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>> Welcome back to New York City everybody.
You're watching theCUBE's coverage
of MongoDB World 2022.
My name is Dave Vellante.
Pretty good attendance here.
I'd say over 3000 people, great buzz,
a lot of really technical sessions.
There's an executive session going on.
There's a financial analyst session.
So a lot of diversity in this attendee base.
Vadim Supitskiy is here. He's the CTO of Forbes
and Abdul Razack is the vice president
of Solution Engineering at Google.
Gents, thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thanks Dave.
>> Happy to be here.
>> So, Forbes, very interesting business.
I'm interested in what occurred
during the pandemic for you guys. Right?
Everybody went digital.
Obviously you guys have a tremendous brand.
We all, in the business world reaped from it,
but what happened during the isolation era?
What happened to your business?
>> Yeah, so we've been innovating and going through digital
transformation for years, since we launched our website
probably 25 years ago.
>> But during the pandemic, because of our coverage,
our foresight to create a breaking news team,
our audiences and readership really skyrocketed.
>> Really?
>> Yeah, and at that point, we were very happy
and really lucky to be in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas.
So when the audiences went up,
we didn't feel any impact, right?
Our environments auto-scaled
and our users didn't experience any issues at all.
So we were able to focus on innovation, our users loyalty
and really building cool products. So we were very lucky
and happy to be in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas.
>> So Abdul, the solution and the title you provided,
obviously worked.
How did you guys end up getting together?
What was that like?
>> Yeah, I mean, like Vadim said,
maybe there's a little bit of
the right place at the right time in this case,
but you can see the need for digital transformation
and the pandemic really accelerated that.
And like Vadim said, primarily Forbes wanted to focus
on innovation and customer loyalty
and the way that comes to bear,
is that you have a technology platform
that can serve those needs. Right?
Whether it is through unique applications that can be
delivered, the ability for developers
to build those applications quickly and seamlessly
and then remove the intangibles of
scalability, performance, latency,
and things of that nature.
So, you can see this all coming together
in this scenario.
>> So as consumers, we see the website,
we read online, maybe sometimes in the laptop,
mostly on mobile.
What is it that we don't see? I mean, the apps
that Abdul talked about, community.
What else is there? Paint a picture of that for us.
>> Yeah. There is a lot going on behind the scene. Right?
So focusing on audience, building communities,
but also what it allowed us to do
while everything was working well,
we were scaling up. Right?
We were able to focus on a lot of innovation.
And one of those was first-party data platform
that we built. We call it Forbes One.
And that's in the center of everything
that we do at Forbes right now. Right?
So it allows us, one, to connect our partners,
advertising partners with the audiences
that they're looking to engage and to connect with.
And then we are growing our consumer business as well
and what that allows us to do is target the right products
at the right time, to the right people,
on the web website and our domain.
So, that's just one of the examples
that we've built our full first-party data platform
on these technologies and we now know
our customers so well that we are able to provide them
with what they want.
>> So the first-party data platform is what? A self-serve for
advertiser, so they can identify?
>> Not just advertisers. So it's in the center of everything.
So advertiser comes in, we provide the segments
and users that they want to reach.
Now, we are creating products as well,
building cool, innovative products
and offering our journalism and everything
there to our readers
and we are able to connect them to the right audiences
at the right time, as well as personalization. Right?
You come onto the website,
you want to read what you want to read.
So we able to create that as well,
using machine learning and AI.
>> So a product, it might be a data product
or it might be a content product?
>> It could be a data product.
It could be like just personalization or something like
that. It could be newsletter. Right?
It could be a stand-alone product, like investing product.
So, there is a lot going on there,
but we want to offer the right ones
at the right time, to the right audiences
and building that platform has allowed us to do that.
>> Okay. Now Google's got great tech.
What's the tech behind all this?
>> Yeah. So when Vadim talked about
segmenting to personalize something
that is relevant to you and
providing recommendations to you. Right?
And all that is based on machine learning, AI technology.
The fact that Vadim has all the data
curated in a in a first-party data platform
gives the ability to create a seamless profile. Right?
You could be interested in a couple of products. Right?
And then the underlying technology
can tailor that to bring what is it that you're looking for
at the right place at the right time. Right?
So those are recommendations, things of that nature
that's all powered by AI and machine learning technology.
>> So it's running on Mongo,
and then you're bringing in Google AI
and machine intelligence tools?
Can you double click on that?
>> Yeah. It's basically a combination of both,
using both platform to the deploy it
and we embrace Cloud. Right?
So we using all the Cloud native technologies. Right?
We didn't want to just lift and shift.
We wanted to make sure we do it right.
And we focused on automation,
even if we had to take a step back,
we knew that automating things was a key for us.
So yes, it's been really successful,
but also really informative for us
to use the right tools for the job.
>> And you had prior experience with Mongo, or?
>> We did.
