 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation. Got a great conversation with a CMO today. We're going to spend some time talking about some of the changes affecting the tech industry and specifically affecting marketing in the tech industry. And we're going to be having that conversation with Megan Eisenberg who's a CMO of MongoDB. Megan, welcome to the Cube. Thank you, thank you for having me. Well, so we're going to spend some time talking about a number of different things, but MongoDB is an especially interesting company in the context of this conversation. Why don't we start by, tell us a little bit about MongoDB. Sure, MongoDB is a leading modern general database platform downloaded by 35 million developers and is used by the hottest private companies like Coinbase to storied brands like HSBC. So if we think about it, the reason why I think this is especially interesting is because MongoDB is an open source company so that means that that has some specific marketing challenges. Yes. It recently went through an IPO and the marketing role in an IPO is especially interesting. But very importantly, here's where I want to start. That in many respects, the tech industry has always been set up to sell products. And the proposition was, I know about my product as a seller, you don't know that much about it, user. So I'm going to spend an enormous amount of time bashing you about why my product is better. That's changed a bit as we move to this digital transformation and the role that data plays in helping companies transform. It's less about what the vendor's doing and more how the company utilizes the technology. It's kind of this underlying from a product orientation to a services orientation. It has a continuous relationship. Yes, that's right. Especially in the open source world where you have a continuous relationship with your developers. Tell us a little bit about how, at least in your experience at MongoDB, that relationship that from a product orientation to a service, ongoing service orientation, affects marketing. Sure, I mean, we think a lot about how our users are using the product. We want to win the hearts and minds of developers. They're out there building new ideas. They're using it. When we enter a company through one developer, we have the opportunity to spread to many others. If we think of all size businesses, there's thousands, if not tens of thousands, of databases and applications. So we want to make sure they have a great experience that we're collecting data that's useful to help them and that it spreads to others. Now, let me amplify what you just said. Because, again, we could go back and think about other technology companies where the role was to explain what a relational database was and why it was better than something else. And what you just described is no, we want to create a community of users that are constantly developing their own visibility, their own insight. And our job is to call the best of that and use that as part of the marketing experience. Have I got that right? Yeah, that's right. Developers are actually quite social and when they're out there building or they find something new, they're creating apps, they're creating new tools, they're sharing that knowledge. And so from a marketing standpoint, we do a lot of work with developer relations, building apps out there speaking to language communities, we're out there at conferences, really showing what the technology can do. So many years ago I had a conversation with a CEO who's now worth billions of dollars. And I asked him specifically, I felt that marketing had been essential to his success. And he said something very interesting. He said, ah, I'm marketing. That's what I put between my engineers and my salespeople to make sure they don't kill each other. Yeah. That can't be the role of marketing in a community-oriented company. Tell us about how marketing stands in collaborative, collaborative arrangement with product and sales at MongoDB. Sure, so I mean, for myself personally as a CMO, I think the success of marketing is its relationships not only with sales, but with engineering. And that they're really sales I see as an internal customer understanding what they need to be successful, making sure that we're talking to the right persona that we're helping them build pipeline. We're putting tools out there that are helping the user go through the experience. And from an engineering standpoint that we're collaborating that there's a feedback loop as people are using the product. We want it to be a frictionless experience when they meet us out in the field or they come to our website. And that part's important as they're registering for the product as they come in as they start to use the product and making sure we all have access to that data. It helps sales better do their job, engineering build a better product, and marketing better really hook the user in. So marketing helps sustain that journey. Yes. But also ensuring that sales is getting the appropriate information and insight on what customers are doing. But it's multimodal today. I mean people talk about multi-channel all the time. Talk a bit about how you anticipate the engagement model changing as more personas get involved, as technology gets more deeply embedded, as the risk profile changes. And very importantly, especially for a company like MongoDB, as the number of use cases explodes. Yes. I mean it's a good point. From a marketing standpoint, we're going direct to developers who want to do self-serve with our MongoDB Atlas product all the way to the CIO and CTO who are trying to digitally transform their businesses. And they're all different channels. It's not just email, it's social, it's your website, it's how you interact with them in the field, it's supporting your sales team. It's our developers that are out there working in the field and building the product. So you're right. At MongoDB we have 28 technologies in our MarTech stack and we've sun set seven. So we've experimented with 35. And the reason is because there's a lot of work around website making a better experience. There's work around social media, how we design what we put out there, what we're doing in the field, making sure every experience, every form you fill out is really optimized for that customer experience. Yeah, it's creating some sort of value for the customers. Yeah. They don't have distraction, not an annoyance. But if you think about it, another CMO once said here in theCUBE that they kind of summarized some of the new role of marketing is that marketing is creating the community and marketing is sustaining the community. Where community really is defined as people who are doing something in common. So your customers are trying to apply this technology that has enormous flexibility. I'm going to ask you to explain a little bit about that in a second. Well, I think it's too deep. To a lot of new use cases. And that's what your users are trying to do. And bringing those together so they can share insights, share experience, improve the quality of the tool, speed the process through the rate at which this all happens is got to be a central feature of the marketing mission at MongoDB. Is that right? Yes, definitely. I mean, we're very much focused on the developer, their experience, winning their hearts and minds and creating advocates. People and developers that come and use the product and love it and build upon it and have things that they've learned that they want to share. We have a pretty detailed documentation for new folks. We have a MongoDB university where we've had over 800,000 developers take courses. It's definitely a highly engaged group that wants to innovate and they want to use the hottest technology. They don't want to be on legacy. Legacy databases came out 40 years ago. The likes of Oracle, right? That