 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles, live production of MongoDB days here in New York City. We go to these events. We extract the signal from the noise, bringing you the best guests that are in the events, and we try to get them to share with you as much knowledge as we can about what's going on at these sessions. About particularly the ecosystem, the technologies, the partnerships that are going on, how practitioners are applying technology to create business capabilities. Matt A.C. is here. He's the Vice President of BizDev and Corporate Strategy at Tengen. Somebody that many of you are familiar with, most recently is blogging for ReadWriteWeb and many, many others, CNET. Been around for numerous companies. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks Dave. Great to see you. Well, first of all, how's the stint going at Tengen? So, I wouldn't use the word stint. I've actually gone through a fair amount of churn the last few years with pre-revenue startups, two of which got acquired, but Tengen feels different. Like it's going to be a company that's going to be here for a long, long time. It's not a stunt. It's not a stint. Not a stint, not a stunt. It's a real company. It's a long-term gig. It's kind of weird, but it's weird, yeah. We have 250 employees we heard today, 100 engineers working on the product. So, you're excited. Yeah, no, things are good. And it's, we're in the fortunate position because of some of the early work and continuing work that the engineering team has done, as well as our community team. I mean, I started to say engineering team and then I realized that it's broader than that, but we're in a fortunate position now where we're the market leader in our category, in no sequel, which brings with it some responsibilities, but also a lot of benefits. The benefits are that we're, in my job, in business development, where I'm working with partners, we're the first no sequel company that they call. And so it's fantastic to be in that position because I've been on the other side where I've worked for the number two or number three player before and that makes life a lot harder as a BizDev person. Well, it was a Jack Welch said you want to be number one or number two in your markets, but you really want to be number one. You want to be number one. So you're number one now, it's a very clear choice. Talk about, so part of your title is Head of Strategy. Summarize, give us the bumper sticker in the strategy, maybe we can unpack it a little bit. Well, I mean, so a lot of what I do on the corporate strategy side is more how do we implement some of the technology strategy that we have and I don't come up with the technology strategy. On the product side though, like I had a conversation in the hall today where we, engineering team has done a great job of building a product that developers love. Enthusiastically across the board, really, really love. We have done a less fantastic job to date on making MongoDB easy to manage within the enterprise. We've made some improvements in that over the last year or so and we will continue to make improvements, but part of the corporate strategy side was going out, talking with customers, saying, hey, where does MongoDB, where is MongoDB great? Where is it not as great? And then taking what we heard and putting that into the product roadmap. And we're doing that now, we're coming out, we've just released backup and we have other tooling improvements that we're doing. Monitoring, just finished as well. Well, monitoring we've had but we're making improvements to monitoring. Tech search is another one. Just things that make it easier to run MongoDB in serious production because that's where we're at right now, is where enterprises are doing that. So you got a toehold, I've been saying all week database used to be boring and now it's like the hottest market going, but so you got a toehold with the leading NoSQL database in a lot of web markets and passionate with developers. And so it sounds like the strategy to expand the TAM is to really do a better job in the enterprise, expanding the maturity or enhancing the maturity of the product and developing relationships with partners who can bring MongoDB to the enterprise. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, no, that's accurate. We've had, some of this was intentional on our part and some of it, frankly, has just been the enterprises have been wanting to use what they saw, Silicon Valley startups and others using, I mean, big data and the NoSQL databases were born on the web, were born and were no different and enterprises have been glomming onto that. And so we've been kind of pulled into the enterprise whether we wanted to or not. Turns out that we really do want to be there. And one of the ways that we're improving our position and it's frankly, I mean, we've got a long ways to go, but we're pretty strong in the enterprise already. We had just in the last six months, we had a hundred organizations paying customers. There's many more that just downloaded the product and used it, but we had a hundred companies come to us and switch off their existing relational database technology, their quote unquote enterprise ready technology and moved to us. We had many more customers that came to us that just for net new applications where they weren't