>>Hello and run. Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here. Day three of Cube's coverage, two sets, wall to wall coverage. Third set upstairs in the Executive Briefing Center. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube with Dave Alon. Two other hosts here. Lot of action. Dave. The cheer here is the CEO of MongoDB, exclusive post on Silicon Angle for your prior to the event. Thanks for doing that. Great to see >>You. Likewise. Nice to see you >>Coming on. See you David. So it's great to catch up. Prior to the event for that exclusive story on ecosystem, your perspective that resonated with a lot of the people. The traffic on that post and comments have been off the charts. I think we're seeing a ecosystem kind of surge and not change over, but like a an and ISV and new platform. So I really appreciate your perspective as a platform ISV for aws. What's it like? What's this event like? What's your learnings? What's your takeaway from your customers here this year? What's the most important story going on? >>First of all, I think being here is important for us because we have so many customers and partners here. In fact, if you look at the customers that Amazon themselves announced about two thirds of those customers or MongoDB customers. So we have a huge overlap in customers here. So just connecting with customers and partners has been important. Obviously a lot of them are thinking about their plans going to next year. So we're kind of meeting with them to think about what their priorities are and how we can help. And also we're sharing a little bit of our product roadmap in terms of where we're going and helping them think through like how they can best use Mongadi B as they think about their data strategy, you know, going to next year. So it's been a very productive end. We have a lot of people here, a lot of sales people, a lot of product people, and there's tons of customers here. So we can get a lot accomplished in a few days. >>Dave and I always talk on the cube. Well, Dave always goes to the TAM expansion question. Expanding your total stressful market, the market is changing and you guys have a great position growing positioned. How do you look at the total addressable market for Mongo changing? Where's the growth gonna come from? How do you see your role in the market and how does that impact your current business model? >>Yeah, our whole goal is to really enable developers to think about Mongo, to be first when they're building modern applications. So what we've done is first built a fir, a first class transactional platform and now we've kind expanding the platform to do things like search and analytics, right? And so we are really offering a broad set of capabilities. Now our primary focus is the developer and helping developers build these amazing applications and giving them tools to really do so in a very quick way. So if you think about customers like Intuit, customers like Canva, customers like, you know, Verizon, at and t, you know, who are just using us to really transform their business. It's either to build new applications quickly to do things at a certain level of performance of scale they've never done before. And so really enabling them to do so much more in building these next generation applications that they can build anywhere else. >>So I was listening to McDermott, bill McDermott this morning. Yeah. And you listen to Bill, you just wanna buy from the guy, right? He's amazing. But he was basically saying, look, companies like he was talking about ServiceNow that could help organizations digitally transform, et cetera, but make money or save money or in a good position. And I said, right, Mongo's definitely one of those companies. What are those conversations like here? I know you've been meeting with customers, it's a different environment right now. There's a lot of uncertainty. I, I was talking to one of your customers said, yeah, I'm up for renewal. I love Mongo. I'm gonna see if they can stage my payments a little bit. You know, things like that. Are those conversations? Yeah, you know, similar to what >>You having, we clearly customers are getting a little bit more prudent, but we haven't seen any kind of like slow down terms of deal cycles or, or elongated sales cycles. I mean, obviously different customers in different sectors are going through different issues. What we are seeing customers think about is like how can I, you know, either drive more efficiency in my business like and big part of that is modernization of my existing legacy tech stack. How can maybe consolidate to a fewer set of vendors? I think they like our broad platform story. You know, rather than using three or four different databases, they can use MongoDB to do everything. So that that resonates with customers and the fact that they can move fast, right? Developer productivity is a proxy for innovation. And so being able to move fast to either seize new opportunities or respond to new threats is really, you know, top of mind for still C level executive. >>So can your software, you're right, consolidation is the number one way in which people are save money. Can your software be deflationary? I mean, I mean that in a good way. So >>I was just meeting with a customer who was thinking about Mongo for their transactional platform, elastic for the search platform and like a graph database for a special use case. And, and we said you can do all that on MongoDB. And he is like, oh my goodness, I can consolidate everything. Have one elegant developer interface. I can keep all the data in one place. I can easily access that data. And that makes so much more sense than having