 Hi, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here for a special exclusive conversation with David DeGiria, the CEO of MongoDB, MongoDB well-established leading platform been around for, I mean, decades. So continues to become the platform of choice for high performance data. This modern data stack that's emerging a big part of the story here at AWS re-invent 2022 on top of an already performing AWS cloud with chips and silicon specialized instances. The world's going to be getting faster, smaller, higher performance, lower cost specialized. Dave, thanks for taking the time with me today. John, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Do you see yourself as an ISV or you just go with that because that's kind of a nomenclature. When I think of the term ISV, I think of the notion of someone building an end solution for a customer to get something done. What we're building is essentially a developer data platform. And we have thousands of ISVs who built software applications on our platform. So how could we be an ISV? Because by definition, I know we enable people to do so many different things. And they can be the largest companies in the world trying to transform their business or startups who are trying to disrupt either existing industries or create new ones. And that's how our customers, you, MongoDB and the whole Atlas platform basically enables them to do some amazing things. The reason for that is we believe that what we are enabling developers to do is be able to reduce the friction and the work required to build modern applications through the document model, which is really intuitive to the way developers think and code through the distributed nature of platforms. So things like sharding, no other company on the planet offers the capabilities we do to enable people to build the most highly-performant and scalable applications. And also, what we also do is enable people to run different types of workflows on our platform. So we have obviously transactional, we have search, we have time series. We enable people to do things like sophisticated device synchronization from edge to the backend. We do graph, we do real-time analytics. So being able to consolidate all that with developers on one elegant unified platform really makes it attractive for developers to build on MongoDB. You know, you guys are a feature partner of AWS and I would speculate, I don't know if you can comment on this, but I would imagine that you probably produce a lot of revenue for Amazon because you really can't turn off EC2 when you do a database work. So, you know, you're kind of cranking all the time. You guys are a top partner. How long have you guys been a partner with AWS? What's the relationship? The relationship has been strong. Actually, Amazon spoke at one of our first user conferences in 2013 and since then we've been working together. We've been at re-invent since essentially 2015 and we've been a premier partner, an emerald sponsor for the last, you know, I think four or five years. And so we're very committed to the relationship. And I think there's some things that we have a lot, we have a lot of things in common. We care a lot about customers and for us, our customers, our developers, we care a lot about removing friction from their day-to-day work to be able to move fast and be able to, in order to seize new opportunities and respond to new threats. And so consequently, I think the partnership, obviously by nature of our common objectives has really come together. How about the journey of Mongo? I mean, you look back at the history and you go back to the old Lamstack days, right? So, you know, the developer traction is just really kind of second to none. It means it's really well-known. And I remember over the conversations day, Mongo doesn't scale. I mean, every year we heard something along those lines because it just kept scaling. I heard the same thing with AWS back in 2013 timeframe. You know, it's just, it's really not for a real prime time. It's for hobbyists, not so much builders, maybe startup cloud, but that developer traction is translated. Can you take us through the journey of Mongo, where it is now and kind of look back and take us through what's the state of the art now? Right, so just for those of you, those in your audience who don't know too much about Mongo, it could be, I'll just start with the background. The company was founded by developers. It was basically the CTO and some key developers from DoubleClick who really saw the challenges and the limitations of the relational database architecture because they're trying to serve billions of ads per day and they constantly need to work around the constraints of the relational database. And so they essentially decided, why don't we just build a database that we'd want to use? And that was the catalyst to start MongoDB. The first thing they focused on was rather than having a tabular data structure, they focused on a document data structure. Why documents? Because it's much more natural and intuitive to work with data and documents in terms of you can set parent-child relationships and how you just think about the relational data as much more natural in a document than trying to connect data in hundreds of different tables. And so that enabled developers to just move so much faster. The second thing they focused on was building a truly distributed architecture, not kind of some adjunct architecture that maybe made the existing architecture a little bit more scalable. They really took from the ground up a truly distributed architecture. So where you can do native replication, you can do sharding and you can do it on a global basis. And so that was the other profound thing that they did. And then since then, what we've also done is the document model is truly a super set of other models. So we enabled other capabilities like search. You can do join, so you can do very transaction intensive use case of MongoDB where fully asset compliant. So you have the highest forms of data guarantees. You can do very sophisticated things like time series. You can do device synchronization. You can do real-time analytics because we can carve off read-only nodes to be able to read and query data in real-time rather than have to offload that data into a data warehouse. And so that enables developers to just build a wide variety of application MongoDB and they get one unified developer interface. It's highly elegant and seamless. And so essentially the cost and tax of managing multiple point tools goes away. When I think of the term ISV, I think of the notion of someone building an end solution for a customer to get something done. What we're building is essentially a developer data platform and we have thousands of ISVs who built software applications on our platform. So how could we be an ISV? Because by definition, we enable people to do so many different things. And they can be the largest companies in the world trying to transform their business or startups who are trying to disrupt either existing industries or create new ones. And so that's how our customers view MongoDB and the whole Atlas platform basically enables them to do some amazing things. