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>> We're back at the Javits Center,
theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022.
The first live event in three years.
Pretty amazing.
And I'm really excited to have Tony Coleman here
as the CTO of Temenos,
who're changing the finance and banking industry,
and Boris Bialek,
is the global head of industry solutions at MongoDB.
Welcome back to theCUBE.
Welcome first time CUBE alum, so thanks for coming on.
>> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us.
>> Tony, tell us about Temenos.
What are you guys up to, disrupting the finance world?
>> So Temenos is everyone's banking platform.
So we are a software company.
We have over 3000 financial institutions around the world.
Marketing tell me that that works out as
over 1.2 billion people rely on Temenos software
for their banking and financial needs.
It's 41 of the top 50 banks in the world run our software,
and we are very proud to be powering all of those entities
on their innovation journeys, and bringing
that digital transformation that we've seen so much of over
the past few years, and enabling
a lot of the world's unbanked, through digital banking,
to become members of the banking community.
>> So basically you're bringing the software platform
to enable that.
So somebody doesn't have to,
they don't have to build it themselves,
'cause they'd never get there.
>> Absolutely.
>> And so that's, I don't know
if you consider that disruptive.
I guess I do, to the industry to a certain extent,
but when you think of disruption in that business,
you think of blockchain and crypto and NFT,
is that a completely separate world or do you guys
participate in that as well?
>> Well, I would say it's related, right?
>> Yeah. >> I mean, NFT,
I was doing a podcast recently
and they had this idea of buzzword jail,
where you could choose words to go into jail.
And I said, NFT, not because I think NFTs
are intrinsically bad, but I think just at the moment,
they are a rife for scam area.
I think it's one of those,
one of these technologies and investment area,
the people don't understand it.
And there's a lot of mistakes that can be made in there.
>> Icebergs ahead.
>> Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating piece.
It could be truly transformative, if we get it right.
But it's very emerging. So we'll see.
So Temenos don't play a huge part
in the blockchain industry directly.
We work with partners in that space,
but in terms of digital assets and that sort of thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
>> Dave: But so Boris, you have industry solutions
in your title. What does that entail?
>> So basically I'm responsible for all the verticals,
and that includes great partners like Tony and Temenos.
We are doing a lot of verticals by now in MongoDB.
When you listen to Dave in all his various talks,
we have so much stuff ranging from banking, telco, retail,
healthcare, insurance, you name it,
we have it by now.
And that's obviously, the client's moving from these
edge solutions,
like touching a little toe in the water about Mongo,
to going all in building bigger solutions you saw on stage
the lady from Wells Fargo this morning.
These are not second great, "Yeah, we do something small."
No, we are part of their transformation journey.
And this is where Tony and I come regularly together.
How we transform things, and how we built
a new way of banking is done with microservices
and the technology surrounding it.
>> Dave: Yeah. But what about performance in this world?
(laughs) What can you tell me about that?
>> Wow. Yeah. >> This is a setup.
>> This is an interesting thing,
because people are always challenging.
What is performance and document databases?
And Tony challenged us actually
six weeks before his own show
several weeks ago in London and says,
"Boris, let's do a benchmark." And maybe Tony,
you bring your story because if I get too excited,
I fall off the chair here, so- (all laughing)
>> Yeah, sure, love.
I mean, performance and efficiency are topics
close to my heart, have been for for years. And so yeah, we,
every two or three years, we at Temenos run a high-
we call it High Water benchmark.
And this year we sort of doubled down,
literally doubled down on everything we did previously.
So this was 200 million accounts,
a hundred million customers.
And we were thrashing through 102,875 transactions
a second. >> Second.
>> Which is a phenomenal number, and...
>> I bet I can't do that in the blockchain. (laughing)
>> Well, touche. Yeah, exactly, right?
So this is, you know,
I get asked why we do such high numbers,
and the reason's very straightforward.
If somebody wants 10,000 transactions a second, and we're
seeing banks now that need that sort of throughput.
If I can give them a benchmark report,
"This is a hundred thousand,"
I don't need to keep doing benchmarks at 10.
(all chuckling) >> Yeah. Okay.