to basically use a bunch of peace parts. And so that's, that's what we're seeing more and more interest from customers about. >>So one of the things I want to get your reaction to is, I was saying on the cube, now you can disagree with me if you want, but at, in the cloud native world at Cuban and Kubernetes was going through its hype cycle. The conversation went to it's getting boring. And that's good cause they want it to be boring. They don't want people to talk about the run time. They want it to be working. Working is boring. That's invisible. It's good, it's sticky, it's done. As you guys have such a great sticky business model, you got a great install base. Mongo works, people are happy, they like the product. So it's kind of working, I won't wanna say boring cuz that's, it's irrelevant. What's the exciting things that Mongo's bringing on top of the existing base of product that is gonna really get your clients and prospects enthused about the innovation from Mongo? What's what cuz it's, it's almost like electricity in a way. You guys are very utility in, in the way you do, but it's growing. But is there an exciting element coming that you see that they should pay attention to? What's, what's your >>Vision that, right, so if you look back over the last 10, 15 years, there's been big two big platform shifts, mobile and cloud. I think the next big platform shift is from what I call dumb apps to smart apps. So building more intelligence into applications. And what that means is automating human decision making and embedding that into applications. So we believe that to be a fundamentally a developer problem to solve, yes, you need data scientist to build the machine learning algorithms to train the models. Yeah. But ultimately you can't really deploy, deployed at scale unless you give developers the tools to build those smart applications that what we focused on. And a big part of that is what we call application driven analytics where people or can, can embed that intelligence into applications so that they can instead rather having humans involved, they can make decisions faster, drive to businesses more quickly, you know, shorten it's short and time to market, et cetera. >>And so your strategy to implement those smart apps is to keep targeting the developer Yes. And build on that >>Base. Correct. Exactly. So we wanna essentially democratize the ability for any customer to use our tools to build a smart applications where they don't have the resources of a Google or you know, a large tech company. And that's essentially resonating with our customer base. >>We, we were talking about this earlier after Swami's keynote, is most companies struggle to put data at the core of their business. And I don't mean centralizing it all in a single place as data's everywhere, but, but really organizing their company and democratizing data so people can make data decisions. So I think what you're saying, essentially Atlas is the platform that you're gonna inject intelligence into and allow developers to then build applications that are, you know, intelligent, smart with ai, machine intelligence, et cetera. And that's how the ones that don't have the resources of a Google or an Amazon become correct the, that kind of AI company if >>You, and that's, that's the whole purpose of a developer data platform is to enable them to have the tools, you know, to have very sophisticated analytics, to have the ability to do very sophisticated indexes, optimized for analytics, the ability to use data lakes for very efficient storage and retrieval of data to leverage, you know, edge devices to be able to capture and synchronize data. These are all critical elements to build these next generation applications. And you have to do that, but you don't want to stitch together a thousand primitives. You want to have a platform to do that. And that's where we really focus. >>You know, Dave, Dave and I, three, two days, Dave and I, Dave Ante and I have been talking a lot about developer productivity. And one observation that's now validated is that developers are setting the pace for innovation. Correct? And if you look at the how they, the language that they speak, it's not the same language as security departments, right? They speak almost like different languages, developer and security, and then you got data language. But the developers are making choices of self-service. They can accelerate, they're driving the behavior behavior into the organizations. And this is one of the things I wrote about on Friday last week was the organizational changes are changing cuz the developers set the pace. You can't force tooling down their throat. They're gonna go with what's easy, what's workable. If you believe that to be true, then all the security's gonna be in the developer pipeline. All the innovations we've driven off that high velocity developer site, we're seeing success of security being embedded there with the developers. What are you gonna bring up to that developer layer that's going to help with security, help with maybe even new things, >>Right? So, you know, it's, it's almost a cliche to say now software is in the world, right? Because every company's value props is driven by, it's either enabled to find or created through software. What that really means is that developers are eating all the work, right? And you're seeing, you saw in DevOps, right? Where developers basically enro encroach into the ops world and made infrastructure a programmable interface. You see developers, to your point, encroaching in security, embedding more and more security features into their applications. We believe the same thing's gonna happen