 Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here. Day three of CUBE's coverage, two sets wall-to-wall coverage. Third set upstairs in the Executive Briefing Center. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. Two other hosts here, a lot of action. Dave Isacheria here is the CEO of MongoDB, exclusive post on SiliconANGLE for your prior to the event, thanks for doing that. Great to see you. Likewise, thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. So it's great to catch up prior to the event for that exclusive story on ecosystem, your perspective. That resonated with a lot of the people that traffic on that post and comments have been off the charts. I think we're seeing a ecosystem kind of surge and not changeover, but like an and, ISV and new platform. So I really appreciate your perspective. As a platform, ISV for AWS, what's it like? What's this event like? What's your learnings? What's your takeaway from your customers here this year? What's the most important story going on? First of all, I think being here is important for us because we have so many customers and partners here. In fact, if you look at the customers that Amazon themselves announced, about two thirds of those customers are MongoDB customers. So we have a huge overlap in customers here. So just connecting with customers and partners has been important. Obviously, a lot of them are thinking about their plans going to next year. So we're kind of meeting with them to think about what their priorities are and how we can help. And also we're sharing a little bit of our product roadmap in terms of where we're going and helping them think through like how they can best use MongoDB as a thing about their data strategy going to next year. So it's been a very productive event. We have a lot of people here, a lot of salespeople, a lot of product people, and there's tons of customers here. So we can get a lot accomplished in a few days. Dave and I always talk on theCUBE, well Dave always goes to the tan expansion question, expanding your total addressable market. The market is changing and you guys have a great position, growing, positioned. How do you look at the total addressable market for Mongo, changing? Where's the growth going to come from? How do you see your role in the market and how does that impact your current business model? Yeah, our whole goal is to really enable developers to think about MongoDB first when they're building modern applications. So what we've done is first built a first class transactional platform and now we've kind of expanding the platform to do things like search and analytics, right? And so we're really offering a broad set of capabilities. Now our primary focus is the developer and helping developers build these amazing applications and giving them tools to really do so in a very quick way. So if you think about customers like Intuit, customers like Canva, customers like Verizon, AT&T, who are just using us to really transform their business, it's either to build new applications quickly, to do things at a certain level of performance to scale they've never done before, and so really enabling them to do so much more in building these next generation applications that they can't build anywhere else. So I was listening to Bill McDermott this morning and you listen to Bill, you just want to buy from the guy, right? He's amazing. But he's basically saying, look, companies like, he was talking about service now that can help organizations digitally transform, et cetera, but make money or save money are in a good position. And I said, all right, Mongo is definitely one of those companies. One of those conversations like here, I know you've been meeting with customers. It's a different environment right now. There's a lot of uncertainty. I was talking to one of your customers, said, yeah, I'm up for renewal. I love Mongo. I'm going to see if they can stage my payments a little bit, things like that. Are those conversations similar to what you're having? Clearly customers are getting a little bit more prudent, but we haven't seen any kind of like slowdown in terms of deal cycles or elongated sales cycles. I mean, obviously different customers in different sectors are going through different issues. What we are seeing customers think about is like, how can I either drive more efficiency in my business? Like a big part of that is modernization of my existing legacy tech stack. How can maybe consolidate to a fewer set of vendors? I think they like our broad platform story. Rather than using three or four different databases, they can use MongoDB to do everything. So that resonates with customers and the fact that they can move fast, right? Developer productivity is a proxy for innovation. And so being able to move fast to either seize new opportunities or respond to new threats is really top of mind for still so easy level executives. So can your software, I mean, you're right, consolidation is the number one way in which people are saving money. Can your software be deflationary? I mean that in a good way. So I was just meeting with a customer who was thinking about Mongo for their transactional platform, elastic for the search platform and like a graph database for a special use case. And we said, you can do all that on MongoDB. And he's like, oh my goodness, I can consolidate everything, I have one elegant developer interface, I can keep all the data in one place, I can easily access that data. And that makes so much more sense than having to basically use a bunch of piece parts. And so that's what we're seeing more and more interest from customers about. So one of the things I want to get your reaction to is I was saying on theCUBE, now you're going to disagree with me if you want, but in the cloud native world that KubeCon and Kubernetes was going through its hype cycle, the conversation went to it's getting boring and that's good because they want it to be boring. They want people to talk about the runtime and want it to be working. Working is boring, that's invisible, it's good. Sticky, it's done. As you guys have such a great sticky business model, you've got a great install base. Mongo works, people are happy, they like the product. So it's kind of working, I won't say boring because it's relevant. What's the exciting things that Mongo's bringing on top of the existing base of product that is going to really get your clients