replacing an existing database switched to us, but so that tells me that we're... I don't know if there's a relationship to Oracle announced last night, it's stocks down almost nine percent. I'm not sure you're talking about them specifically, but we've written about that. We don't take credit for all of that. We've written a lot, a lot going on at Oracle, but... Okay, so Matt, I want to ask you, so you were an observer, an independent observer of this space for quite some time. You kind of had to pick at the litter. Why is it that MongoDB has been so successful? What do you attribute that momentum? And I think this was intentional. The engineering team built a product that is super easy for developers to use. Is from what I've heard from people, and I think IBM may have even said this on stage this morning, a pleasure to use. And it's that approachability of the product and the fact then that you get high performance and scale. But I think more than anything else, it's that approachability that has set it apart. There are other NoSQL products that may not have the same range of applicability for different use cases, but there is no other, so far as I know, no other relational or non-relational database that's as easy to use as MongoDB. That more than anything else is what set us up for success. And then we've had the companies had to do a number of other things to build on that success, but that was the start of it. I mean, that ease of dimension is becoming so important. I mean, you certainly see the ease with which developers go to Amazon. We did the ServiceNow event in Las Vegas last month, and the ease with which people can interact with that system. That has so much allure for customers, more so than I've ever seen. Yeah, and that's probably the hardest thing. You can fix problems with scalability. You can fix technical problems in any product. It's very hard to engineer in after the fact, simplicity and ease of use. That's why, I mean, you see with Apple in consumer products, you watch people trying to catch up with Apple by trying to make their products sleek, and they almost miss the point. You can come up with the shell of a product that looks good, but unless it's that you nail that simplicity, it just doesn't take off to the same extent. Again, I think that's something that the engineering team and the community around MongoDB have done fantastically well. In the DNA, it's sort of the big part of the why they started the company. Yeah. So I wonder if we could go back to the topic of kind of getting into the enterprise market. So we know you guys have signed some big time customers and met life. I know Goldman Sachs is here at the conference. So kind of talk about how the partnership strategy aligns with kind of getting further into the enterprise and helping potentially, you mentioned some of the things you got to work on around making MongoDB a little bit easier to manage and some of those more enterprise features. How are the partnerships going to help you do that? And what are some of the real specifics about specific ways these partnerships like IBM are going to improve your ability to get into the enterprise? Sure, that's a good question. So one thing about the enterprise that's not true in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley's new startup is born and they use all the latest, greatest technology. In the enterprise, as you know, they may use some of the latest, greatest technology but they also use the crappiest, oldest, stagiest technology that's been around for 5,000 years. So one of the things that we have to do to really crack the enterprise in earnest is we have to work with the technology that they already have embraced, that legacy technology that's already there. So we've had some things, some partnerships announced recently, whether it's IBM or Informatica, these are some of the leading in their respective Informatica and data integration, IBM, kind of across a range of different product categories. These are the leaders that have long standing relationships within the enterprise. And if the CIO or that director of IT or whoever's making that IT decision, she needs to know that there is support for the tools that she already has within the organization and increasingly we have that support, whether it's, again, IBM, Informatica, we have a few others that will be announced soon. We're working with RadHat on OpenShift which is not legacy technology that's been around forever, but it's another known brand that if a CIO is going to buy into cloud, they're likely to buy from a vendor that they know that they're already doing business with and we've got other things with these and other vendors that we're working on, partners that we're working with. And from a technical perspective, I mean these are, it strikes me that these are real deep partnerships, these are not kind of press release partnerships. So how important, talk a little bit about how important it is to really do the underlying difficult work of integrating with technologies and not just kind of the, we see so many other vendors kind of do the, oh, we've got a partner with this person, we've got a partner with that person, but really, to me, it's really critical to do the work underneath. Yeah, so IBM is a really good example of that. So if we announced, as we did, that IBM is standardizing