with data scientists and business analysts where developers are gonna embed that functionality that was done by different domains in the Alex world and embed that capability into apps themselves. So these applications are just naturally smarter. So you don't need someone to look at a dashboard and say, aha, there's some insight here now I need to go make a decision. The application will do that for you and actually make that decision for you so you can move that much more quickly to run your business either more efficiently or to drive more, you know, revenue. >>Well the interesting thing about your business is cuz you know, you got a lot of transactional activity going on and the data, the way I would say what you just described is the data stack and the application stacks are coming together, right? And you're in a really good position, I think to really affect that. You think about we've, we've operationalized so many systems, we really haven't operationalized our data systems. And, and particularly as you guys get more into analytics, it becomes an interesting, you know, roadmap for Mongo and your customers. How do you see that? >>Yeah, so I wanna be clear, we're not trying to be a data warehouse, I get it. We're not trying to be like, you know, go compete. In fact, we have nice partnership with data bricks and so forth. What we are really trying to do is enable developers to instrument and build these applications that embed analytics. Like a good analogy I'd use is like Google Maps. You think about how sophisticated Google Maps has, and I use that because everyone has used Google Maps. Yeah. Like in the old, I was old enough to print out the directions, map quest exactly, put it on my lap and drive and look down. Now have this device that tells me, you know, if there's a traffic, if there's an accident, if there's something you know, going will reroute me automatically. And what that app is doing is embedding real time data into, into its decision making and making the decision for you so that you don't have to think about which road to take. Right? You, you're gonna see that happen across almost every application over the next X number of years where these applications are gonna become so much smarter and make these decisions for you. So you can just move so much more quickly. >>Yeah. Talk about the company, what status of the company, your growth plans. Obviously you're seeing a lot of news and Salesforce co CEO just resigned, layoffs at cnn, layoffs at DoorDash. You know, tech unfortunately is not impacted, thank God. I'm not that too bad. Certainly in cloud's not impacted it is impacting some of the buying behavior. We talked about that. What's going on with the company head count? What's your goals? How's the team doing? What are your priorities? >>Right? So we we're going after a big, big opportunity. You know, we recognize, obviously the market's a little choppy right now, but our long term, we're very bullish on the opportunity. We believe that we can be the modern developer data platform to build these next generation applications in terms of costs. We're obviously being a little bit more judicious about where we're investing, but we see big, big opportunities for us. And so our overall cost base will grow next year. But obviously we also recognize that there's ways to drive more efficiency. We're at a scale now. We're a 1.2 billion business. We're gonna announce our Q3 results next week. So we'll talk a little bit more about, you know, what we're seeing in the business next week. But we, we think we're a business that's growing fast. You know, we grew, you know, over 50, 50% and so, so we're pretty fast growing business. Yeah. You see? >>Yeah, Tuesday, December 6th you guys announce Exactly. Course is a big, we always watch and love it. So, so what I'm hearing is you're not, you're not stepping on the brakes, you're still accelerating growth, but not at all costs. >>Correct. The term we're using is profitable growth. We wanna, you know, you know, drive the business in a way that we think continues to seize the opportunity. But we also, we always exercise discipline. You know, I, I'm old enough where I had to deal with 2000 and 2008, so, you know, seen the movie before, I'm not 28 and have not seen these markets. And so obviously some are, you know, emerging leaders have not seen these kinds of markets before. So we're kind of helping them think about how to continue to be disciplined. And >>I like that reference to two thousand.com bubble and the financial crisis of 2008. I mentioned this to you when we chat, I'd love to get your thoughts. Now looking back for reinvent, Amazon wasn't a force in, in 2008. They weren't really that big debt yet. Know impact agility, wasn't it? They didn't hit that, they didn't hit that cruising altitude of the value pro cloud agility, time of value moving fast. Now they are. So this is the first time that they're a part of the economic equation. You're on, you're on in the middle of it with Amazon. They could be a catalyst to recover faster if plan properly. What's your CEO take on just that general and other CEOs might be watching and saying, Hey, you know, if I play this right, I could leverage the cloud. You know, Adams is leading into the cloud during a recession. Okay, I get that. But specifically there might be a tactic. What's your view on >>That? I mean, what, what we're seeing the, the hyperscalers do is really continue to kind of compete at the raw infrastructure level on storage, on compute, on network performance, on security to provide the, the kind of the building blocks for companies like Monga Beach really build on. So we're leveraging