 Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE, New York City, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE NYC 2018. I'm Peter Burris with Wikibon and theCUBE and today we're going to be talking to Sung Park who's the Vice President of Product Marketing and Developer Advocacy at MongoDB. Welcome to theCUBE. So, we're going to be here for the next couple of days talking about issues pertaining to big data, artificial intelligence, how those two things are coming together, how they're going to remain separate. MongoDB, 7,400 customers, that's what gives you a stake in the industry. But what is the problem that MongoDB and others have been trying to solve? It used to be that MongoDB was a database, it was a substitute, but as it's grown, as it's expanded, as the use cases have become more fungible, it's evolving. That problem has to evolve. Tell us a little bit about the problem that people are trying to solve today. Yeah, so MongoDB obviously has seen a fair bit of success over the past few years. As a company, we're only about 10 years old. We just passed our 10 year anniversary last year. And for us, I think we're extremely proud of the fact that we are not only the leading modern database in terms of, to your point, powering today's modern applications, but also looking ahead to ultimately where we want to be is looking for the ease in which we can amplify how developers are building, but more importantly, how customers and businesses are actually leveraging MongoDB to do things around world-class global applications. So as a company, we started off probably pretty early on looking at more systems of engagement type use cases, web, mobile. Those are pretty straightforward for us in terms of, again, developers being kind of empowered by this document model, which is very natural, very intuitive, which allows them to not only build very quickly, but also iterate on that. Link page, link page. Correct, correct. And over the past few years, we've put a lot of investment into looking at how we can now leverage this massive developer adoption to really investing in the product. So in most, I guess, the large banks, maybe as a great example, they are now leveraging us for more systems of record type use cases where they are mission critical. The requirements are centered around data governance and security, but also looking at scalability performance, but again, really centered around business velocity. How do we iterate very quickly? And now I think as the world has just been very quickly evolving around us, really looking at how we can leverage MongoDB with customers to drive much more actionable insights, so systems of insight and intelligence, and looking at how we can make that so much easier for not just developers, for end users, right? Because for us, it's really about the developer experience, but also the user experience. And for us, kind of the broad vision we see is having this ubiquitous kind of global data layer, if you will, Peter, and it's the ability for data to reside anywhere and everywhere it needs to be, be able to get to market very quickly by again leveraging the ability for MongoDB to kind of take away some of the complexity around siloed data, data exists, and all these different types of data stores and databases, make that as easy as possible, but more importantly, leverage this thing called cloud. And for us, like we're really excited about the last few years in terms of product development and what we've done building things like MongoDB Atlas, which is our fully managed database as a service offering, building things like MongoDB Stitch, which is our serverless platform, to again, take that step function of now driving developer productivity to that next level almost exponentially, and we can talk about that. And more importantly, leveraging the cloud, right? So MongoDB Atlas supports all three of the major cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. And for us, we want to give customers and users the optionality to not just pick and choose which cloud provider they run MongoDB on, but again, in the context of this ubiquitous data layer, they don't have to worry about where it resides, so you can also leverage kind of the best of breed services. Well, I want to build on that for a second, because I think you still have to worry about where it resides. Data locality is still going to be important, but coming back to one of the major trends, it's people talk about the explosion of data. You hear all the time, in the next two years, we're going to create more data than we've created in the entirety of human history. That was five years ago. Which is mind-boggling, but what we often forget is that the number of data sources, the number of data sinks, might even be growing faster than the size of the data. And that the traditional way of thinking about this is, oh, we're going to create all this new data, and we're going to put it in existing databases. The reality is, we're going to create all this new data, and we're going to create a lot of new databases as part of the process. And so in many respects, what you're saying is, there's business problems that naturally have data associated with them, and the style of the application is going to be a really, really important part of the conversation about how to serve this, and that the technologies used to deliver that become essential and strategic decisions from a business standpoint. So, for example, serverless has enormous implications. Talk to us a little bit about Stitch and how MongoDB and serverless are going to come together, because it's going to be a very, very important technology as we look forward. Yeah, it's a great point. I think for us, we obviously worked on MongoDB to be the best modern database, bar none, right? And I think we've more than proven that and achieved that, especially with the announcement of things like multi-document asset transaction support. Even though it's not been a requirement, let's say, for a lot of users and customers to be able to support mission-critical workloads, it ends up being a checkbox. It's just a good technology for a particular style of application. So you're trying to cover all the application bases because that's what a great data platform needs to do. So again, come back to... Yeah, so we grounded on that, and for us, we wanted to take that next evolution, right? So we created MongoDB Stitch, which is our serverless platform, and it allows to basically drive three kind of key functional areas, right? In terms of meeting specific drivers around, again, developer productivity, let's remove a lot of the boilerplate code, all the things that are kind of mundane, kind of low value for developer