on the MongoDB wire protocol and query language, and we just kind of leave it at that, well, nobody's going to care. I mean, they're going to care when they read the press release and then they're going to be, frankly, kind of angry when- Well, exactly. And then they're not going to trust the next thing that we do, the next announcement that we make. So that particular partnership has involved not only numerous conversations between the companies, but a lot of deep technical integration that we're doing and that we will continue to do. Another one is Informatica for this, I think maybe the leading data integration product in the enterprise. Again, if that's just a press release and the first time a customer actually goes to, hey, it says that sounds fantastic. I use Informatica. I want to use MongoDB as a data source. I'm going to put the two together. And if it doesn't work, we no longer live in a world where you can have discrete failures that nobody hears about. Because of the internet, everybody hears when things that don't work. And we need that deep technical integration is what makes sure that the first time and the hundredth time that somebody picks up that partner integration and tries to use it, it's what makes sure that they're going to communicate that success on the web. Right, no, I think that's critical, especially in the quote unquote big data space. There's so many companies kind of popping up. And so you see a lot of these announcements about partnerships, but again, I'm impressed with what MongoTengen is doing with really doing the deep partnerships and really making them effective and really valuable for the users. So we talked a bit about some of the more traditional technology vendors out there. What about on the Hadoop side of the equation? How does Mongo and Hadoop live together? And what are you doing on that side of the equation of the partnerships and strategy? So I will start by saying that I think that we need to actually do a lot more there. We are in conversations with the number of the Hadoop vendors to figure out integration. We have built in MapReduce. We have a Hadoop connector that comes out of the box integrated into Tengen. But I think the next phase for us with Hadoop is, again, people are picking sides and they have their chosen Hadoop vendor that they want to work with. We need to make sure that we are integrated with those particular distributions. So whether it's Hortonworks or MapR or EMC slash Pivotal slash whatever they're called today, we need to make sure that we work with their chosen partners. And that's something that frankly, we haven't done that yet. We're in conversations, but we haven't finished that yet. We find the marriage of Hadoop for analytical processing, data processing and MongoDB for storage and that side of it, it's perfect. So it's something that we hear about from customers all the time. So we have a, I guess I would say, it's in our self-interest to make sure that we get that right. And I like, again, the approach, the open approach. You've got to work with all the different flavors and customers have, as you said, their chosen vendor and it's important to give customers their choice. It sounds like that's certainly in your part of your strategy. Matt, can you talk a little bit more about the IBM relationship? In particular, I'm interested in your views on the impact on standards. A lot of people are saying, okay, well, IBM's throwing holy water on Mongo and JSON interface and that's going to drive standards much in the same way as it occurred in Linux when IBM blessed the Linux movement. Is it a valid comparison and what do you see in terms of the impact of that blessing on the standards? So I don't know if you're using the religious terminology because I'm from Utah or not, but I'll go with that. It's holy water. I'm a Catholic, that's what we say. That's what I say. So I think, so in IBM's presentation this morning, they talked about different ways that standards get created. One way is for standards group to get together and sit in, frankly, hotel rooms like we're at here today with no natural lights and come up with what should happen and they said that's one way and it doesn't actually work that well. The other way is for de facto standards to arise and for the vendors to get behind that and they said that actually tends to work a lot better and that they find that they can then help along that standard, like so OpenStack is an example, Linux is an example. Linux was being used before IBM got involved but I remember the day when IBM made the announcement that they were committing a billion dollars to Linux. I was working for a Linux vendor at that time and it completely changed the dynamic of the industry where we went from having to explain why anyone should use Linux to suddenly Linux was like, okay, it's blessed, the holy water. And the same thing has happened with IBM and OpenStack. OpenStack was an interesting and frankly popular project and then IBM got involved and it just ballooned. We're, so coming back to your original question, do we expect that sort of halo effect from IBM on MongoDB? We are hopeful that IBM will, their involvement will continue to make MongoDB super popular. I would say that even more than just the popularity thing, though, what we're excited about with IBM is IBM has been