that price performance curve that they're pushing. You know, they obviously talk about Graviton three, they're talking about their training model chip sets and their inference model chip sets and their security chip sets. Which is great for us because we can leverage those capabilities to build upon that. And I think, you know, if you had asked me, you know, in 2008, would we be talking about chip sets in 2022? I'd probably say, oh, we're way beyond that. But what it really speaks to is those things are still so profoundly important. And I think that's where you can see Amazon and Google and Microsoft compete to provide the best underlying infrastructure where companies like mongadi we can build upon and we can help customers leverage that to really build the next generation. >>I'm not saying it's 2008 all over again, but we have data from 2008 that was the first major tailwind for the cloud. Yeah. When the CFO said we're going from CapEx to opex. So we saw that. Now it's a lot different now it's a lot more mature >>I think. I think there's a fine tuning trend going on where people are right sizing, fine tuning, whatever you wanna call it. But a craft is coming. A trade craft of cloud management, cloud optimization, managing the cost structures, tuning, it's a crafting, it's more of a craft. It's kind of seems like we're >>In that era, I call it cost optimization, that people are looking to say like, I know I'm gonna invest but I wanna be rational and more thoughtful about where I invest and why and with whom I invest with. Versus just like, you know, just, you know, everyone getting a 30% increase in their opex budgets every year. I don't think that's gonna happen. And so, and that's where we feel like it's gonna be an opportunity for us. We've kind of hit scap velocity. We've got the developer mind share. We have 37,000 customers of all shapes and sizes across the world. And that customer crown's only growing. So we feel like we're a place where people are gonna say, I wanna standardize among the >>Db. Yeah. And so let's get a great quote in his keynote, he said, if you wanna save money, the place to do it is in the cloud. >>You tighten the belt, which belt you tightening? The marketplace belt, the wire belt. We had a whole session on that. Tighten your belt thing. David Chair, CEO of a billion dollar company, MongoDB, continue to grow and grow and continue to innovate. Thanks for coming on the cube and thanks for participating in our stories. >>Thanks for having me. Great to >>Be here. Thank. Okay, I, Dave ante live on the show floor. We'll be right back with our final interview of the day after this short break, day three coming to close. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

>>Hi, I'm John Ferry with the Cube. We're here for a special exclusive conversation with David Geria, the CEO of Mongo MongoDB. Well established leading platform. It's been around for, I mean, decades. So continues to become the platform of choice for high performance data. This modern data stack that's emerging, a big part of the story here at a reinvent 2022 on top of an already performing a cloud with, you know, chips and silicon specialized instances, the world's gonna be getting faster, smaller, higher performance, lower cost specialized. Dave, thanks for taking the time with me today, >>John. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. >>Do you see yourself as a ISV or you just go with that, because that's kind of a nomenclature >>When, when I think of the term isv, I think of the notion of someone building an end solution for customer to get something done. Or what we're building is essentially a developer data platform and we have thousands of ISVs who build software applications on our platform. So how could we be an isv? Because by definition I, you know, we enable people to do so many different things and you know, they can be the, you know, the largest companies of the world trying to transform their business or startups who are trying to disrupt either existing industries or create new ones. And so that's, and, and that's how our customers view MongoDB and, and the whole Atlas platform basically enables them to do some amazing things. The reason for that is, you know, you know, we believe that what we are enabling developers to do is be able to reduce the friction and the work required to build modern applications through the document model, which is really intuitive to the way developers think and code through the distributed nature of platforms. >>So, you know, things like charting no other company on the planet offers the capabilities we do to enable people to build the most highly performant and scalable applications. And also what we also do is enable people to, you know, run different types of workloads on our platform. So we have obviously transactional, we have search, we have time series, we enable people to do things like sophisticated device synchronization from Edge to the back end. We do graph, we do real time analytics. So being able to consolidate all that with developers on one elegant unified platform really makes, you know, it attractive for developers to build on long >>Db. You know, you guys are a feature partner of aws and I would speculate, I don't know if you can comment on this, but I would imagine that you probably produce a lot of revenue for Amazon because you really can't turn off EC two when you do a database work. So, you know, you kind of crank it all the time. You guys are a top partner. How long have you guys been a partner with aws? What's the relationship? >>The relationship's been strong, actually, Amazon spoke at one of our first user conferences