and prospects enthused about the innovation from Mongo? What's, because it's almost like electricity in a way. You guys are very utility in the way you do, but it's growing. But is there an exciting element coming that you see that they should pay attention to? What's your vision of that? Right, so if you look back over the last 10, 15 years, there's been two big platform shifts, mobile and cloud. I think the next big platform shift is from what I call dumb apps to smart apps. So building more intelligence into applications and what that means is automating human decision-making and embedding that into applications. So we believe that to be a fundamentally a developer problem to solve. Yes, you need data scientists to build the machine learning algorithms to train the models, but ultimately, you can't really deploy it at scale unless you give developers the tools to build those smart applications. That's what we're focused on. And a big part of that is what we call application-driven analytics where people can embed that intelligence into applications so that they can, instead of rather having humans involved, they can make decisions faster, drive their businesses more quickly, shorten time to market, et cetera. And so your strategy to implement those smart apps is to keep targeting the developer and build on that base. Correct, so exactly. So we want to essentially democratize the ability for any customer to use our tools to build those smart applications where they don't have the resources of a Google or a large tech company, and that's essentially resonating with our customer base. We were talking about this earlier after Swamy's keynote. This most companies struggle to put data at the core of their business. And I don't mean centralizing it all in a single place, there's data's everywhere, but really organizing their company and democratizing data so people can make data decisions. So I think what you're saying, essentially Atlas is the platform that you're going to inject intelligence into and allow developers to then build applications that are intelligent, smart, with AI, machine intelligence, et cetera. And that's how the ones that don't have the resources of a Google or an Amazon become that kind of AI company. And that's the whole purpose of a developer data platform, is to enable them to have the tools, to have very sophisticated analytics, to have the ability to do very sophisticated indexes, optimized for analytics, the ability to use data lakes for very efficient storage and retrieval of data, to leverage edge devices to be able to capture and synchronize data. These are all critical elements to build these next generation applications. And you have to do that, but you don't want to stitch together 1,000 primitives, you want to have a platform to do that. And that's where we really focus. You know, Dave and I, three, two days. Dave and I, Dave Vellante and I have been talking a lot about developer productivity. And one observation that's now validated is that developers are setting the pace for innovation. And if you look at how they, the language that they speak, it's not the same language as security departments. They speak almost like different languages, developer and security, and then you got data language, but the developers are making choices of itself service, they can accelerate, they're driving the behavior into the organizations. This is one of the things I wrote about on Friday last week, was the organizational changes are changed because the developer is setting the pace. You can't force tooling down their throat. They're going to go with what's easy, what's workable. If you believe that to be true, then all the security is going to be in the developer pipeline. All the innovation to be driven off that high velocity developer cycle is seeing success of security being embedded there with the developers. What are you going to bring up to that developer layer that's going to help with security, help with maybe even new things? Right, so, you know, it's almost a cliche to say now, software is eating the world, right? Because every company's value proposition driven by software is either enabled to find or created through software. What that really means is that developers are eating all the work, right? And you're seeing, you saw in DevOps, right? Where developers basically encroach in the ops world and made infrastructure a programmable interface. You see developers to your point, encroaching in security, embedding more and more security features into their applications. We believe the same thing's going to happen with data scientists and business analysts where developers are going to embed that functionality that was done by different domains in the analytics world and embed that capability into apps themselves. So these applications are just naturally smarter. So you don't need someone to look at a dashboard and say, aha, there's some insight here. Now I need to go make a decision. The application will do that for you and actually make that decision for you so you can move that much more quickly to run your business either more efficiently or to drive more, you know, revenue. Well, interesting thing about your business is because, you know, you've got a lot of transactional activity going on and the data, the way I would say what you just described is that the data stack and the application stacks are coming together, right? And you're in a really good position, I think, to really affect that. You think about we've operationalized so many systems. We really haven't operationalized our data systems. And particularly as you guys get more into analytics, it becomes an interesting road map for Mongo and your customers. How do you see that? Yeah, so I want to be clear. We're not trying to be a data warehouse. We're not trying to be like, you know, go compete. In fact, we have a nice partnership with Databricks and so forth. What we're really trying to do is enable developers to instrument and build these applications that embed analytics. Like a good analogy I'd use is like Google Maps. You think about how sophisticated Google Maps has, and I use that because everyone has used Google Maps. Like in the old, I was old enough to print out the directions. Map quest. Yeah, exactly. Put it on my lap and drive and look down. Now it's this device that tells me, you know, if there's a traffic, if there's an accident, if there's