 Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 19. This is our third day in Vegas. That's a lot of Vegas. I am joined by my co-host, Justin Moran, the founder and chief analyst at Pivot9. And Justin and I are welcoming back one of our Cube alum joining us next from MongoDB is Sahir Azam, its chief product officer. Welcome back. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. So talk to us about what's going on at MongoDB. I know we've had you on the program before we've had MongoDB, but what's sort of the latest and greatest? Yeah, so we're continuing to grow very fast, and especially our cloud product Atlas. We've got two million developers using the platform today, 13,000 customers, many of which are on the amazing AWS platform. And I think people are really embracing the idea of a multi-cloud database service and a data platform that can have the flexibility to work with no matter where they are. Talk about, sorry, Justin, about multi-cloud a little bit more because it is a symptom as one of our CEOs, Dave Vellante calls it. A lot of companies have inherited it. It's more by, whether it's organically or it's by acquisition or developer preference, it's a state in which a lot of businesses are operating, but it's challenging. Yes. So some of the things that you're hearing with respect to customers, how can you help them deal better in that world? Sure, so yeah, we definitely see some of those exact trends. So, you know, for large enterprises, many times they have different use cases and different business units where developers or application owners prefer different cloud providers, oftentimes it's acquisition, but also at a strategic level at the CTO, CIO or even CEO level, you know, there is a forethought strategy that it's going to be a multi-cloud platform world. And now, what we see is many customers are still very much focused on a single cloud provider to get the build up the skills on, but with a close eye to a second or third tier provider in the architecture that they will scale and balance over time. So, I think it's early days, but the trend is definitely rising in what we're seeing. Now, one of the things that makes a multi-cloud strategy really hard to implement is the data, you know, especially transactional data that runs live applications that are serving real customers, that makes an application a development team really stuck on a certain platform. So, what we're focused on at MongoDB is really decoupling that data layer from the underlying cloud infrastructure providers, such that if you want to leverage the benefits the different services AWS has in their rich ecosystem, but then maybe plum in something from another provider, we make that extremely easy to do with a click of a button and move your data across those cloud providers. Yeah, so talk about the mechanism for doing that a little bit more, because that's really tricky to do. And that's one thing I think people have been concerned about the idea of multi-cloud, is that, well, are you actually running in multiple clouds simultaneously? Or is it more that actually sometimes we just want to move a bit from here to there or use for different applications? There's sort of three trends that we see, you know, and we're a data platform player. So, you know, our use cases are sort of bounded around database technology, data analytics. So, the first is for customers who want high availability across multiple regions within a certain geographies. Let's say you're dealing with personal information of German citizens. In Germany, Amazon has a region in Germany only one and maybe you want Azure or GCP to be a second region for high availability and you need to rely on a secondary provider because there's only one from a particular cloud of choice in that geos. That's sort of one high availability kind of use case. The second is leveraging the benefits of all these different services that the cloud providers themselves are releasing. So, we hear a lot of customers that say, you know, Amazon's my preferred partner for operationalizing my app, we use their services, our database runs there. However, we may want to take some of that data, even if it's for a week, even for a few days, a month and perhaps move it over to another provider to leverage some new analytic service or machine learning or AI algorithm that they might have. Today, that's really challenging to do. So, the idea that you can click a button and create that replica and move that data over very easily is something that people are asking from us. And then the third is geographic reach. So, our database platform Atlas runs in 70 global regions worldwide across AWS, Azure and GCP, which makes it the most widely available database and service on the planet. And one of the interesting use cases for that is, let's say somebody is using a single cloud provider for 99% of their workload, but some they see their app takeoff in Taiwan. You know, maybe another cloud provider has a region in Taiwan, just mix and match and add that region into the architecture very seamlessly. So, those kind of three categories, high availability within Geos, the ability to leverage, you know, the rich service offerings and mix and match and then the geographic reach are the three things we see for multi-cloud at a strategic level beyond the reactive angle of acquiring a company and learning how to have to manage multiple clouds that way. It does sound like it's a bit of a trend that we're hearing, particularly today, I think, Lisa, where enterprises want choice. And that customer choice of being able to choose things that actually suit me rather than necessarily which vendor I'm buying my infrastructure from. That sounds like it's something that we're hearing a lot. Yeah, and we've invested a lot of time engineering effort, working with Amazon, working with Google, working with Microsoft to unify that data layer across the three cloud providers. And I think that's something unique that Mongo is really focused on. But there were so many announcements that came out in Andy Jassy's keynote a couple of days ago. I think I read 23 announcements, Justin, like the first 20 minutes or something at his keynote. So much information, but I'm curious, did anything that they announced surprise you in terms of, hey, customers are living in this multi-cloud world. There's use cases, there's reasons for it. Any shift that Amazon was making or announced this week that you thought, yes, some of these things are becoming a reality. We have to go where the data is. We have to deliver what's best for our customers. I mean, I think Amazon is a very customer-centric company. I don't think I heard any announcement that particularly acknowledged the fact that it's going to be a multi-cloud world. I think there's still the market share leader, they have a rich set of offerings and they're going to continue building on that, which I think makes a lot of sense from the position that they're in. I think some of the announcements that are interesting to us, definitely the idea of having lower cost, higher performance arm hardware and chips for a database vendor, if we can lower the price performance curve for customers on top of that infrastructure, that's exciting for us. And we always think it's interesting in a AWS keynote that's two or three hours long that about a third or half of it is talking about data. We all love data, so the more rich sets of services we can surround and integrate Mongo into the better. So exciting for us. Data seems to be like the next generation of cloud. Data can become a huge asset for any business in any industry, whereas there are companies and times where data was a risk, a vulnerability. What is a great example in your opinion of a MongoDB customer who has done a great job of transforming to where data is now a huge asset and a driver of business differentiation? So one interesting customer example I