>> What's your journey been like there?
>> Yeah, we actually were one of the first clients of Mongo.
I think we were number 11 at that time.
>> 10gen.
>> Yes. It was.
>> We remember.
>> Many years ago it was MongoDB one, right?
>> Yeah.
>> And at that time we we introduced contributor network
for us and our audiences were scaling as well.
And we used Out-of-the-Box WordPress
as our publishing platform, which couldn't scale.
So we had to rethink and figure out,
"Alright, so what do we do?"
We compared couple of no SQL databases
and Mongo was a winner because they checked all the boxes
and developers loved it right away. Right?
They're like, "All right, this is so much faster
to develop on. It's just a great tool for the job
going from SQL to, to no SQL".
And we scaled and we never looked back.
And then obviously Atlas came,
so there are kind of two inflection points here.
One switch into no SQL and two going away
from managing databases.
Like we don't want to be in that business. Right?
Updates, patches, all of that,
that we had to do manually, over-provision in our
environments and kind of wasteful.
So being on Atlas, that was a second
kind of inflection point for us,
which opened it up for us to do even
more innovation and move faster.
>> Okay. And you're happy about this partnership,
despite, I mean, you partner with Mongo obviously,
Google has its own databases, that's just the nature
of the world we live in, isn't it?
>> No and fundamentally like that, we always believe
that customer choice is the primary notion. Right?
I mean, and Google Cloud platform
is more of a platform and the ecosystem
is critical to that. Right? It's imperative.
So, like Vadim said, the combination of
Google and Mongo provides a truly Cloud native platform
that can serve the needs for years to come,
rather than from looking at it
from a legacy perspective.
And that's the way we look at it. Right?
I mean, there is choices all the time
and sometimes it's competition.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
And you're still selling a lot of compute and storage and
machine intelligence, so machine learning.
This morning in the keynotes, we heard a lot
about a lot of different capabilities.
We've certainly watched Mongo evolve its platform
over the last half a decade or more really.
But you've mentioned the developers loved it. Right?
As Mongo evolves its platform,
is there trade off from a developer simplicity standpoint?
Are they able to preserve that from your perspective?
>> I think with Atlas, it actually makes it easier now.
So when they need to create an environment,
they can do it on the fly.
When they need to test something,
also things available to them right away.
So it actually, in general, as the platform
becomes more mature and more stable,
which is very important, but at the same time,
the flexibility remains for development and for creation of
environments and things like that.
So we've been pretty happy with how it transitioned,
to being a more mature platform.
>> Did the move to Google Cloud and Atlas change the way
that you're able to deliver high availability
versus what you were doing when you were self-managing?
Can you talk about that a little bit?
>> Yeah, absolutely. We were in a data center,
so kind of one location and moving to
MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud,
now we're multi region. Right?
So we have a full DR strategy
and we feel a lot more secure and we feel
very confident that anything that happens,
we can scale, we can fail over.
So absolutely, this helps us a lot.
And the feature that was introduced probably
a few years ago to auto scale MongoDB environments as well,
that has been really key for us,
so we can sleep well.
>> Meaning you can scale while you sleep.
>> Right, exactly. Exactly.
>> Yeah. Plus the other part is
you don't size for peak. right?
You size as you grow, and then you,
you have that elasticity built in. Right?
That it is the nature.
And then Mongo is available on
multiple Google Cloud regions.
So as you expand, you don't worry about
all the plumbing that you need to do
and things of that nature.
>> They asked us serverless this morning.
>> Yeah.
>> How does that affect what you guys are doing
together and what are your thoughts
from Google's perspective and then of course, from Forbes?
>> And that's the trend that we see constantly. Right?
Serverless really decouples the tie to the VMs. Right?
And so it makes it much more easier to provide
the elasticity and have function calls across. Right?
Function as a service and things of that nature. Right?
So we see a lot of promise in that. Right?
We do that even within our own products
and we see that giving the ability to decompose
and recompose applications
and would love to hear how you're leveraging that. Right?
>> Yeah. We fully embrace serverless.
So we use all the tools you provide, I think.
If you look at our architectural diagrams,
it's like all these pops-up, cloud functions,
composer, app engine.
So we use the full suite and we love it.
>> Yeah, Yeah. Okay.
And then you talked this morning about the eliminating,
the trade-offs with serverless of having to
either when you dial it down You have to restart,
but you've solved that problem,
or I guess Mongo's helped you solve that problem.
Can you explain that a little bit
from a technical standpoint?
>> Yeah. From a technical standpoint,
if you look at, like as a developer, right?
If you're building an intelligent app,
it has multiple components within it. Right?
There is pops-up for messaging,
there is cloud functions and things of that nature.
So you don't worry about, when it's encompassed
in a serverless architecture,
you don't worry about a lot of the complexities
that go on behind it
and so that makes the abstraction much more easier.