serving the enterprise since Adam and Eve walked in the garden. We're going to continue with the religious network. And that helps us because MongoDB has been serving mostly to date to these kind of up and coming new school developers. We need to solve all the boring problems too of security, auditing, all these sorts of things. And IBM knows those things cold and having their expertise in improving the code and improving the way we think about it, that's, I mean, it's invaluable. So IBM's baptism into the... At some point we're going to have to stop with this. How far can we take this? So my question is, so, and I want to forget and comment, when IBM got into the whole Linux movement, a big part of that was competition with Microsoft because they were getting killed in OS2 and Windows and Mills saw, hey, we're not going to win that battle head-to-head. In fact, interestingly enough, they had just bought Lotus. Right. And then they said, oh, by the way, we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source, that Lou Gehrsten must have loved that. Obviously it paid off. But there was an enemy, if you will. OpenStack, actually, in a similar way, maybe not enemy, maybe a frenemy in VMware, somebody who is sort of, you know, leveraging a lot of the customer. Or Amazon. And certainly Rackspace and OpenStack with Amazon was originally sort of a, we called it, sorry, to keep the pun. We called it at the time of Hail Mary against Amazon. But it ended up being more, I'm sorry, but we ended up being more of a bulwark relative to VMware. And even VMware is now having to hop in there. That's a really whole other interesting talk track. There doesn't seem to be an enemy here. It seems to be more opportunistic, but help us sort of squint through that. So there could be, if I'm IBM, like one of IBM's biggest competitors is Oracle. So this could potentially be seen as being steered toward them. But I don't think it's that narrow. Like, again, on stage today, IBM said, we would welcome Oracle's involvement in this standardization of the MongoDB wire approach. Linux, Oracle, the language behind Linux. No, I mean, IBM, these companies are grownups and they're used to this open source where you both compete and cooperate with each other. So yeah, I don't think that there is any particular enemy here that they're fighting against. And frankly, they're really not fighting against like the enemy of relational database technology. This is actually a way of making the two, the old world of, and the systems of record, we'll say, and to use foresters things, systems of record versus systems of engagement. It's a way of actually making those two worlds mesh really nicely together so that a developer can blend what she knows well from the relational world and these, whether it's a general ledger system or their ERP system or whatever, marry that with the systems of engagement, these mobile applications that she's building. It's actually, I can't really think of who the enemy would be here other than really crappy software. Well, that's good, that's a good enemy. Because Mike Olson, the former now, CEO of Cloudera, is often fond of saying, look, this is incremental. Now, maybe that's just being respectful, Oracle's a big partner, but. I think in Mike's case, that's him just being gracious. Yeah, because. Mike wants to obliterate every one of those. Sure, and so exactly, and so I think that, but that's a question that we ask a lot in SiliconANGLE and Wikibon is, is this really all incremental? Or is the sort of big data tale that's wagging the dog today ultimately going to be the head of the animal? And many people believe that it is. What do you think? So I think we have years, decades maybe, of peaceful, somewhat peaceful coexistence. Like I said, we've had just in the last six months 100 defections from relational database in applications and projects that we've been selling into 100 defections to MongoDB, and those are the ones that we can count. Those are paid customers. And I suspect that that will continue to improve and accelerate, but we're talking about a universe of a $30 billion market of existing applications that's going to continue to grow. There's just so much room to work together on things like this that will we reach a point eventually where NoSQL is completely cannibalizing the relational database market? Maybe. Like I think if you think of it as a Venn diagram or there's overlap between what a relational database and a NoSQL database can do today, but I think the universe of applications that are applicable to a NoSQL database is actually growing faster than, I know it's growing faster than the universe of applications that are suitable for a relational database. Have you seen our forecast on that? I'll have to show it to you. It's interesting, David Floyer did it. And SQL's getting a boost from all this as well, but NoSQL is growing much, much faster. So to the point, part of it is defection and cannibalization and the other part is rising tide lifts all ships. All right, Matt AC, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure speaking with you and thanks for your time. I appreciate it, thank you. All right, keep it right there everybody. Jeff Kelly and I will be back. We're here live at the MongoDB Days event in New York City. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.