was designed before cloud, before mobile, before the volume of variety of data that we have today. And so if you want to build new apps you have to do it in a new modern way and MongoDB is a real alternative to those legacy databases. Yeah, so one of the things I think is especially important as we think about some of this stuff ultimately is you said you want to build out the developer community and make sure that that engagement is strong while at the same time obviously sustaining relationships with other personas that are going to write the checks probably through your sales organization. Yes, yes. What is the role of diffusing knowledge through a service? I mean, do you have a university or do you, how does content get designed and instrumented at MongoDB to catalyze that community activity? Yes, I mean content's very important all the way from our developer advocates and relations are building content to educate developers to help them learn about the product, use the product. And then for the C level execs that are trying to transform their businesses they're trying to learn about microservices, blockchain, there's a lot of content and we see it like HubSpot really educated the marketing community around inbound marketing. We're doing a lot of work to educate and work with developers and create that digital watering hole so they can learn what they need to build their next app. Especially on the idea of complex rich natural data. Yes, that's right. We believe that MongoDB is the natural way and the best way to work with data and you can put it where you want intelligently as well as the freedom to run it anywhere. Our MongoDB Atlas runs on all three major clouds with AWS, GCP and Azure and that ability to migrate we're on 54 different regions. So really anywhere in the world you want to have your app running we've got it set up for you. So MongoDB as a database company is trying to reduce the limitations of how well database can handle more complex data. The engineering is using an open source approach to try to ensure that there's a high quality offering associated with that promise. You're deploying it on a lot of different platforms cloud not cloud. So that people don't face fundamental infrastructure constraints to try to get advantage of that. That creates an enormous number of opportunities for someone to come in and try it. The whole try by motion or land and expand as people like to talk about how is MongoDB refining that notion of land and expand through its marketing mission? Sure I mean well certainly we're making it frictionless for you to sign up self-serve you can go put a credit card in we've got a free tier where you can quickly experiment try it out. As your application grows and becomes mission critical we've got the tools that you need to maintain it we've got security and all the features you would need to run a modern application and we've set it in a way where no matter where you are in the world or who you want to collaborate with it's easy for you. It's very frictionless for the developer it's a natural way to develop and you're not worried about the operational overload that comes with relational or legacy databases. So we've talked a lot about how MongoDB is working with developers let's pivot a little bit and talk about how MongoDB worked with potential investors. I've been fascinated by the role the marketing plays within IPOs. You've got finance with a very very well defined role sales that typically has a very well defined role. The marketing's tried to straddle that fine line between driving new volume but being very careful about what you say and how you say it to keep people feeling confident and comfortable in a financial standpoint. You joined MongoDB three years ago. Yes, yes three years ago. You had an IPO about halfway into your tenure. Tell us a little bit about that. Sure, I mean October 2017 the company went public. It was a very exciting time. Certainly the first time that I had been with the company and taken them public. I was fortunate enough our CEO, Dave Iticharia had done it multiple times as a leader and as a board member. And so he brought a lot of knowledge around that. And as a marketer you're thinking how do you stay within the guidelines but make sure everyone's aware of what you're doing. Certainly if you've been doing it in the past you can keep doing, if you're not hyping the market you can keep doing what you've been doing. You can run your events. You can talk about the product. The day of is a really big day to get in front of media. I was really impressed by what the team did to align media interviews. I think we had 24 different interviews in one day and we had over 50 or 60 stories break within the next week or so. So that was exciting just that timing because you can't line those up too soon. You've got to make sure everything's a go and it really worked out. And now we're just excited about the future of the market. $60 billion market by 2020 according to IDC. So we've got a massive opportunity in front of us. So what can we do? Certainly for a marketing standpoint what do I need to be doing to get on that and work through that? So MongoDB is a growth company. Yes. Good, solid set of employees. Tell us a little bit about how marketing's role is going to change over the next couple of years as MongoDB tries to grab more of this $60 billion opportunity. Yeah, I mean we've definitely have a strong vision around where we're going with our products and solutions as a database platform. We're doing a lot of work with partners. We've got some great stuff going on with SIS like a center and Infosys and Wipro who have modernizing the tech stack and working with really large companies and we're part of that offering. So we'll be working heavily with that. We're very close with the cloud vendors with AWS and Microsoft Azure and GCP. So a lot of good work going around that and we'll continue to grow our cloud offering itself Atlas, MongoDB Atlas. It's only been around two years. It's already 14% of our business now has grown 400% over the last year. And so excited to see. Yes, thank you. Yeah, thank you. That's a really exciting part of the business and with so much moving to the cloud it's the right place to be. I feel like we've done a great job really looking at where we need to be and then highlighting that in the market. So last question, Megan. Sure. MongoDB is carving out an interesting spot for itself within the marketplace. As you focus in customers, customers are increasingly dictating how the market's going to evolve. It's an interesting dynamic, especially that community approach. But there's always efforts to pull it back especially from some of the entrenched database competitors. How are you guys trying to both keep the focus and what the customer needs, drive them to this modernization while at the same time acknowledging and recognizing that they can't change everything on day one. That you have to coexist. Yeah, so MongoDB is doing a lot of work around migrations, making it very easy and frictionless. If you're going to move to the cloud this is the perfect time to move off legacy databases. And we see it with our customers. They're struggling with 40 year old technology. They need a more modern approach. They want a single view of their data. They're dealing with so much of it and it's the right time when they move to the cloud. So we're making sure our product is on all the major clouds, which it is and all the regions that we've got the tools that they need and that that process is really simple. All right, Megan Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB. Thank you very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. It's been a great conversation. And once again, you will see additional CUBE conversations until next time. I'm Peter Burris. Thank you very much for watching.