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STEPHANIE WONG: Thank you so much for everyone
joining our fireside chat.
I'm Stephanie Wong, developer advocate at Google Cloud.
And I'll be your moderator.
Today we have Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB,
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, and Vadim Supitskiy,
CTO of Forbes.
Thomas, so glad to have you here with us today.
Let's start with you.
Google Cloud and MongoDB share a common vision
for digital transformation in the Cloud.
So what are some challenges you see businesses are experiencing
with their digital transformation initiatives,
especially as organizations navigate
what will be the new normal?
THOMAS KURIAN: The biggest change
that we see is that every industry has had its customers,
whether they are consumers, if you're
a consumer-facing company, or a business,
if you're a B2B company, wanting to do a couple of things.
They want to have you deliver your services online to them,
and have you understand them better in order
to provide them better service.
And the heart of the whole process
of digital transformation is helping
people manage their data, whether that's
for products or customers, and also
to then connect to customers online
using new digital medias.
And so a lot of our work with them and this team at MongoDB
have been to facilitate that whole process
of digital transformation, whether that's
in retail, or health care, or manufacturing, or automotive,
or media.
And a lot of the work has been to facilitate that.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes.
Absolutely.
The pandemic has really encouraged the acceleration
of digital transformation, and also highlighted
some challenges around data synthesis.
So for Dev, in today's increasingly digital world,
data is a key asset for organizations.
And it plays a vital role in digital transformation
for an enterprise.
So when speaking with customers, what challenges and trends
are you observing?
DEV ITTYCHERIA: So as you said, what the pandemic
has really reinforced is that a company's competitive advantage
today is using software and data to drive their business.
And so when you need to connect to the customers
digitally, when you need to be digital first
in terms of how you engage with not just
your customers, but your partners and your suppliers,
knowing how to use software and data
becomes really, really important.
And you can't really buy your competitive advantage.
You have to build it.
What I mean by that is you can buy third-party software,
whether it's CRM software, or supply chain software,
or HR software.
But your competitors can do that as well.
Your real competitive advantage comes down
to really building these software applications that
really transform your business.
So what that really means is, are you
giving your developers the tools to be
as productive as possible?
And that's where we think we add a lot of value in partnership
with Google, where we can help developers really
increase the pace of acceleration
to build amazing applications.
That really transforms a business.
And when you talk to development teams,
the biggest challenge they have is actually managing data.
Data is this very important asset.
Think about any application.
What would it be without relevant, timely data?
And so data becomes a really important part
of how people build these applications.
And if you don't have a data platform that enables that,
you really struggle.
And the challenge really comes home
when people start using legacy technologies,
like relational databases, that are not
designed for the way developers think and the way they code.
They're not designed to scale.
And they're not really designed for fault tolerance.
And those are the problems that we're addressing
in our partnership with Google.
And we're seeing a lot of success
with customers who are using the combined technologies.
STEPHANIE WONG: Data can be a double-edged sword.
But we're so excited about what MongoDB and Google
Cloud have done to make data more accessible and manageable.
So for Vadim, how has Forbes's digital transformation
played a vital role in captivating
record-breaking audiences during the pandemic?
VADIM SUPITSKIY: Since we launched forbes.com website
25 years ago, we always focused on innovation
and digital transformation.
In recent years, it only has accelerated.
Our traffic has been steadily growing,
and then came the pandemic.
And our traffic really, really spiked,
driven by our coverage of COVID-19 pandemic
and our foresight to create a breaking news team.
We saw record-breaking numbers.
120 million unique visitors every month came to forbes.com.
At that point, I was extremely happy that we
were in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas,
because it really allowed us to scale.
And our users didn't see any degradation at all.
It also allowed us to continue to innovate, even
during the most difficult circumstances.
Technology and data is at the core of everything
that we do at Forbes.
And having the data consolidated in one place,
highly available with very little latency
has been really transformational for us.
So I'm very happy that we migrated when we did.
STEPHANIE WONG: That's fantastic.
It's so great to see Forbes thrive.
Now, Thomas, over the years, we have seen MongoDB and Google
Cloud work very well together.
Can you share a little bit more about the partnership
and how Google Cloud and MongoDB are helping their customers
in their journey to the Cloud?
THOMAS KURIAN: Just following on the comments
that Dev and Vadim made, we're helping customers
in three very important ways.
One is bringing the developer ecosystem of our two
organizations together to help, as Dev said,
allow developers to use our two technologies together
to build great applications that will provide
the foundational advantage for companies,
whether that's helping 1-800-Flowers accelerate
their e-commerce, helping Autotrader sell products online
more effectively, helping an organization like Spoke use
Google's AI and ML along with data and MongoDB.
All of these are examples where the developer ecosystems are
being brought together to help people
build the core applications that drive their business.
That's number one.
Number two, it's about simplifying the experience
people have with the platform.
Just as an example, when you look at Autotrader, when
we started our work with them, they
were doing about 15,000 releases a year in production.
And over the last year, they have reached 35,000 releases
to production.
So almost double the productivity
of the developer organization.
And we do that by making things simpler for people.