really like is Axiom, they're a marketing data provider. Data has been the heart of their business for a long time, but traditionally their business would be packaging up and shipping data sets to their end customers in a very custom bespoke manner. What we work with them on is leveraging our cloud platform Atlas, along with some API technologies that we have and a product called Stitch, to make it very easy for them to create custom APIs to allow their end customers to access that data programmatically. And since we manage and run that on their behalf, their development team, their operations team, don't have to worry about the plumbing and managing of all these API layers and all that. They just stamp out these custom APIs, we auto-scale them on top of the rich Mongo database on the back end, and so we've allowed them to really take the data business they were in, but really modernize it by exposing it directly to developers programmatically instead of just shipping data around, which is expensive and cumbersome. So I think that's a really interesting example of sort of a data company transforming itself and kind of innovating in the cloud with some of the technologies we provide, obviously on top of the Amazon platform. Yeah, so you mentioned transforming, that's definitely been a theme of the show. So MongoDB is a different way of actually managing data, so compared to traditional methods. A lot of enterprises still have a lot of investment in RDBMS as more traditional kind of databases. What are you seeing when customers come to MongoDB and start using this different way of storing and managing data? What does that transition for them like? Sure, so I think the thing that MongoDB's inception 11 years ago through now, what drives our adoption, I should say, is really the fact that developers love our platform. The document model, the MongoDB API, is just a much more flexible and natural way for developers to think about writing applications. So when you're building an application, you might be managing a customer object, a product, an account. These are all sort of business objects that get represented in a developer's mind and then in an application, but then if you put that in a relational database, you're chopping that up into rows and tables and then having to rejoin that back together just to make sense of the underlying information you're trying to represent. Mongo gets rid of all of that cognitive dissonance and that's what really unlocks that developer productivity. Now, the interesting thing about MongoDB is as a non-relational database, we have looked at the legacy RDBMS providers and said, what are the things that are really strong about those platforms that we can bring forth and apply to this much more agile and natural data model? So things like data governance and schema, strong transactional guarantees, enterprise management functionality, enterprise security and encryption at a very deep level. These are things that large mission critical application developers and operators really need and they don't typically find them in fast databases, scalable databases like MongoDB. So what we've done is really merged the best of the legacy traditional databases, the things people expect in a rock solid mission critical database, but brought it forward in a model that's much faster for developers to move quickly on. And so the way that represents itself in our business, roughly about a third of our business, any given quarter tends to go from legacy migrations off of some traditional relational database. And the driver for that is modernization. People want to move those apps to the cloud. They don't just want to lift and ship from one relational database to another necessarily. That might have certain cost benefits from one provider to another, but it doesn't unlock that developer agility and that's why they're choosing MongoDB. So on the spirit of transformation, the ability for MongoDB to unlock that developer productivity, one of the things Danny Jassy talked about on Tuesday was one of the four essential pillars of transformation, it's got to come from the top down. It's got to come from that senior executive level that got to drive it down aggressively. As chief product officer, where are your conversations? Are you still in terms of like feedback and customer advisory information? Are you still talking mostly to the developer folks who are the primary users or are you also having those higher level both? Tell us a little bit about that. Now what's interesting about a data technology like Mongo is it's not a top down sort of sell. No CIO, CTO, line of business executive is going to dictate down to their developers, thou shalt use this particular database technology or whatnot. Every development team is going to choose a technology that allows them to move fast meets their requirements. So what we've really done is we focused on engaging with our customers, our sales organization, our marketing organization, our developer relations organization is merging a strategic top down sort of model with those CIOs and business leaders about how MongoDB can transform their business as a data platform, get that sponsorship, get that executive alignment to be a strategic provider but then at the same time really fostering that community that MongoDB has always been known for bottoms up to make sure that more and more of these applications see the power and value of MongoDB. So we have to merge both those motions. If we were just bottoms up, then I think we wouldn't be as strategic as we are in many of these organizations in terms of how transformative as a vendor and a technology provider and partner we are, but at the same time, if we lost our roots with the developers, databases don't get chosen from the top down. They get introduced and put on the list maybe and sponsored into the account but we've got to build and earn that trust with developers directly. So you've had incredible success, incredible growth so far. Thank you. What's next for Mongo? So I think a big part of our journey for the last three or four years has been really adding a second major growth engine to the company by building out our cloud business. So that was our MongoDB Atlas platform built on top of AWS, Azure and GCP and that is the fastest growing part of our business and will clearly be the majority of our business in the future. The next year to two years is really about transitioning from a single data product company to a data platform company. So earlier this year we announced not just the core foundational database features we're always building on top of but also a big step into analytics with our Atlas Data Lake product which allows development teams and analysts to run queries using the Mongo query language they love but on top of S3 where they have mountains and mountains of data stored from all these different sources. And at the same time we've also added things like full text indexing. So instead of standing up and search cluster next to your Mongo database having to worry about copying data just to get full text search in your application we merge that capability directly into the Atlas platform. So a big part of our journey is saying once we have so many customers on the platform how can we add more value and yet still merge that all in a very expressive developer experience with our query language. So they're not dealing with 13 different databases and four copies of their data and integrating and shuttling that all around but it's a very prescriptive experience for them. Wow, so here thank you for sharing all the innovations that are going on at MongoDB with Justin and me on the program today. A lot going on. Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the show. Good, we appreciate your time. For my co-host Justin Warren I'm Lisa Martin and you've been watching theCUBE from Vegas baby, AWS re-invent 19. Thanks for watching.