Tell me more about the anytime you get into benchmarks,
you want to understand the configuration, the workload.
Tell me more about that.
>> Tony: So we have a pretty well trodden path of
a standard transaction mix.
We call it our "retail transaction mix."
And so it's the, it tries to, you know,
the workload is there to mimic,
'cause it's a simulation, right,
around what you would do on your daily basis.
You're going to make payments,
you're going to check your balances. You're going to see what,
what money's moved on your account.
So we do all of that, and we run it through a proper
production guide environment and we feel,
this is really important.
This isn't a something we do in the lab
you couldn't go live on, this is
all of the horrible nonfunctional requirements around
high availability-
>> Boris: Security, security, passes, private links,
all the things. And one thing is,
they're doing this for a long time.
So this is not like,
"Let's define something new for the Mongo world."
No, this is something Tony's doing for literally 10,
15 years by now, right?
>> Tony: If only it was only 15 years, but yes. (laughs)
>> And this is your benchmark, right?
>> Yeah. >> Or is this-
>> Temenos developed this benchmark. Yeah, absolutely.
>> Temenos developed this benchmark. Okay.
>> Yeah. And so we ran it through and yeah,
some fantastic numbers, and not just on
the sheer sort of top level numbers,
a hundred thousand transactions a second,
the response time out of Mongo was fantastic at, you know,
one millisecond, which is just brilliant.
So it means you get these really efficient numbers.
And what that helped us do with, you know,
some of the other partners that were involved in the
benchmark as well. It meant that our through per core,
which is a really good measure of efficiency, is up to four
times better than we ran it three years ago.
So in terms of a sustainability piece,
which is so important, that's really a huge improvement,
and that's down to application changes,
architecture changes,
as well as using appropriate technology in the right places.
>> Dave: How important were things like the number of cores,
the memory sizes, the block sizes, all that stuff?
>> Boris: We are very tiny. So this is a part,
when I talk to people, we have a,
what we call M80 system in the back, and people look at me,
"You run how many transactions on that one?" So to be fair,
three quarters were MongoDB,
one quarter was something else, because we are still porting
some components over and start procedures, full disclosure.
But when I think 75,000 transactions on a single M80 system,
which is 32 cores I think correctly,
>> That's correct. >> Something like that.
This is a tiny machine in this world of banking.
So before this was a mainframe, and now it's one little
instance on AWS and this is really the amazing part.
Costs are down, and environmental footprint
is so, so important.
>> And this is a heavy, write heavy environment, or a mix,
>> or what was it like? >> See, the way we
architect the solution is it follows something
called a CQRS pattern.
So Command Query and Responsibility Segregation.
So what we do,
we do all the commands in an appropriate database
for that piece.
And that was running at about 25,000 transactions a second.
And then we're streaming the data out of that,
directly into Mongo.
So actually, Mongo was doing more than the 75,000 queries
a second, which is the read heavy part.
>> Dave: Yeah.
>> It was also ingesting 25,000 transactions a second
at the same time.
>> Dave: Okay, and the workload had a high locality,
medium locality?
It was, I mean, just give us a picture of what that's like.
>> Sorry, so- >> The locality?
>> Yeah, we don't have that.
>> That's not- >> So yeah. So explain that.
>> That's kind of not the mindset for a document database.
Correct? >> Exactly. Exactly.
In a document database, you don't have these,
hotspotting the one single field of a table,
which is suddenly hotspotting and no,
you have literally an query comes up and we say,
what goes together, gets stored together,
belongs together, comes out together.
So the number of IOPS for example, is much,
much smaller in a document system than a
historically relational system.
>> Dave: So it's, the IOPS is not
a good indicator necessarily, right?
>> Boris: Not anymore.
That's why the size is so much reduced.
The number of access patterns of small line-
I mean, Temenos is highly optimized for XML
internally as well, the internal structures.
So that goes very close to obvious suggestions.
>> Traditional benchmark, would've a cache in front,
would have a high cache hit rate. We sold 99% ca-
Right? That's a high locality reference,
but that's irrelevant.
>> All gone. It's gone.
There's no caching in the middle anymore.
It goes straight against the database.
All these things are out, and that's what makes the thing
so exciting, and all this thing in a real environment.
