in a document model.
They think building an application,
they're thinking about business objects.
The user, an invoice, a product,
and you can just map that so naturally
as a developer in MongoDB,
and that is just a much faster business innovation cycle
than a traditional, relational database.
And that will only grow as more and more organizations,
even traditional organizations,
start to build customer-facing applications,
where their engineering teams now need
to ship in an agile manner,
pushing out new versions of their application weekly,
or daily, instead of annually.
So I think that's sort of fundamental.
And in many ways, The Cloud accelerates that.
Whether you look at the DevOps movement
and what's happening there,
we're seeing the shift where no one wants to spend
the skillset and time to learn how to manage
a distributed database system,
or any database system, for that matter.
They want to focus on writing compelling applications.
So if we can deliver at a very economical price point
and elastic service that then scales endlessly,
it allow them to focus on their core business
and us to focus on ours.
>> And that's the benefit of The Cloud.
But talk about this Atlas product,
two years ago who had no customers.
Now you have over 4,000 and growing.
>> Correct.
>> That's just plug and play off The Cloud?
Order on the marketplace?
How are the customers onboarding?
>> There's multiple ways.
We have certainly a very healthy self-service,
direct-to-developer type of business,
where they can go online, swipe a credit card,
get started on our free tier,
and start off with small development environments
that are $10 a month, all the way through giant,
globally distributed clusters
that can scale an application to millions.
So, that starts developer first.
However, we're interestingly seeing an uptake of that,
especially this year, even an enterprise, established,
highly regulated accounts as well,
where they have a massive Cloud migration happening
in conjunction with Amazon, and they want to use MongoDB
because the richness of our database.
The ability to now buy through the marketplace
and consume it as a service is really compelling.
>> So you're curious about how your relationship
with the customers changed
when you went to as-a-service with the database.
Was there significant change in that relationship?
How does it change when you've got this ongoing,
monthly billing activity?
>> Definitely, great question.
I think it changed interestingly.
Obviously the financial model's different
because it's a consumption based model,
based on pay for what you use.
So that's obviously very Cloud-centric, Cloud-native,
that's more of the math side of things.
What I think is more interesting is now,
we're obviously managing the customer's
mission-critical databases.
So when they're buying into a technology like Atlas
from us, or Stitch from us, it's no longer
just choosing Mongo because it's a great product.
Its' choosing Mongo because it's a company they trust
to run a mission-critical application
and scale it as a partner.
So it's elevated the strategic nature of how we're used,
as a modern, persistent store and database.
As an alternative to Oracle is sort of one angle,
but now to look at it as a trusted partner.
Because frankly, there's a share of risk model
that has to happen in a Cloud services model.
And that's been the biggest dynamic that's elevated
our standing in many of these accounts.
>> I presume you see an increased trajectory.
It's going to take an increasing share of your total business
as you go forward.
>> It was 14% last quarter,
certainly it's a big focus of ours.
It's growing over 400% per year from a scale point of view.
So we're doubling down, no question.
>> Take a minute to talk about MongoDB Stitch
and the four components you guys have in there.
What's relevant about that?
Why is it important for MongoDB customers
and potential customers?
>> At the macro level, we're seeing the constant trend
of developers wanting to be more productive
and consume higher levels of abstractions,
and they have to write less code.
That's the macro reason why we built Stitch.
Because it's always been our mission as a company,
to empower developers and build great, amazing apps.
But at a specific level, what's interesting is,
now that we're in The Cloud,
we can enable interesting functionality in a few ways.
In one sense, many developers, many engineers,
have been used to things like triggers
in the relational world, meaning,
you're watching for data changing
and you want to execute some sort of action.
So now we've brought triggers
into the non-relational modern database world,
which Stitch triggers.
So now any change in a database in Atlas
can trigger an integration into Amazon's Kinesis service,
or dumping data into S3, a variety of different use cases,
to enable real time, sort of reactive application.
So that's sort of fundamental, that's number one.
The second is, enabling client-side apps.
Mobile applications, rich web applications,
to have more enabling, faster technology.
Because now the client app can interact with the database
in a much richer way, with the secure model.
The query anywhere service does exactly that.
It brings the full power of Mongo
all the way through the edge,
all the way through the client-side application,
with Mongo Mobile.
So we're really extending our reach and architecture
because fundamentally, what we're hearing
from developers is, we want to work with MongoDB
because it's the best way to work with modern data,
but help me do that everywhere.
>> It's like stitching together all the data.
Jeff, we were just talking about on the IoT portion
of our intro package, how, if you stitch it all together,
you can really bring everything beautifully together.
Because the operators are spending a lot of time wasted
on brunt work and tasks that they don't want to do.
And with The Cloud, I think this is one of the
value propositions we're seeing this year become very clear.
And sort of with the VMware relationship annoucement
a couple years ago, you're going to hear about it
at Google Next and some other Cloud conferences.
The developers are king.
The operator's still going to be an elevated role,
they're not going away.
The storage administrator becomes the IT Operations guy,
so the operators and the developers are going to create
a nice, symbiotic relationship.
Is this is where Stitch hits home?
>> It his home from a governance and security standpoint
around that, as does Atlas, right?
