 Wikibon.org, and this is theCUBE, where we extract the signal from the noise. We bring you the best guests at these events. We're here at the MongoDB Days Conference in New York City. Max Shearson is here. He's the CEO of TenGen, of course TenGen is the company that is building out the ecosystem around MongoDB. Max, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me, and thanks for coming to our conference, Dave. Yeah, I appreciate you guys having us here and heard great keynote this morning from the deputy mayor. I'm here with my co-host as well, Jeff Kelly. So, Max, in the keynote, we heard a lot about what's going on in the ecosystem. The mayor talked about New York. You guys are here, New York base, let's start there. New York has surpassed Boston as the number two region in the country for venture capital. I'm from Boston. It makes me a little sad, but it's not surprising. A lot of action down here, largely coming from industries that are transforming. Talk about that a little bit, and what New York means to TenGen? Sure, so the company was founded in New York. The founders of TenGen came out of DoubleClick. And they were in New York, they love New York. You can't take a New Yorker out of New York. People love New York or they hate it and they love it. So the company was going to be here, and it's actually worked out phenomenally well. There's just been a great labor pool for us in New York. I think New York has had a lot of momentum in technology as technology has intersected so many traditional businesses and disrupted them that the combination of technical skills with people who understood businesses from publishing to fashion to finance that were being disrupted by technology to media and advertising has really led to a growth of technology in New York. That said, most of the technology is at an application, services on the internet type of layer. I think TenGen and MongoDB are not typical of the type of companies that you find in New York but in working at a deep systems infrastructure level. But we've been very, very happy with the labor pool, I think the energy and the vibrancy, the diversity of New York makes it a great place for us to be located. The timing's been phenomenal for Mongo and TenGen. They say they got a combined skill with a little bit of luck. The combination of just the explosion of data, unstructured data, this whole, what's now called the big data meme, you guys started before people were talking about big data. But the database business, which you're very familiar with, you've been in the business for a long time, used to be with Oracle. Used to be 10 years ago, database business was kind of boring. You go to a party, hey, the database business, okay, see you later. And now it's like the hottest segment going. It reminds me of the late 80s, early 90s, all kinds of jockeying for position. And Mongo really has rocketed. So what do you attribute that early success? Yeah, I think that the founders really got the basic product concept right. I think what people have been looking for is a database which is more agile than the relational database and which is more scalable, works well in cloud style, scale out architectures. And neither of those was a natural fit for the relational database that was invented in 1970 for a very different set of requirements. So I think it'll have a big, big place in the industry for many years to come. But people are realizing that many of the problems they're solving now need a different type of technology. And I think Dwight and Elliot really hit on the technology that people were looking for. Let's unpack those problems a little bit. Pun intended, I guess. Do a double click on that. Help us understand some of those problems. Why the traditional RDBMS is not as well suited to solve the problems that you guys are addressing and maybe talk about some of the customers that you have. Sure, so over the last decade in particular, a lot has changed about the way people develop software and the type of software that they're developing. Where most applications used to be internal, now a large portion of applications go out and touch organizations, customers. And a much more intimate part of their business is involved in technology. They're doing development in a more rapid, agile, iterative approach. It's not a matter of take two years, build this application and then you're done with it or you'll take another two years to revamp it. They want to revise their applications weekly or in some cases daily. Often the target platform is mobile going out to millions of users and the data that they're working with is not just the regular rows and columns of numbers in a spreadsheet that the relational database was designed for decades ago doing payroll, doing accounts receivable, doing accounts payable, but it's dealing with social media, dealing with user generated content, dealing with integration of a lot of different data and bringing that together and the flexibility of the data model of MongoDB and the built in scale out capabilities just fit so well with those trends. Yeah, Jeff Kelly, you were in San Francisco this week and the whole internet of things, the industrial internet, that's even just going to generate more data but what's your take on all this? Sure, well of course with machines becoming intelligent and sensor technology just creating more and more data and often you're going to want to surface that data in applications such as the type of applications that you can support with MongoDB. So Max, I wonder if we could dig in a little bit to the, you know, we hear a lot from developers that we love working with Mongo, it's a really simple, easy developer environment. Can you explain a little bit more, dig in a little bit, what makes Mongo so popular with developers specifically? What makes it easy to use or easy to develop applications with Mongo? Sure, so the biggest difference between MongoDB and the relational databases that people are used to is the data model. In a relational database, the basic unit that you work with is called a row and it's a fixed set of fields, fixed quantity and fixed what they are. And so to model the variability of real world data, you have to bring together many different tables, many different rows and somehow create a fusion between them and there's functionality in a relational database to support that, but there's some complexity associated with it. In MongoDB, the fundamental unit of storage is what we call a document, which can have hierarchy, which can have repeating groups, something like an order can be a single document in MongoDB, whereas in a relational database, that logical item of an order winds up being split across dozens to in some cases over 100 different tables to accommodate the variety of different information that can be a part of an order. So that's just an order of magnitude simplification for developers and the work they have to do to interface with the database. And I wanted to turn to some of the customer winds you've had recently. So again, we know that with web startups and mobile startups, Mongo is very popular, but we're seeing you start to gain some traction in some more, I guess, what