in 2013. And since then we've been working together. We've been at reinvent since essentially 2015. And we've been a premier partner, an Emerald sponsor for the last Nu you know, I think four or five years. And so we're very committed to the relationship and I think there's some things that we have a lot, we have a lot of things in common. We care a lot about customers and for us, our customers, our developers, we care a lot about removing friction from their day to day work to move, be able to move fast and be able to, in order to seize new opportunities and respond to new threats. And so consequently, I think the partnership, obviously by nature of our, our common objectives has really come together. >>Talk about the journey of Mongo. I mean, you look back at the history, I, you go back the old lamp stack days, right? So you know, the day developer traction is just really kind of stuck at the none. I mean, it's, it's really well known. And I remember over the conversations, Dave Mongo doesn't scale. I mean, every year we heard something along those lines cuz it just kept scaling. I heard the same thing with AWS back in 2013 timeframe. You, oh, it's just, it's really not for a real prime time. It's, it's for hobbyists, not so much builders, maybe startup cloud, but that developer traction is translated. Can you take us through the journey of Mongo where it is now and, and kinda look back and, and, and take us through what's the state of the art now, >>Right? So just for those of you who, who, those, you know, those in your audience who don't know too much about Mon Be I'll just, you know, start with the background. The company was astounded by developers. It was basically the CTO and some key developers from Double Click who really saw the challenges and the limitations of the relational database architecture because they're trying to serve billions of ads per day and they constantly need to work on the constraints and relational database. And so they essentially decided, why don't we just build a database that we'd want to use? And that was a catalyst to starting MongoDB. The first thing they focused on was, rather than having a tabler data structure, they focused on a document data structure. Why documents? Because there's much more natural and intuitive to work with data and documents in terms of you can set parent child relationships and how you just think about the relationship with data is much more natural in a document than trying to connect data in a, you know, in hundreds of different tables. >>And so that enabled developers to just move so much faster. The second thing they focused on was building a truly distributed architecture, not kind of some adjunct, you know, you know, architecture that maybe made the existing architecture a little bit more scalable. They really took from the ground up a truly distributed architecture. So where you can do native replication, you can do charting and you can do it on a global basis. And so that was the, the other profound, you know, thing that they did. And then since then, what we've also done is, you know, the document model is truly a super set of other models. So we enabled other capabilities like search you can do joins, so you can do very transaction intensive use case among be where fully asset compliant. So you have the highest forms of data guarantees you can do very sophisticated things like time series, you can do device synchronization, you can do real time analytics because we can carve off read only nodes to be able to read and query data in real time rather than have to offload that data into a data warehouse. >>And so that enables developers to just build a wide variety of, of application longing to be, and they get one unified developer interface. It's highly elegant and seamless. And so essentially the cost and tax of matching multiple point tools goes away when, when I think of the term isv, I think of the notion of someone building an end solution for a customer to get something done. Or what we're building is essentially a developer data platform and we have thousands of ISVs who build software applications on our platform. So how could we be an isv? Because by definition I, you know, we enable people to do so many different things and you know, they can be the, you know, the largest companies in the world trying to transform their business or startups or trying to disrupt either existing industries or create new ones. And so that's, and and that's how our customers view MongoDB and, and the whole Atlas platform basically enables them to do some amazing things. >>Yeah, we're seeing a lot of activity on the Atlas. Do you see yourself as a ISV or you just go with that because that's kind of a nomenclature? >>No, we don't view ourselves as ISV at all. We view ourselves as a developer data platform. And the reason for that is, you know, you know, we believe that what we are enabling developers to do is be able to reduce the friction and the work required to build modern applications through the document model, which is really intuitive to the way developers think and code through the distributed nature of platforms. So, you know, things like sharding, no other company on the planet offers the capabilities we do to enable people to build the most highly performant and scalable applications. And also what we also do is enable people to, you know, run different types of workflows on our platform. So we have obviously transactional, we have search, we have time series, we enable people to do things like sophisticated device synchronization from Edge to the back end. We do graph, we do real time analytics. So being able to consolidate