Because what we're seeing
is the modern operators are saying,
listen, it's not strategic for us to learn all the bits
and bites of infrastructure management anymore,
or database configuration management, whatever it might be.
But it is strategic to say,
what are the key services that we're going to partner
with for the long term of this business,
while protecting governance and risk,
thinking about security,
abstracting away any particular providers.
We're definitely seeing an evolution in the
traditional operations role, and then at the same time,
a developer's influence
is consistently increasing in the market.
>> I want to get your thoughts on this.
You've been an industry veteran for a while,
going back to the old BMC days, or before that,
looking at the early days,
and when the tech stacks are pretty well understood.
And certainly Mongo made their bones,
early days with LAMP stack, early days with Open source,
now certainly changed with Cloud.
Looking back now and seeing what's happening now,
a lot of people are reawakening to The Cloud.
I was just talking to an investor in Silicon Valley,
who was doing some work in China just five years,
has kind of been out of the enterprise IT space,
he's like, damn, the stack has changed significantly.
What have you observed, how would you talk about
the changes between just five, six years ago and today?
From a stack standpoint, from a capability standpoint,
from a critical architecture standpoint, what's your view?
>> I think, first and foremost,
we're seeing a shift in application architecture.
We're seeing the idea of micro services,
decomposed applications, decoupled components
and functionality, that's only rising.
And we're seeing that, interestingly,
not only for new applications,
but also legacy modernization of existing applications.
So now, that's actually driving a change in our business.
Instead of the shiny, new IoT apps or mobile apps
or web apps, that Mongo's always been strong for,
we're now seeing 30% of our business come from
legacy application modernization to micro services.
>> 30% of your business is modernizing legacy apps?
>> Correct.
>> Wow.
>> As they want to drive faster developer productivity,
better economics, obviously, of running that application
and build it on a more modern platform and architecture.
>> You put a container around Kubernetes,
you can now bring them into a modern architecture
without sunsetting them rapidly.
You don't have to rip and replace.
You can just let it take a natural lifecyle.
>> Right.
And we basically play with that in two ways.
If you're in the public Cloud,
there's a nice fit between Kubernetes wrapping
all the different app components,
making them abstracted, scalable,
Atlas underneath this fluid data layer.
Or, if a customer's their own data center
trying to modernize their stack,
standardizing on Kubernetes, we now integrate our IP
around automation and management directly into Kubernetes.
That was one of the big announcements
we made a few weeks ago.
>> That makes Mongo really more versatile than ever before.
I think the database as a service proves that
you can really see the value of how having
not a one spot only in the stack
you can sit down with Atlas and then provide agility.
Is that what's going on?
>> The key driver is always agility for us.
And then there's, oh wow,
there's a huge cost savings to this as well.
Whether it be in terms of productivity, infrastructure cost,
just because of the native architecture,
so as we see more and more organization become
software companies, effectively, as the saying goes,
that's just been a huge tailwind to our business.
>> So two final questions for me,
and I'll Jeff ask his questions.
One, what's the relationship with Amazon look like now?
And the second question is,
what should people know about Mongo if they haven't been
keeping in touch with Mongo lately?
What's the new, big bumper sticker
that they should know about from Mongo?
>> On the first point,
the relationship with Amazon is very strong.
We obviously partnered with them originally
when we built Atlas and continued to do so.
And just core architecture.
Building a database and service
that's best in class on their platform.
And expanding initially from four or five regions
to now global footprint and that was the first phase.
Now, we're heavily focused on going to market.
Whether it's our sales teams working together on accounts,
working on migration opportunities,
or new application architectures.
Whether it's marketplace adoption that we're together,
trying to drive in inquiries.
There's quite a bit of collaboration happening.
Certainly they have databases and services,
but we believe certainly functionality-wise,
there's a huge ecosystem around Mongo,
and they see that and want to empower them with Atlas.
So that's been a huge advantage to driving growth
into the market.
The second point around what I would want people
to know about Mongo is,
MongoDB today probably would surprise people
from our original roots.
Our original roots were systems of engagement,
high scale web applications, new apps,
we're fantastic at that.
Obviously, Stitch is a way to double down on that value.
But as I touched upon earlier,
now we're really betting on a more general purpose strategy,
where we brought forth things like transactions
and acts of compliance for the first time
to non-relational databases.
So we really believe that there's no application today
for which Mongo can't give
the same level of developer benefit.
Even if it's a heavy transactional
mission-critical application.
>> Doubling down on the web app, core business,
giving them more range and functionality to go anywhere
they want to go with those apps.
>> Exactly.
And, saying alright, there's this huge wave of billions
of dollars built on legacy technology,
how do we unlock those applications,
get them on a modern platform, that allows those apps
to stick around for the next 20 years
and deliver customer values.
>> It's not your dad's tingen, I guess that's the take away.
>> Inside joke, tingen.
Formerly MongoDB.
Thanks for coming on The Cube.
Great to see you.
Congratulations on your role at Mongo.
Great company, CMO.
Great to see your success, thanks for coming on.
>> Thanks for having me, I really enjoyed the conversation.
>> The Cube, here live in New York City.
More coverage, stay with us.
I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick.
We'll be right back, thanks for watching, stay with us.