MongoDB World 2015 Keynote: Dev Ittycheria

Good morning, its nice to be here.

As Meagen mentioned, this is my first MongoDB World. I was talking to some people outside, and the energy in this room is palpable.

I don’t plan to speak very long because there’s some great content coming behind me. We have some amazing speakers, panelists, and breakout sessions between now and tomorrow.

So I just want to give you some sense for how far we’ve come, where we are focused, and where we are going.

But before I do that I want to take a few moments to thank our team who has put this conference together, as well as all the people including our customers and our users who contributed amazing content.

People have worked long hours - actually, planning for this conference started the day after the last MongoDB World. People have worked long hours, nights, weekends. So please join me in giving them a round of applause.

So, one of the most common questions I’ve gotten since I joined MongoDB is why did I actually join the company. And it really came down to three reasons:

1. The first reason is really the market, and as an investor I’ve seen - and I think many of you have experienced - that the whole software market has been completely disrupted. We’ve seen that happen at every layer of the IT stack. From network and storage to compute, to applications, middleware, IDE environments, and even management tools. And I believe that the database market is ripe for disruption, and I think the time is now.

2. The second reason is the product. As an investor you spend a lot of time thinking about the product. As an investor I spent a lot of time investigating other NoSQL vendors in terms of investment opportunities. I ended up passing on those investments because I did not believe that those companies could catch MongoDB.
3. And third is really the team. That was really the trickiest question for me because I did not really know the team before I got here. After spending time with Eliot, Kevin, and Dwight, as well as the management team and a lot of the key employees, not only is this organization comprised by some amazingly talented people but they are deeply committed and deeply passionate about building great technology as well as a great business.

In actuality, there’s a fourth reason. I’ve had the privilege to live all over the world. I’ve lived in Europe, Asia, and even in Africa, and now North America, and my favorite city in the world is New York City. So I’m really thrilled to have a chance to help build a seminal tech company here in New York, and obviously this room and the energy in this city is just amazing.

One of the things that really struck me was the commitment of this community. And when you think about the community, we see a lot of people who are demonstrating a lot of interest in mongo. In fact, today we are announcing that MongoDB has been downloaded over 10,000,000 times. If you think about that statistic, that’s pretty amazing. Moreover, we are also seeing a lot of people building their careers around MongoDB. We’ve had over 300,000 people sign up for training classes associated with MongoDB. On top of that, this year alone we had over 35,000 people attend events all over the world, indicating the global presence of MongoDB. Moreover, we’ve had over 1,000 partners become partners of MongoDB because they are extending, building, or augmenting their businesses around our technology, and we have over 2,000 customers who are essentially transforming the business with MongoDB.

But these are just our statistics, let me show you some other statistics. If you look on Google or LinkedIn, MongoDB is the most searched term in the NoSQL space, far outpacing any other competitor. Moreover, if you look at LinkedIn the job profile index is just off the charts, again indicating that people are building their careers around MongoDB. MongoDB is not just a technology, it is truly a movement.

On top of that, db-engines recently announced a report - and they track the database market very closely - MongoDB was anointed the database of the year for a second year in a row. Moreover, we are recognized as the fourth most popular database in the market. Now normally I wouldn’t crow about being fourth place in a market, but if you think about the top three vendors, they have been in around for over 20 plus years. So its a pretty amazing thing to see MongoDB grow so quickly in such a short period of time to compete with the big boys.

So I’ve talked to you a little bit about the community, but the real reason the community is here is really around the product. And we announced what we can now call 3.0 at our last year’s conference. And 3.0 was truly a leapfrog improvement in functionality and performance, and a big reason for that improvement was the acquisition of WiredTiger. And today and tomorrow there are going to be a bunch of sessions about WiredTiger, so I really encourage you to attend those sessions and really dig in with the people that are building that amazing code. On top of that with 3.0 we also announced the notion of pluggable storage engines where you can attach different storage engines to MongoDB depending on the use case you have. In fact, our friends at Facebook are going to be showcasing RocksDB as another storage engine, and you can expect us to introduce other storage engines. The main point is that MongoDB is not just a niche technology, its truly a broad-based solution.

We’ve also invested a significant amount of time in building some really rich and robust management tools. Because we believe that to really build and use mongo, you need to trust it and to run and monitor and manage MongoDB for the most mission critical applications.

So let me come back to performance. I’m pleased to announce that an independent 3rd party conducted some tests to illustrate that mongo provides the best performance in a multi-node environment for a variety of workloads, and we’ll get into the details in a later session. The point is that for a long time you’ve known that mongo had the widest range of features, and now you can also be confident that it provides the best performance and scalability. Not only can you have your cake, but you can eat it too.

We’ve talked a little about community, and a little about product, now let me talk to you about our users and customers. The first one I want to talk about is a company called AXA. AXA is one of the world’s largest insurance companies, and what they saw when apple introduced the apple watch was an opportunity to introduce a new application called drive coach. This app essentially allows users to monitor their driving behavior - how good of a driver am I , how aggressive am I, how fast am I going, how do I take turns, how do I brake, etc - and essentially it gives feedback to the driver about what kind of a driver they are so they can become even a better driver. But also what it does is to change the dynamic and relationship between the user and AXA, because people don’t view it as just a traditional insurance company any more, people view it as a cutting edge technology company.

On top of that, AXA now gets an incredible amount of data about drivers so they can do a better job of assigning risk profiles to their customers. So this is an example of a company that is transforming their business. And by the way, they would not have been able to build this application this quickly without using MongoDB.

So that’s a big company, now let me tell you about a small company, based right here in New York City called x.ai. x.ai focuses on the problem of scheduling meetings. I think everyone in this room has experienced the pain and spent too much time trying to schedule a meeting at the right time and in the right place to meet with you friends, your colleagues, and your customers. What x.ai does is essentially to provide a virtual assistant using artificial technology to automate that process for you. Now, x.ai is speaking tomorrow, so I don’t want to steal their thunder, but here’s an example of a cutting edge startup here in New York using cutting edge technology and using MongoDB to build an exciting new business. I truly encourage you to attend that session.

And when you look at our customer base, it spans some of the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world, as well as some really cool cutting edge startups. So we have customers of all shapes and all sizes, and in some ways we have startups who are using MongoDB to behave like large enterprises, and large enterprises who are using MongoDB to become an agile and nimble startup. That’s the power of MongoDB, and that’s why MongoDB is starting to become a movement.

So I’ve talked to you a little bit about the community, I’ve talked to you a little bit about product, and I’ve talked to you a little bit about customers. There’s one other point I want to make and that is that we want to build an amazing business.

We believe firmly that to build great technology we have to be a great business. So we are investing an enormous amount in a series of commercial products and services that complement our core open source product. That we are investing in a high performance sales, services, and support organization to build tangible value as you interact with MongoDB. And the payout to you is that the rate of acceleration will only continue to increase as we grow.

In Eliot’s keynote talk tomorrow he’s going to showcase some really exciting things coming out with MongoDB 3.2, and that would not happen if we were not growing very quickly as a business.

So the point I want to make is that this is the time, this is the seminal moment when MongoDB transitioned from the compelling alternative to the new default. We will become the new default solution for ops, the new default solution for developers, the new default solution for business users, and the new default solution for partners.

I didn’t want to take too much time because we have some great content coming, but I really really want to thank you for coming today, and really encourage you to spend the next two days interacting with your peers, your colleagues, the MongoDB engineers. Many of you presenting today started conversations last year, and I think many of you starting conversations today will be presenting next year.

So thank you very much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed speaking to you, and I encourage you to enjoy the show.

[Intros next speaker]