And when I say simpler for people,
eliminating complexity by offering them Atlas on GCP
as a solution to help them get their work done.
And the third is we do a lot of work that takes away complexity
for operators as well.
We want people to get capabilities.
Vadim talked about handling scalability
when you have a huge amount of traffic coming in,
handling spikes in capacity requirements,
ensuring that security and cybersecurity is provided
on people's mission critical data that's stored in Mongo
on GCP.
So the third thing we want to make sure
is not just the developer community,
but the company that depends on our technologies working
together can go to bed at night and not
be worried about things like, will we
be able to handle capacity needs?
Will we handle the availability requirements
that mission critical applications need?
Will we get the necessary cybersecurity protection?
And a lot of that comes from the great work
that the MongoDB team and the Google Cloud engineering teams
have done together over the last year.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes.
All of our teams have been very busy at work
over the last year.
For Vadim, what led you to decide on working
with MongoDB and Google Cloud?
And what has changed since your journey to the Cloud?
VADIM SUPITSKIY: The decision to migrate to Google Cloud
was made because of the toolset that the platform provides,
its scalability, and developer friendliness.
Regarding MongoDB Atlas, we always
evaluate different managed solutions.
And if it meets our requirements and makes sense, we go with it.
It was also a perfect time for us to migrate to MongoDB Atlas
because we were migrating to Google Cloud
and wanted to keep our products close to the databases
to reduce the latency to the minimum.
We also didn't want to be in the business of managing databases.
We didn't want to do routine tasks, like backups, patches,
and overprovisioning our environments.
Instead, we wanted to focus on important things,
like innovation and our users' loyalty.
We migrated to Google Cloud in about six months,
so pretty fast, and right away saw really, really
great results.
We've seen our speed to market increase by 58%.
Last year, we released 73% more initiatives than the year
before.
And while our velocity has really accelerated,
the number of rollbacks, defects, and hotfixes
has decreased by over 30% for us.
So the results speak for themselves.
STEPHANIE WONG: Wow.
Those numbers, that's amazing.
So for Dev, we are clearly seeing some great customer
success, as Vadim's story is evident of.
So what's next for Google Cloud and MongoDB?
And what excites you about the future?
Where do you see most of the opportunities?
DEV ITTYCHERIA: Well, it all comes back to the theme
about helping customers innovate fast you just
heard Vadim talk about.
And frankly, we hear this from lots of customers,
sophisticated customers like Forbes, just saying,
my biggest gating issue is how can I increase
the speed of innovation.
So I think what Thomas talked about is
the integrations between MongoDB and Google Cloud really
make the developer experience very seamless,
things like unified billing, unified procurement.
Even the sales engagement model just
makes it very simple for customers to engage
with the two organizations.
They don't have to deal with trying
to understand what one hand is doing while the other hand does
something else.
And then on top of that, the integrations that we have
across the products, integrations with some
of Google Cloud's other data products, like BigQuery,
and a bunch of other capabilities,
data stream, and so on and so forth,
as well as all the technical integrations,
security integrations, that really
offer a seamless experience for customers.
And so those are the things that we're already doing,
and we're just doubling down on.
And we're working closely with Google
with some other value-add services for customers
so that they can have a really incredible experience.
So frankly, the infrastructure gets out of the way for them
to continue to innovate and build amazing applications that
really drive their business.
STEPHANIE WONG: Vadim, would love
to hear what's next for Forbes as well.
VADIM SUPITSKIY: We're always looking at what's next,
and what the next era of information will bring.
On the technology side, we're using
serverless and Cloud native more and more, as well as AI and ML.
On the business side, we are obsessed
with building our users' loyalty.
We want to deliver bespoke experiences,
and really offer the most valuable products
to our readers.
We have a very ambitious first-party data roadmap.
And having that product overall has allowed
us to really deeply understand our user,
as well as continuing to cultivate different audience
segments, very valuable ones, like C levels, decision makers,
entrepreneurs, and leaders in different verticals.
We are continuing to build our communities.
We're growing our audiences on domain and off domain,
and also focusing on newsletter subscriptions as well.
We are really proud of our AI-powered CMS.
We want to make publishing simple.
And we really, really focus on making
our journalists' lives easier.
We also have really invested in expanding our consumer product
suite.
Every day somebody comes to forbes.com
we want to offer them more and more value.
So for us, innovation and transformation
truly never stops.
STEPHANIE WONG: Well, Vadim, thank
you so much for taking the time to share your experience
and a look towards the future.
Thomas, do you have any closing thoughts?
THOMAS KURIAN: Vadim, thanks again for the great work you
guys are doing using our platform, along
with Mongo's technology.
It's amazing to see the impact you're
having on readers in so many different parts of the world.
I look forward to watching how your platform evolves.
And then, Dev, thanks again to all
of the engineers and everyone in your organization.
It's been such a great partnership.
And watching our customers succeed
using our products together to build great experiences
for people, just like we heard from Vadim and his team
at Forbes, it makes us all feel super
proud to be working with you.
STEPHANIE WONG: Vadim, Dev, Thomas, thank you so much
for a wonderful conversation.
And thank you to everyone watching.