all that with developers on one elegant unified platform really makes, you know, it attractive for developers to build on long ndb. >>You know, the cloud adoption really is putting a lot of pressure on these systems and you're seeing companies in the ecosystem and AWS stepping up, you guys are doing great job, but we're seeing a lot more acceleration around it, on staying on premise for certain use cases. Yet you got the cloud as well growing for workloads and, and you get this hybrid steady state as an operational mode. I call that 10 of the classic cloud adoption track record. You guys are an example of multiple iterations in cloud. You're doing a lot more, we're starting to see this tipping point with others and customers coming kind of on that same pattern. Building platforms on top of aws on top of the primitives, more horsepower, higher level services, industry specific capabilities with data. I mean this is a new kind of cloud, kind of a next generation, you knows next gen you got the classic high performance infrastructure, it's getting better and better, but now you've got this new application platform, you know, reminds me of the old asp, you know, if you will. I mean, so are you seeing customers doing things differently? Can you share your, your reaction to this role of, you know, this new kind of SaaS platform that just isn't an application, it's, it's more, it's deeper than that. What's going on here? We call it super cloud, but >>Like what? Yeah, so essentially what what, you know, a lot of our customers doing, and by the way we have over 37,000 customers of all shapes and sizes from the largest companies in the world to cutting edge startups who are building applications among B, why do they choose MongoDB? Because essentially it's the, you know, the fastest way to innovate and the reason it's the fastest way to innovate is because they can work with data so much easier than working with data on other types of architecture. So the document model is profoundly a breakthrough way to work with data to make it very, very easy. So customers are essentially building these modern applications, you know, applications built on microservices, event driven architectures, you know, addressing sophisticated use cases like time series to, and then ultimately now they're getting into machine learning. We have a bunch of companies building machine learning applications on top of MongoDB. And the reason they're doing that is because one, they get the benefits of being able to, you know, build and work with, with data so much easier than any other platform. And it's highly scale and performant in a way that no other platform is. So literally they can run their, you know, workloads both locally and one, you know, autonomous zone or they can basically be or available zone or they could be basically, you know, anywhere in the world. And we also offer multicloud capabilities, which I can get into later. >>Let's talk about the performance side. I know I was speaking with some Amazon folks every year it's the same story. They're really working on the physics, they're getting the chips, they wanna squeeze as much energy out of that. I've never met a developer that said they wanna run their workload on a slower platform or slower hardware. We know said no developer, right? No one wants to do that. >>Correct. >>So you guys have a lot of experience tuning in with Graviton instances, we're seeing a lot more AWS EC two instances, we're seeing a lot more kind of integrated end to end stories. Data is now security, it's tied into data stacks or data modern kind of data hybrid stack. A lot going on around the hardware performance specialization, the role of data, kind of a modern data stack emerging. What, what's your thoughts on the that that Yeah, >>I, I think if you had asked me, you know, when the cloud started going vogue, like you know, the, you know, the, the later part of the last decade and told me, you know, sitting here 12, 15 years later, would you know, would we be talking about, you know, chip processing speeds? I'd probably thought, nah, we would've moved on by then. But what's really clear is that customers, to your point, customers care about performance, they care about price performance, right? So AWS's investments in Graviton, we have actually deployed a significant portion of our at fleet on Amazon now runs on Graviton. You know, they've built other chip sets like train and, and inferential for like, you know, training models and running inferences. They're doing things like Nitro. And so what that really speaks to is that the cloud providers are focusing on the price performance of their, as you call it, their primitives and their infrastructure and the infrastructure layer that are still very, very important. >>And, and you know, if you look at their revenue, about 60 to 70% of the revenue comes from that pure infrastructure. So to your point, they can't offer a second class solution and still win. So given that now they're seeing a lot of competition from Azure, Azure's building their own chip sets, Google's already obviously doing that and and building specialized chip sets for machine learning. You're seeing these cloud providers compete. So they have to really compete to make their platform the most performant, the most price competitive in the marketplace. Which gives us a great platform to build on to enable developers to build these incredibly highly performant applications that customers are now demand. >>I think that's a really great point. I mean, you know, it's so funny Dave, because you know, I remember those, we don't talk speeds and feeds anymore. We're not talking about boxes. I