I think Tony, we really need to stress it, right?
It's not a test bet at home.
It's a real life environment out into the wild,
with the right benchmark drivers and load drivers.
>> Dave: How did your customers, you know, respond?
You did this for your recent event?
>> Tony: Yeah. So we did it for our user conference,
our community forum, which was, as Boris said
a few weeks ago in London. And the reaction was certainly,
it was a great reception of course,
but the main thing that people were fascinated about,
how much more efficient the whole platform is.
>> Dave: Explain that.
>> So, you know, when we can run, and this,
it's a great number that the team pulled out,
which is, so having doubled the throughput on the platform,
from what we did three years ago,
we're actually using 20% less infrastructure
to give double the performance, you know, at a macro level,
that's a phenomenal achievement.
And that means that these changes that we make,
everything that we are doing, benefits all of our customers.
So all of the banks, when they take the latest releases,
they get these benefits,
everything is that much more efficient,
so everybody benefits from every investment.
>> Dave: And this was run in the cloud, is that correct?
>> That's correct, yeah. >> You're running Atlas?
>> So this was... >> Atlas NAT on AWS,
with an AWS Kinesis and Lambda processes.
And, so it was a really reality-driven environment.
>> So pure cloud native,
all using managed services on AWS and then Atlas
for the Mongo piece.
>> So awesome. I mean, so now how convenient for Mongo,
the timing for MongoDB World,
how are you socializing this with your community, Boris?
>> Boris: Yeah. We are having this afternoon session
as well, where we talk a little bit more detail about that.
And Tony has a session as well tomorrow.
So we see a lot of good feedback as well
when we bring it up with clients.
Obviously some clients get very specific because this
reduction in footprint is so huge.
When you think a client has eight,
nine environments from early development systems,
to production, to emergency standbys,
maybe in a different cloud, all these things,
what Dave talks about, the different Atlas features,
multi-cloud environmentally, all this stuff comes to play,
and this is why I'm so excited to work with him.
We should bring up as well
the other things which are available already
with your front end solutions, with the infinity services.
Because that's the other part, the modernization,
the microservices, which Tony is so politely not mentioning.
(Tony laughing)
So there's a lot of cool technology into that one,
which fits to how MongoDB works in microservices, API first,
all these, what they call math factors, microservice,
API, cloud native, headless.
I think that was the right order now.
>> Dave: Mhm.
>> So all these things are reflected as well by Temenos
with their leadership, what they achieve.
Now, I think a lot of companies have to play catch up now
to what Tony and his team are delivering on the bank side.
>> Well, this gets to modernization.
Right? >> Yeah.
>> We really haven't explicitly talked about that.
Everything you just said talks to modernization.
So you typically, in financial services,
find a lot of relational database, right?
The 20 year old, you know, hardened, et cetera,
high availability, give 'em credit to that.
But a lot of times you'll see them just shift that
into the cloud. You guys chose not to do that.
What was that modernization journey look like?
>> Tony: So it's a bit of, I'm a firm believer
in pragmatism and using,
I think I touched on earlier, the appropriate technologies.
>> Mhm. >> So...
>> Horses for courses.
>> Exactly. Took the words right out of my mouth.
And I was talking to one of the investor analysts earlier,
and the exact same question comes up, right?
So if you've got a relational database or you've got
a big legacy system and you know,
you're stuck on a mainframe or whatever it is,
and you want to pull that over, when you,
it's not just the case of moving the data model from one,
you know, paradigm to another,
you need to look at it holistically, and you need to be
ambitious. I think the industry has got, you know,
quite nervous about some of these transformation projects,
but I, in some ways, although it might be counterintuitive,
I think being ambitious and being in bold is a better way,
a better way through it. You know, take a view,
look at it holistically, lay out a plan.
It is hard. It is hard to do these sorts of transformations,
but that's what makes it the challenge.
That's what makes it fun.
Take those bold steps, look at it holistically,
look at our end state, and then work out a practical way
you can deliver value to the business, and your customers,
as you deliver on that roadmap.
>> Dave: So did you migrate from a traditional RDBMS
to Mongo?