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of activity on the Atlas. Do you see yourself as an ISV or you just go with that because that's kind of a nomenclature? No, we don't view ourselves as an ISV at all. We view ourselves as a developer data platform. And the reason for that is we believe that what we're enabling developers to do is be able to reduce the friction and the work required to build modern applications through the document model, which is really intuitive the way developers think and code through the distributed nature of platforms. So things like sharding, no other company on the planet offers the capabilities we do to enable people to build the most highly performant and scalable applications. And also what we also do is enable people to run different types of workflows on a platform. So we have obviously transactional, we have search, we have time series. We enable people to do things like sophisticated device synchronization from edge to the backend. We do graph, we do real time analytics. So being able to consolidate all that with developers on one elegant unified platform really makes it attractive for developers to build on long ADB. You know, the cloud adoption really is putting a lot of pressure on these systems. And we're seeing companies in the ecosystem and AWS stepping up, you guys are doing a great job. We're seeing a lot more acceleration around IT staying on premise for certain use cases yet you got the cloud as well growing for workloads and you get this hybrid steady state as an operational mode. I call that kind of the classic cloud adoption track record. You guys are an example of multiple iterations in cloud. You're doing a lot more. We're starting to see this tipping point with others and customers coming kind of on that same pattern. Building platforms on top of AWS on top of the primitives, more horsepower, higher level services, industry specific capabilities with data. I mean, this is a new kind of cloud kind of a next generation, you know, AWS next gen, you got the classic high performance infrastructure is getting better and better. But now you've got this new application platform, you know, reminds me of the old ASP days, you know if you will. I mean, so are you seeing customers doing things differently? Can you share your reaction to this role of, you know this new kind of SaaS platform that just isn't an application? It's more, it's deeper than that. What's going on here? We call it super cloud. But like what are you doing? Yeah, so essentially what, you know a lot of our customers doing, and by the way we have over 37,000 customers of all shapes and sizes from the largest companies in the world to cutting edge startups who are building applications in MongoDB. Why did they choose MongoDB? Because essentially it's the, you know the fastest way to innovate. And the reason it's the fastest way to innovate is because they can work with data so much easier than working with data on other types of architecture. So the document model is profoundly a breakthrough way to work with data and make it very, very easy. So customers are essentially building these modern applications, you know applications built on microservices, event driven architectures, you know addressing sophisticated use cases like time series to and then ultimately now they're getting into machine learning. We have a bunch of companies building machine learning applications on top of MongoDB. And the reason they're doing that is because one they get the benefits of being able to, you know build and work with data so much easier than any other platform. And it's highly scale and perform in a way that no other platform is. So literally they can run their, you know workloads both locally and one, you know autonomous zone or they can basically be or available zone or they could be basically, you know anywhere in the world. And we also offer multi-file capabilities which I can get into later. Let's talk about the performance side. I know I was speaking with some Amazon folks every year. It's the same story. They're really working on the physics and getting the chips. They want to squeeze as much energy out of that. I've never met a developer that said they want to run their workload on a slower platform or slower hardware. We know it said no developer, right? No one wants to do that. Correct. You guys have a lot of experience tuning in with Graviton instances. We're seeing a lot more AWS EC2 instances. We're seeing a lot more kind of integrated end to end stories. Data is now security. It's tied into data stacks or data at modern kind of the data hybrid stack. A lot going on around the hardware performance specialization, the role of data kind of a modern data stack emerging. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think if you had asked me when the cloud started going both like the later part of the last decade and told me sitting here 12, 15 years later, would we be talking about chip processing speeds? I would probably thought, nah, we had to move down by then. But what's really clear is that customers, to your point, customers care about performance. They care about price performance, right? So AWS's investments in Graviton, we have actually deployed a significant portion of our Atlas fleet on Amazon, now runs on Graviton. They built other chipsets like Tranium and Inferentia for training models and running inferences. They're doing things like Nitro. And so what that really speaks to is that the cloud providers are focusing on the price performance of their, as you call it, their primitives and their infrastructure and the infrastructure layer that are still very, very important. And if you look at their revenue, about 60 to 70% of the revenue comes from that pure infrastructure. So to your point, they can't offer a second class solution and still win. So given that now they're seeing a lot of competition from Azure, Azure's building their own chipsets, Google's already obviously doing that and building specialized chipsets for machine learning. You're