 Okay, we're back here live in Silicon Valley in the heart of Big Data Country. This is Santa Clara, California. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and join with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. Thanks for watching everybody. We're here with Kevin Hansen, who's a solution architect at TenGen. So Kevin, welcome. We're going to talk about MongoDB and Big Data and what's happening with customers. Good to have you here. Pleasure to be here. We spare no expense to extract the signal from the noise. We'll talk to anyone and everyone, CEOs, entrepreneurs, solution architects, guys in the field, you're on the ground. You're working with customers. You're at one of the fastest growing companies in the area, TenGen. Obviously MongoDB, hugely successful, just lapping the field over the past two years in just terms of growth. Really hit the sweet spot of that general purpose developer market. Beautifully, some questions on the high-end scale will try to drill down, but nice niche. We call this the NASCAR race. You guys are the front car right now, and anyone could slingshot out there, Cassandra, and some other approaches like Riyak and CouchDB will have to drill down on. But you guys are clearly accelerating and doing well. You got a new CEO, Max, who we interviewed at Oracle Open World. But you're on the ground, you're in the front lines. What is the action right now on TenGen? And what are you seeing right now with customers? Obviously, ease of use has been a nice thing for you guys to get into that market with developers. Hey, you know, LAMPSTAC developers, if you know LAMPS, you're running a rock with Mongo. You don't need to be a PhD to code it. What's happening now? What's the next level of... I think a big focus of the company right now is, I mean, we've proven that MongoDB is easy to get started with, easy to build an application. But if you're a big company, then what happens if you have a big implementation? What does that look like? How do you monitor it? How do you deploy it? All the tools around that, that's a big focus for us this year. Coming with the next release, MongoDB 2.4, we're going to have the on-premises version of our Mongo monitoring service available for our customers. So, a monitoring service that they can then have on their own servers. And then later in the year, we're going to be coming out with a cluster manager. So, a nice user interface or a tool for people to be able to quickly spin up, spin down their clusters, upgrade machines, things like that, things that you need the command line for right now. So, you know, the DevOps world, we've been following for multiple years now, but it's really going mainstream with cloud. Obviously, cloud operations and DevOps are kind of on a collision course. Essentially, the data center is the destination. I'm sure you're talking to a lot of your customers who see cloud and on-premise activities. It's not that easy. So, you know, software defined networking was really established by, say, Nacira. And you have OpenStack out there getting some major credibility and lift these days around infrastructure as a service. Certainly, infrastructure as code is a huge term. So, you know, with that, you can tease out the trends, automation, configuration management. Where are you guys at on that? I mean, you guys have a good developer friendly environment, but again, developers don't want to get nuanced in all the plumbing. Where are you guys at on some of the innovations and advancements? You've got some white space to fill. So, in terms of the plumbing, like I said, the two things are the on-premises monitoring system and then the ability to manage that cluster will be coming out later this year with the cluster manager. We're also enabling a lot of our partners to do those sort of cloud deployments. You know, for example, Red Hat OpenShift. You can run MongoDB on a platform as a service. You've got Object Rocket, MongoDB as a service today, which is software acquired. There's Mongo HQ, Mongo Labs. So, I think we're really focused on enabling our partners to deliver a very tight managed solution around MongoDB. Those guys are partners, right? So, how does a partner work with Tengen in a customer deployment? So, you guys come in, just take us through the day in the life of a solution architect. What do you do? You sell and what are you guys selling and what are your partners pushing in there? So, I mean, we have a variety of different partners, but the ones that we just spoke about are MongoDB hosted solution providers. So, you would go to them and you would say, okay, I don't want to run my own infrastructure. You know, maybe you looked at something like EC2, where you have infrastructure as a service. You know, you essentially get a machine in the cloud, but if you want something much more simple, where you just write code and deploy, that's when you've got the platforms as a service. So, those are the sort of hosting providers that we work with. We also work with a bunch of consulting companies that help do implementations. In terms of what I do every day, I'm on site with customers. I'm either, you know, early in the cycle telling them, you know, here's how you can use MongoDB. Let's look at upcoming projects. Let's see where it would be a great fit, where it might not be a great fit. Let's work through that. And then, or if they've already deployed on MongoDB, which is typically more common, it's okay. You know, how can we optimize this? How can we take a look at your schema design, your indexing, things like that, to really enable you to be extremely successful with MongoDB? So, let's take through the use cases of your customers. What are the top pain points that you're running into right now? You guys get called any, they're on a pre-sales or in the middle of an implementation. What are some of the key things that you bump into that like