you call traditional industries, financial services. I know you've established a financial services advisory group really to explore how NoSQL can make a positive impact in the financial services industry, MetLife, Goldman Sachs, and others involved in that effort. Talk a little bit about how you're kind of targeting the enterprise in general, financial services in particular, and what is TenGen doing to make Mongo, quote unquote, harden for the enterprise? Sure, so as we evolve, and in addition to the web companies, both the startups and the e-bays and larger established leaders on the web, we move into traditional main street businesses, financial services, telecommunications, government. There are some of the requirements have a different prioritization in those industries. So things like security rank higher for a bank maybe than they do for some web companies. Things like manageability and operations rank higher. So it's all functionality that all of our users benefit from, but we've accelerated the development of things like security and auditing and monitoring and backup and some of the operational tools, monitoring that the larger enterprises find important. Yeah, some of the basic blocking and tackling. We heard you talk about that earlier today. You guys are, if you stay at the MongoDB days at the end, you're going to lay out the roadmap a little later on and I don't know, maybe you can show us a little leg in this session. I wanted to turn attention, so we're in New York City and of course the big talk of the last two days, the market is going crazy, Bernanke's statements that the economy's getting better because send the markets diving, well there you go. But Oracle announced last night, it's now a couple of quarters where we're seeing some bumpiness. SiliconANGLE reported the relationship between the open source, the new style of database movement and some of Oracle's woes. Do you buy that premise and what are your thoughts on some of the sort of traditional legacy infrastructures out there? How do you see that changing over time? Sure, I think there's a reinvention of enterprise infrastructure underway that's driven by a number of factors. One is the move to new styles of deployment, cloud style deployment, commodity hardware is one of the factors. People look for new types of technology infrastructure, people are becoming much more open not just to cloud deployment of technology but to SaaS based offerings. So I think the pressure on the traditional enterprise technology players comes from a mix of software as a service on the application side and then open source on the technology side that's driven by I think both technology shifts, people getting more comfortable with cloud deployments as well as people looking for improved economics. They've been a relatively small group of providers on the enterprise side. Generally with fairly high price points it's great for the shareholders to drive tens of billions of dollars of revenue at 50 plus percent margins but eventually customers start looking for alternatives that are both going to be more functional, more agile and more cost effective. Well and certainly I guess with Oracle's acquisition of Sun they've got some inherent incentives now to sell more hardware. IBM obviously sells a lot of hardware. Microsoft really doesn't but essentially if you think of those companies as software companies just for a moment why not commoditize the hardware? I mean that would be in their best interest wouldn't it and put more function into the software. So over time don't they have to transform? I mean maybe come to you and say hey Max there's a billion dollars you want to buy your company and then act like they invented the whole space. Will the old line sort of legacy software companies be able to respond and transform or do you expect this is a whole new wave of leaders that we're going to see? What's your take on that? I think one of the challenges for the traditional enterprise companies in really embracing this technology is the open source nature of most of the innovation in the database space recently and that creates a bit of an innovator's dilemma where the pricing at which we sell is not real appealing to an Oracle for example and so I think it'll be a challenge for them to figure out to what extent do you embrace the new technology paradigm versus to what extent do you try to protect your price points? Well on some guys I always joke it's Lou Gerson's line but IBM is a recovering alcoholic relating to open source software and of course you guys just did a deal with IBM and so you have some of these old line companies that have proven that they can make money in open source and Oracle's never been a big purveyor of open source software so some will make that transition some will not is that essentially what you're saying? Absolutely we've been really excited about the work that we've been doing with IBM we were excited about the energy and focus that they've put behind working with us and we've seen IBM follow that through to great success for example with Linux. IBM also was a big part of the development of the relational database, they invented and got behind the SQL standard and became a big player in the market with Oracle probably as the leader in that space so we're excited to have IBM join us in this space we think IBM entering a market like this potentially pretends a big future for the market. Is it your SQL moment? With JSON? It's got to be really excited about that. It is. So kind of wrapping up just one if you can give us kind of an update on the company you mentioned your keynote I think you've got up to maybe over 100 engineers now working on the product there's 250 people in the company total give us a quick update on the company and kind of where you stand there. Sure. So the company's been growing very quickly in the last two and a half years we've gone from 20 a few employees to 250 odd. I talked to our class of interns this year and it was the size of the company when I joined two and a half years ago so it's been a lot of growth and it's really been in response to the tremendous surge in usage of MongoDB so we're trying to grow to be able to service those people who are using MongoDB and to be able to build out MongoDB for that diverse set of requirements so we anticipate strong continued growth probably by late next year will be over 500 people and continued growth into the future. It's a big market. We're having a great time we're really excited by what our customers are doing we're excited by the reception that MongoDB has had in the marketplace and we're working hard to continue to build the team to meet that demand. Hi Max, I know you're really busy and you got to go and everybody's talking at you here a lot of customers, a lot of developers want your time but I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Hope you can come back on at some point. Love to pick up this and other topics so really appreciate you again having us here and coming on theCUBE. Great, thanks for having me. All right, keep it right there everybody we'll be right back. This is theCUBE, we're live in New York City at the MongoDB days, we're right back.