seeing these cloud providers compete. So they have to really compete to make their platform the most performant, the most price competitive in the marketplace, which gives us a great platform to build on to enable developers to build these incredibly highly performant applications that customers are now demanding. I think that's a really great point. I mean, it's so funny, Dave, because I remember those, we don't talk speeds and feeds anymore. We're not talking about boxes. I mean, that's all kind of school thinking because it was a data center mentality, speeds and feeds. And that was super important. But we're kind of coming back to that in the cloud and now in distributed architecture as you put your platforms out there for developers, you have to run fast. You gotta, you can't give the developer a subpar or any kind of performance system. They'll go somewhere else. I mean, that's the reality of what developers, no one, again, no one says I want to go on the slower platform unless it's some sort of policy based on price or some sort of thing, but for the most part, it's gotta run fast. So you got the tail of two clouds going on here. You got Amazon Classic. IaaS keep making it faster under the hood. And then you got the new abstraction layers and the higher level services. That's where you guys are bridging this new, new generational shift where it's like, hey, you know what? I can go, I can run a headless application. I can run a SaaS app that's refactored with data. So you see a lot more innovation with developers, you know, running stuff in the CICD pipeline that was once IT. And you're seeing security and data operations kind of emerging as a structural change of how companies are transforming on the business side. What's your reaction to that business transformation and the role of the developer? Right, so, I mean, I have to obviously give amazing kudos to the, you know, to AWS and the Amazon team for what they built. Obviously, they're the ones that kind of created the cloud industry and they continue to push the innovation in the space. I mean, today they have over 300 services and, you know, obviously, you know, no startup today is building anything not on the cloud because they have so many building blocks to start with. But what we though have found from talking to our customers is that in some ways there is still, you know, the onus is on the customer to figure out which building block to use to be able to stitch together the applications and solutions they want to build. And what we have done is taken essentially an opinionated point of view and said, we will enable you to do that, you know, using one data model, you know, Amazon today offers, I think, 17 or 18 different types of databases. We don't think like, you know, having a tool for every job makes sense because over time, the tax and cost of learning, managing and supporting those different applications just don't make a lot of sense or just become cost prohibitive. And so we think offering one data model, one, you know, elegant user experience, you know, one way to address the broadest set of use cases is that we think it's a better way, but clearly customers have choice. They can use Amazon's primitives and those second layer services as you described, or they can use us. And fortunately, we've seen a lot of customers come to us with our approach. And so does Amazon and I have to give, obviously again, Kudos and Amazon is very customer obsessed. And so we have a great relationship with them, both technically in terms of the product integrations we do, as well as working with them in the field, you know, on joint customer opportunities. Speaking of it, while you mentioned it, I wanna just ask you, how is that marketplace relationship going with AWS? Some of the partners are really seeing great economic and cross-selling, joint selling, or them selling your stuff. So there's a real revenue pop there in that religion. Can you comment on that? So we had been working the partner in the marketplace for many years now, more from a field point of view where customers could leverage their existing commitments to AWS and leverage essentially, you know, using Atlas and applying Atlas towards their commits. There was also some sales incentives for people in the field to basically work together so that, you know, everyone one should we collectively win a customer. What we've recently announced is this pay as you go initiative where literally a customer on the Amazon marketplace can basically turn up, you know, an Atlas instance with no commitment. So I think it's so easy. So we're just pushing the envelope to just reduce the friction for people to use Atlas on AWS. And it's working really, really well. The uptake has been very strong. And we feel like we're just getting started because we're so excited about the results we're seeing. You know, one of the things that's kind of not core in the keynote theme, but I think it's underlying messages clear in the industry is the developer productivity. You said making things easy is a big deal. Self-service, getting in and trying. These are what developer friendly tools are like in platform. So I have to ask you, because this comes up a lot in our kind of business conversation, is if you take digital transformation concept to its completion, assuming now, you know, as a thought exercise, you completely transform a company with technology. That is the business transformation outcome. Take it to completion. What does that look like? I mean, if you go there, you can say, okay, the company is the app. The company is the data. It's not a department serving the business. It's the business. And so I think this is kind of what we're seeing as the next big mountain decline, which is companies that do transform there. They are technology companies. They're not a department like IT. So I think a lot of companies are kind of saying, wait a minute, why would we have a department? It should be the company. What's your view on this? Because this is- Yeah, so I've had the good fortune of being able to talk to a thousand customers all over the world. And you know, one thing, John, they never tell me. They never tell me that they're innovating too quickly. In fact, they always tell me the reverse. They tell me all the obstacles and impediments they have to be able to move fast. So one of the reasons they gravitate to MongoDB is just the speed that they wish they can build applications to your point, developer productivity. And by definition, developer productivity is a proxy for innovation. The faster you can make your developers move, the faster they