something, you know, I will reroute me automatically. And what that app is doing is embedding real time data into its decision making and making the decision for you so that you don't have to think about which route to take. You're going to see that happen across almost every application of the next X number of years where these applications are going to become so much smarter and make these decisions for you so you can just move so much more quickly. Dave, talk about the company, what status of the company, your growth plans. Obviously you're seeing a lot of news. Salesforce's co-CEO just resigned. Layoffs at CNN, layoffs at DoorDash. You know, tech unfortunately is not impacted. Thank God, not too bad. Certainly in cloud's not impacted. It is impacting some of the buying behavior. We talked about that. What's going on with the company? Headcount, what's your goals? How's the team doing? What are your priorities? Right, so we're going after a big, big opportunity. You know, we recognize obviously the market's a little choppy right now, but a long term we're very bullish on the opportunity. We believe that we can be the modern developer data platform to build these next generation applications. In terms of cost, we're obviously being a little bit more judicious about where we're investing, but we see big, big opportunities for us. And so our overall cost base will grow next year, but obviously we also recognize that there's ways to drive more efficiency. We're at a scale now. We're a $1.2 billion business. We're going to announce our Q3 results next week. So we'll talk a little bit more about what we're seeing in the business next week. But we think we're a business that's growing fast. You know, we grew, you know, over 50%, and so we're a pretty fast growing business. Yeah, Tuesday, December 6th, you guys announced it. Of course it's a big, we always watch and love it. So what I'm hearing is you're not stepping on the brakes. You're still accelerating growth, but not at all costs. Correct. The term we're using is profitable growth. We want to, you know, drive the business in a way that we think continues to seize the opportunity, but we also, we've always exercised discipline. You know, I'm old enough where I had to deal with 2000 and 2008, so, you know, I'm not 28 and have not seen these markets. And so, obviously some of our, you know, emerging leaders have not seen these kinds of markets before, so we're kind of helping them think about how to continue to be disciplined and- I like that reference to 2000.com bubble in the financial crisis of 2008. I mentioned this to you when we chatted. I'd love to get your thoughts now looking back for re-invent. Amazon wasn't a force in 2008. They weren't really that big debt yet. No economic impact, agility wasn't itting. They didn't hit that cruising altitude of the value properties of the cloud. Agility, time to value, moving fast. Now they are. So, this is the first time that they're a part of the economic equation. You're in the middle of it with Amazon. They could be a catalyst to recover faster if planned properly. What's your CEO take on, just that general, and other CEOs might be watching and saying, hey, you know, if I play this right, I can leverage the cloud. You know, Adam says, leading to the cloud during the recession. But specifically, there might be a tactic. What's your view on that outlook? I mean, what we're seeing the hyperscalers do is really continue to kind of compete at the raw infrastructure level, on storage, on compute, on network performance, on security, to provide the kind of the building blocks for companies like MongoDB to really build on. So we're leveraging that price performance curve that they're pushing. You know, they obviously talked about Graviton 3. They're talking about their training model chip sets and their inference model chip sets and the security chip sets, which is great for us because we can leverage those capabilities to build upon that. And I think, you know, if you had asked me, you know, in 2008, would we be talking about chip sets in 2022? I'd probably say, oh, we're way behind that. But what it really speaks to is those things are still so profoundly important. And I think that's where you can see Amazon and Google and Microsoft compete to provide the best underlying infrastructure where companies like MongoDB can build upon and we can help customers leverage that to really build the next generation application. I'd say it's 2008 all over again, but we have data from 2008. That was the first major tailwind for the cloud. When the CFO said, we're going from CapEx to OpEx. So we saw that. Now it's a lot different now. It's a lot more mature. I think there's a fine tuning trend going on where people are right sizing, fine tuning, whatever you want to call it. But a craft is coming, a trade craft of cloud management, cloud optimization, managing the cost structures, tuning. It's a crafting, it's more of a craft. It kind of seems like we're in that era. Yeah, I would call it cost optimization. That people are looking to say like, I know I'm going to invest, but I want to be rational and more thoughtful about where I invest and why and with whom I invest with versus just like everyone getting a 30% increase in their OpEx budgets every year. I don't think that's going to happen. And that's where we feel like it's going to be an opportunity for us. We've kind of hit escape velocity. We've got the developer mind share. We have 37,000 customers of all shapes and sizes across the world and that customer crown is only growing. So we feel like we're a place where people are going to say, I want to standardize on MongoDB. Yeah, and Salips got a great quote in his keynote. He said, if you want to save money, the place to do it is in the cloud. Tighten the belt. Which belt are you tightening? The marketplace belt, the supplier belt? We had a whole session on that. Tighten your belt thing. David, chair, CEO of a billion dollar company, MongoDB continue to grow and grow and continue to innovate. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and thanks for participating in our stories. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it here. Okay, I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante live on the show floor we'll be right back with our final interview of the day after this short break, day three coming to close. Stay with us, we'll be right back.