>> Tony: So yeah, this is a fun conversation.
(Boris laughing) >> I'll bet.
>> So of course in the late nineties,
the kind of the phrase,
"document model," hadn't really been coined yet.
And for some of our workloads,
at the time we refer to it as a hierarchical model.
>> Dave: Okay.
And, you know, at that point in time, really,
if you wanted to sell to a bank,
you needed to be running on Oracle.
So we took this data model and we got it running in Oracle,
and then other relational databases as well.
But it actually under the covers there, it is stored as XML.
So there is a project that we're looking at to say, well,
okay, taking that model, which is in a relational database.
And of course you build over time,
you do rely on some of the features of relational databases.
And moving that over to something like Mongo isn't,
you know, it's not quite as simple as just changing
the data model.
There's a few bits and pieces that we need to work through,
but there is a proof-of-concept that we're running,
which is looking really promising, and spurred on by the
amazing results from the benchmark,
that could be something that's really interesting.
>> Dave: Yeah, and I think, 20 years ago,
you probably wouldn't even thought about it, right?
It was just too risky.
But today, with the modern tools and the cloud,
and you're talking about microservices and containers,
it becomes potentially more feasible.
>> Well, the other side of it is, you know,
it's only relatively recently that Mongo has had
transaction support across multi-document,
multi-collection transactions. And in banking,
as we all know, you know, it's highly regulated.
It is all of your worst possible nonfunctional requirements,
security, transactionality, atomicity, you know,
the whole shebang,
your worst possible nightmare is Monday morning for us.
>> Boris: (laughing) Yeah. >> So...
>> And I think one part which is exciting about this,
Tony is a very good practical example about this large scale
modernization and cutting out court base by cutting off
that layer and going back to the hierarchical internal
structures, we are simply finding a lot
of the backend components of her,
because obviously code translation,
which was done before, is not needed anymore.
And that is as well, for me, an exciting example,
to see how long it takes, what it is.
So Tony is facing my life experiment, so to speak.
(Tony laughing) >> Dave: Well, Boris,
you're right on because it used to be those
migrations were how many lines of code,
how long do I have to freeze it?
And that a lot of times led people to say, well, forget it,
'cause business is going to shut down for a year.
>> Yes, but now we do that.
We do that.
So I'm working obviously besides the work with Temenos,
with a lot of financial clients. And by now it's,
my joke is normally "Shift and lift, pain and no gain,"
because the result of the work is when they
move everything to the cloud and it was bad before,
it will not be better in the cloud
only because it's in somebody else's data center.
So these modernization and innovation factors
absolutely critical.
And as Tony said, the people get it by now,
this shift and lift is over. It is "How can I innovate?"
"How can I accelerate my innovation?"
And that leads very quickly to
the document model discussion.
>> Dave: Yeah. I think the world practitioners will
tell you, if you really want to affect
the operational model,
have a meaningful impact on your business,
>> Boris: Yeah.
>> you have to really modernize.
You can't just lift and shift. Is that fair to say?
>> Absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely.
>> I mean, that's, you know, it's a difference between,
hundreds of millions or billions in some cases versus,
you know, some nice little hits here or there.
>> And we see as well, a lot of clients,
by now asking for solutions like the Temenos solution
and like others,
where there is not any more discussion about how to move
to MongoDB. The question is "How fast?"
>> Dave: Yeah.
>> "How can I accelerate?" We see the services request.
The first one, it's amazing.
After the event, what we had in London,
I've 100 clients calling us.
So it's not our sales people calling upon the clients,
the client's calling in. "I saw it, how do I get started?"
And that is, for me, from the vendor perspective,
so to speak, an amazing moment.
>> Dave: Love to sell for Mongo. There you go.
(Boris laughing) Guys, we got to go.
Thanks so much for sharing your story.
>> Thanks so much. >> Thank you.
Love to have you back and see how that goes,
that migration to come. >> Happy to come back.
That's a big story of if and when it happens.
>> Absolutely, it was a pleasure.
>> Yeah. Great. >> Thanks very much.
>> All right, keep it right there everybody.
We'll be right back.
This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE.
You're watching our live coverage of MongoDB World 2022
from New York City.
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