can push out code, the faster they can iterate and build new solutions or add more capabilities on the existing applications, the faster you can innovate, either to, again, seize new opportunities or to respond to new threats in your business. And so that resonates with every C-level executive. And to your point, the developer is not some side hustle that they kind of think about once in a while. It's core to the business. So developers have amassed enormous amount of power and influence. Their engineering teams are front and center in terms of how they think about building capabilities and building their business. And that's also obviously enabled, to your point, every software company, every company is now becoming a software company because it all starts with software. Software enables, defines or creates almost every company's value proposition. Makes me smile because I love operating systems. It's one of my hobbies in college was that systems programming. And I remember those, now we're kind of like the operating systems, the cloud. So everything's got specialized capabilities. Now that's a big theme here at re-invent. If you look at the announcements Monday night with Peter DeSanto, so you got new instances, new chips. So this whole engine kind of specialized components is like an engine. You got a core and you got other subsystems. This is going to be an integral part of how companies architect their platform or Adam calls it the landing zone or whatever they want to call it. But you got to start seeing a new architectural thinking for companies. What's your, can you share your experience on how companies should look at this opportunity as a plethora of more goodness on the hardware of art? But like chips and instances, because now you can mix and match. You got everything you need to kind of, not roll your own, but like really build foundational high performance capabilities. Yeah, so I think this is where I think Amazon is really enabling all companies, including companies like MongoDB, push the envelope and innovation. So for example, the next big hurdle for us, I think we've seen two big platform shifts over the last 15 years of platform shifts to mobile and the platform shift to cloud. I believe the next big platform shift is going from dumb apps to smart apps, which you're building in machine learning and AI and just very sophisticated automation. And when you start automating human decision-making rather than looking at a dashboard and saying, okay, I see the data now and now I have to do this, you can automate that into your applications and make your applications leveraging real-time data become that much more smart. And that ultimately then becomes a developer challenge. And so we feel really good about our position and taking advantage of those next big trends and software leveraging the price performance curves that Amazon continues to push in terms of their hardware performance, networking performance, price performance and storage to build those next generation of modern applications. Okay, so let me get this straight. You have next generation intelligent smart apps and you have AI generative solutions coming out around the corner. This is like pretty good position for MongoDB with data. I mean, this is what you do. You're in that center of the action. What's it like? I mean, you must be like, trying to shake the world and wake up. The world's starting to wake up now through this. So what's it like? Well, I mean, we're really excited and bullish about the future. We think that we're well positioned because we know as to your point, we have a massed amazing amount of developer mindshare. We are the most popular modern data platform out there in the world. And there's developers in almost every corner of the planet using us to do something. And to your point, leveraging data and these advances in machine learning AI, we think the more AI becomes demarcatized, not done by a bunch of data scientists sitting in some corner office, but essentially enabling developers to have the tools to build these very sophisticated smart applications and we'll position as well. So that's obviously gonna be a focus for us over the, frankly, I think this is gonna be like a 10 year, 10, 15 year run and we're just getting started in this whole area. I think you guys are really well positioned. I think that's a great point. And Adam mentioned to me in my interview he said on stage talk about it, that the role of a data analyst kind of goes away. Everyone's a data analyst. They'll still see specialization on core data engineering, which is kind of like an SRE role for data. So data ops and data as code is a big deal making data applications. So again, exciting times and you guys are well positioned. If you had to bumper sticker the event this week here at re-invent, what would you, how would you categorize this point in time? I mean, Adam's a great leader. He's gonna help educate customers, how to use technology to for business advantage and transformation. You know, Andy did a great job making technology great and innovative and setting the table. Adam's gotta bring it to the enterprises and businesses. So it's gonna be an interesting point in time. How would you categorize this year's re-invent? Right, I think the tech world is pivoting towards what I'd call rationalization or cost optimization. I think people obviously in the last 10 years have, you know, it's all about speed, speed, speed. And I think people still value speed, but they wanna do it at some sort of predictable cost model. And I think you're gonna see a lot more focus around cost and cost optimization. That's where we think having one platform is by definition of vendor consolidation and way for people to cut costs so that they can basically, you know, still move fast, but don't have to incur the tax of using a whole bunch of different point tools. And so we think we're well positioned. So the bumper sticker I think about is essentially, you know, do more for less with MongoDB. Yeah. And the developers on the front lines, great stuff. You guys are great partner, a top partner at AWS in great reflection on where you guys been, but really where you are now. Great opportunity, David to cheer. Thank you so much for spending the time. And it's been great following Mongo and the continued rise of developers on the front lines really driving the business. And they are kind of driving the business. So, and I think they're gonna continue smart apps, intelligent apps, AI generative apps are coming. I mean, this is real. Thanks, John. It's great speaking with you. Thanks, thanks so much. Okay.