customers are saying, hey, I need help? I'd say like one of the most common ones is around specific use cases that they're doing. So, like, user data management is one. We have a lot of companies that are struggling with managing a variety of different user data. And user data is a really broad term. But I mean specifically, if you have someone who has social media accounts and you have somebody who has a variety of activity, you know, what links have they clicked? What Twitter accounts do they have? What are their Facebook posts that they've done? Or if you're a business, you know, what accounts do they have with you? What activities have they done? Tracking all that can be really complicated in a relational database. Because you really don't know exactly how are you going to model for data that you don't know what exists yet if you're tracking that. With MongoDB, because it's a flexible schema, we really see people able to, you know, bring that data in real time and not have to think about that on the front end. Once they get the data, then they can figure out how they want to query it. Things like that. What do you think about the Green Plum announcement with Pivotal? Have you seen that? Have you followed that at all? What's your take on that? I mean, I think it's, you know, it's sort of where things are going with kind of the Hadoop stack and things like that. You think the fragmentation is going to be, going to set them back a bit? You think it's good for those guys? Yeah, I'm not really not sure. No, I'm not sure. You know, I guess we'll wait and see. All right, so what's going on right now, Mongo? Just give us a taste of what's happening inside the company. What's the culture like? I mean, you guys went from, you know, fast and loose startup to now, you know, growing so fast. You got to put some structure together. Is it, what's it like now in Mongo? I mean, is there still a rockin' ship growth or what's the culture like? Yeah, I mean, 2012 was a fantastic year. The company just really took off and I think it was also the year where big companies really developed stories around MongoDB. It wasn't just startups anymore. It was big companies leveraging the value that we bring and using it. Now, internally as a company, it's tough to manage that kind of growth, but I think we're doing a really good job of it. We're at just over 200 employees now. We're still growing fast. I think the plan is to be at somewhere like 300-ish employees by the end of the year. We have our main headquarters in New York where Elliott and Dwight are founders work, but then we have a really big team in California where I work as well and there's a really good culture between those two offices. And really now, last year was difficult because absorbing that, going from 60 people to 201 year, so many people need to get spun up, so many people need to get trained. I think a great thing, I'm really excited about this year. Now all those people are trained. Now the engineers are trained. The troops are in the field. The troops are in the field so we've got a new release coming out next month. MongoDB 2.4 should be out within a matter of weeks and then we're excited about 2.6 later this year. So I think we're really starting to get a good cadence and really kind of just starting to become a well-loiled machine. So why MongoDB versus some other no-sequel choices? It's just the momentum that's behind it, the ecosystem. I mean, talk about that a little bit. So I think at a very first level, at a high level, it's so easy to use. Developers can just pick it up. I mean, literally when I joined the company I just downloaded the next thing I knew I was persisting data, running queries, et cetera. So I think one, it has a big appeal from a developer perspective. Another thing too is that it gets you the features of no-sequel, right? You know, linear scalability, the ability to incrementally grow, add more nodes, and so on and so forth. But you also don't have to give up all the query ability that you're used to with a relational database. So people are used to being able to query on any column, query on any field in MongoDB. People are used to the ability to create secondary indexes on top of their data. You can do that with MongoDB as well. So I like to say it's really, you know, the speed and scalability of no-sequel with the functionality of what you might be used to on a relational database. So John was asking earlier about the green plum announcement. I have a sort of broader question in terms of, you know, the sequel meets no-sequel. How do you see that affecting your customers? Do you see the traditional BI guys who have kind of been sitting back with their arms folded now jumping in? What's happening in your customer base? And are they asking you about that and pushing you in that direction? Yeah, I mean, in terms of like BI and reporting and things like that, that's one thing that's been a big focus for the company. In MongoDB 2.2, we came out with our aggregation framework which lets you do things like grouping data, sorting on computed values, generating statistics across your dataset. And that's going to be even faster in the next version of MongoDB. So I think that as we improve that functionality, it's going to be more and more that those folks are going to be interested in MongoDB as a platform. Excellent. All right, Kevin, well, this is thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your time and the update and good luck with everything. Pleasure. We'll be watching, man. All right, let's see you. It's been MongoDB, one of the hot startups and certainly now Rocketship grow. They're all holding up for their lives at this point. Throwing, I mean, it's Rocketship's taken off and you guys have bulkened up. Congratulations. Thank you. We'll be right back to theCUBE after this short break with more guests here. Day two, Strata Conference. This is theCUBE.