to build applications. We wanted to make it seamless and easy to integrate, integrate with obviously cloud provider services, integrate with custom APIs and basically webhooks, things along those lines. And then to your point, more around governance and security, make it in a way that, again, customers don't have to worry about security, they don't have to worry about data locality, data resiliency and making sure that where you domicile data is going to be ultimately kind of abstracted out, and all you have to do is define the policies with Stitch, and we take care of that for you, as well as a key capability that we have in Atlas is something called global clusters. It's the ability to have very low latency, high performance capabilities that we can move data closer to the user, and do it in a way... Closer to the activity. Closer to the activity, right? Because again, let's face it, every company is becoming a software company, and it's not tens or hundreds or thousands of users, it's millions of users around the world. So we want to... Billions because a device is also a user from a database. Absolutely, absolutely. So we wanted to move the data as close to the user as possible for the best user experience, but in the same context, be able to adhere to all the strict regulatory compliance, data locality, data sovereignty rules, and kind of requirements that exist. So we have this capability called global clusters with a few single mouse clicks, be able to define a policy, where does data actually reside, and who has access to that data, and again, be able to push it very quickly through any of the three cloud providers onto again, as close to the user as possible. So that's one example of what we've done to handle that. And then for Stitch, our serverless platform, it is really a function of being able to again, let developers create very quickly, increase that time to market, but make it very easy for them to expand and address that global user base. So look, database has goodness to it, right? As you said, governance, security, all that becomes part or parcel of the database, but it also has some associated overhead. Modeling the data in advance, how you actually administer the data, and what you're trying to do is bring the goodness of the database, but reduce some of the traditional administrative headaches associated with database, without losing that goodness. So as we think about the developer, because you also have the developer advocacy hat to wear, what are you doing over the course of next year to take this 7,400 businesses that are using MongoDB in a strategic way to even further expand the role that MongoDB is going to play in building a lot of these new applications? So our perspective on developers, developers are the heart and soul of MongoDB, right? If you think about our founders, they're all developers, and they wanted to actually address and solve this interesting database problem 10 years ago. The hardest thing about building an application was actually working with databases that are from yesteryear, right? Four decades ago, built in a different time and a different place, requirements have obviously changed. So for us, it's really being able to amplify not just the awareness and leveraging the millions of developers that already use MongoDB, but doing it in a way that allows us from a company perspective to kind of share the goodness, right? I truly believe there's no other voice better than the developer and the customer and the user to kind of talk about MongoDB and how they're using it. And if you think about companies like Coinbase, for example, right, a great customer of ours, I mentioned kind of the three systems of engagement and record and insight. They're leveraging Mongo for all of those things, right? And for us, from a developer perspective, we want to make sure developers have options. They're aware of all the choices, but also be able to leverage best of breed in terms of building for today, but kind of future-proofing their work. And experience matters. In the developer world, experience matters. If you do it one way, if you can use a set of tooling to build that application and the tooling can support other applications, continue to do it because it just, it makes you better, makes your development better, makes your practices better, makes your organization better, experience really matters. This is hard stuff we're talking about doing. Yeah, it is. And I think back to the developer point of view, we do want to make it more of a, almost a grassroots, right? As far as making sure we meet with developers and our users out in the community, whether it's through user groups, conferences, events, we sponsor a ton of hackathons. We do a lot of work with the universities because we want to, again, just drive that awareness, but also show them a better way, Peter, because I think everyone's kind of been brainwashed and programmed to think about data from a relational perspective, and there are fine use cases for that right now that we, again, will kind of say, hey, use relational where it makes sense, but it's probably more for, you know, cots, custom off the shelf, or commercial off the shelf systems that are already just embedded, right? Versus if you're really, truly thinking about building modern applications for today's day and age, there is a better way, right? And if you think about what we grounded with the document model, it's the best way, the most natural way, again, to work with data. If you think about how we've handled distributed systems, we've architected MongoDB from the ground up to be, again, globally resilient, scalable, and available. And if you think about now the freedom that we give users to basically run their workloads anywhere with, again, MongoDB running on your laptop, or MongoDB Mobile running on a device, as well as on the mainframe, on-prem in a data center, and now into the cloud, I think this really positions us very strongly in terms of how we view this kind of ubiquitous data layer again, globally, that again, users should not have to worry about working with data, right? You have to jump through hoops in order to worry about where things reside. How do we adhere to things like GDPR and all these, again, data sovereignty and locality issues, and we want it to be as seamless, as easy, and in performant as possible. So for us, that's our mission. All right, so Seng Park, VP of product management, product marketing, and developer advocacy. Thank you very much in talking about how the future, we can think of getting the goodness of database faster. Once again, MongoDB, we will be back shortly with more from theCUBE NYC coverage of new trends in big data and artificial intelligence.