And it eliminates the friction
that a developer goes through.
I think they've talked about removing friction
and that's the primary source of productivity loss,
which is the friction.
We used to come from a world
where developers were more worried.
80% of the time they would spend on plumbing this thing
and then only 20% writing code. Right?
And then now this whole paradigm should flip that. Right?
That's where we see the promise of it.
>> Do you still do stuff on Prem
or are you pretty much all in the Cloud?
>> Fully in the Cloud.
>> How long did that take? What was that like?
>> It actually was really fast.
We had a real aggressive timeline. It took us six months.
>> Really?
>> Yeah. Yeah.
And it was aggressive, but I was happy
that we did it in a short period of time.
>> And what was the business impact
that you saw moving to the Google Cloud?
>> Yeah, so obviously after we moved to the Cloud,
we wanted to measure, especially the first year,
how it affected us and what were the positives out of it.
And yeah, we've seen tremendous results.
58% increase in speed to market.
We were releasing four times more often
than when we were on Prem.
We saw 73% increase in initiatives delivered
and while our velocity was scaling up,
we also saw 30% decreased in hot fixes and rollbacks.
So it became more stable
while we scaled up the velocity
and obviously very happy with those results.
>> Wow. Do you golf?
>> I don't actually.
>> Do you golf?
>> No. I watch golf.
>> I used to watch.
Okay. Do you know what a mulligan is?
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. mulligan is like a do-over right.
If you had a mulligan, would you do anything differently?
>> You know, we learned a lot and one of the keys for me
was definitely automate everything,
make sure that you automate as much as possible,
even if it slows you down
because in the future
that will help you so much
and use the platform and the tools that available to you.
So, serverless. Right?
Use Cloud the way it's supposed to be, as much as possible
and I think that's the advice I would give.
>> Are there any cautions with regard to automation,
either of you that you see?
I mean because sometimes automation
brings unintended consequences
and "Oops" happens really fast.
>> Yeah. It's a little bit of a process. Right?
If you take a step back, right,
and typically what people tend to do is,
there is a standardization process
and once it's standardized, the next step is
you gain efficiencies by automation. Right?
In this whole thing, what is underestimated
is change management.
And we see a lot of room for improvement
around educating on change management,
getting ahead of that
so that you can see what is coming.
So that the organization moves across that.
I don't know if you saw that in your case,
but we see this predominantly in other other cases.
>> Yeah. I mean, for us,
we wanted to make sure that all the testing was in place
and things like that.
So not just automation of deploying or anything like that,
but make sure that there is something there to catch
if something goes wrong and roll back and things like that.
So you want to make sure that you protected
in many areas.
>> So square this circle for me,
because especially with COVID, so many unknowns
and one of the benefits of document database
is you're not tied into a schema. You got a flexible schema.
Okay. So you're changing, you can change things
much more easily.
So when you talk about standardization,
you're talking about standardizing,
what at the infrastructure layer,
or where does that standardization occur?
Where should it occur.
>> I mean, you could have it
at the business process level.
>> Okay.
>> You could have it at the infrastructure level.
You could also have it on the administration aspect of it.
So there are three areas
where you could apply automation to.
>> So is there an analog to flexible schema
at the business process level?
Is that kind of how to think about it,
whereas I'm not locked into a business process schema?
I have to build flexibility into that as I change my?
>> No, I mean, you can apply it any which way.
I mean, I don't think the schema matters so much. Right?
Like, for example, if you take the Forbes US case. Right?
There is content curation, for example. Right?
>> Yeah, okay.
>> You could take content curation.
Content curation in the previous world,
like in the WordPress world,
was not very flexible. Right?
Like that it wouldn't scale.
And now you are in a world
where you have a very flexible schema,
but the process of curating the content
can be standardized. Right?
And then the next step of that
is to automate that. Right?
And so you could apply it in any manner if you will.
>> So have you built a custom CMS?
Is that what you've done there?
>> Yeah. We built our own custom CMS. It's AI powered.
We want to make our journalist lives easier.
So we're constantly trying to figure out
what can we give them
to make their day-to-day job much easier.
>> So the machines can curate and find the best content.
>> We do recommend things. Yes, absolutely.
We curate, we tell them what would be
the best headline, for example, what would
>> Prior to them publishing?
>> Yeah. Yeah.
What would be the better keywords to include and things like
that, what images. Just recommendations.
>> And you can automate the insertion
of those WordPress to go every time they do,
even though they're writing about the same topic.
>> It's a recommendation process obviously, but
>> There is a human intelligence to that at the end. Right?
I mean, but you can create a much more informed
view by curating and recommending content
rather than a myopic view.
>> And you're eliminating that mundane keystroke task.
Wow. Amazing story guys.
Thanks so much for sharing.
>> Absolutely.
>> All right. Keep it right there.
We're live from MongoDB World 2022 in New York city.
Be right back.
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