mean that's old kind of school thinking because it was a data center mentality, speeds and feeds and that was super important. But we're kind of coming back to that in the cloud now in distributed architecture, as you put your platforms out there for developers, you have to run fast. You gotta, you can't give the developer subpar or any kind of performance that's, they'll, they'll go somewhere else. I mean that's the reality of what developers, no one, again, no one says I wanna go on the slower platform unless it's some sort of policy based on price or some sort of thing. But, but for the most part it's gotta run fast. So you got the tail of two clouds going on here, you got Amazon classic ias, keep making it faster under the hood. >>And then you got the new abstraction layers of the higher level services. That's where you guys are bridging this new, new generational shift where it's like, hey, you know what? I can go, I can run a headless application, I can run a SAS app that's refactored with data. So you've seen a lot more innovation with developers, you know, running stuff in, in the C I C D pipeline that was once it, and you're seeing security and data operations kind of emerging as a structural change of how companies are, are are transforming on the business side. What's your reaction to that business transformation and the role of the developer? >>Right, so I mean I have to obviously give amazing kudos to the, you know, to AWS and the Amazon team for what they've built. Obviously they're the ones who kind of created the cloud industry and they continue to push the innovation in the space. I mean today they have over 300 services and you know, obviously, you know, no star today is building anything not on the cloud because they have so many building blocks to start with. But what we though have found from our talking to our customers is that in some ways there is still, you know, the onus is on the customer to figure out which building block to use to be able to stitch together the applications and solutions they wanna build. And what we have done is taken essentially an opinionated point of view and said we will enable you to do that. >>You know, using one data model. You know, Amazon today offers I think 17 or 18 different types of databases. We don't think like, you know, having a tool for every job makes sense because over time the tax and cost of learning, managing and supporting those different applications just don't make a lot of sense or just become cost prohibitive. And so we think offering one data model, one, you know, elegant user experience, you know, one way to address the broadest set of of use cases is that we think is a better way. But clearly customers have choice. They can use Amazon's primitives and those second layer services as you as you described, or they can use us. Unfortunately we've seen a lot of customers come to us with our approach and so does Amazon. And I have to give obviously again kudos and Amazon is very customer obsessed and so we have a great relationship with them, both technically in terms of the product integrations we do as well as working with 'em in the field, you know, on joint customer opportunities. >>Speaking of, while you mentioned that, I wanna just ask you, how is that marketplace relationship going with aws? Some of the partners are really seeing great economic and joint selling or them selling your, your stuff. So there's a real revenue pop there in that religion. Can you comment on that? >>So we had been working the partner in the marketplace for many years now, more from a field point of view where customers could leverage their existing commitments to AWS and leverage essentially, you know, using Atlas and applying in an atlas towards their commits. There was also some sales incentives for people in the field to basically work together so that, you know, everyone won should we collectively win a customer? What we recently announced is as pay as you Go initiative, where literally a customer on the Amazon marketplace can basically turn up, you know, an Alice instance with no commitment. So it's so easy. So we're just pushing the envelope to just reduce the friction for people to use Atlas on aws. And it's working really very well. The uptake has been been very strong and and we feel like we're just getting started because we're so excited about the results we're >>Seeing. You know, one of the things that's kind of not core in the keynote theme, but I think it's underlying message is clear in the industry, is the developer productivity. You said making things easy is a big deal, self-service, getting in and trying, these are what developer friendly tools are like and platform. So I have to ask you, cuz this comes up a lot in our kind of business conversation, is, is if you take digital transformation concept to its completion, assuming now you know, as a thought exercise, you completely transform a company with technology that's, that is the business transformation outcome. Take it to completion. What does that look like? I mean, if you go there you'd say, okay, the company is the app, the company is the data, it's not a department serving the business, it's the business. And so I think this is kind of what we're seeing as the next big mountain climb, which is companies that do transform there, they are technology companies, they're not a department like it. So I think a lot of companies are kind of saying, wait a minute, why would we have a department? It should be the company. What's your your your view on this because this >>Yeah, so I I've had the for good fortune of being able to talk to thousand customers all over the world. And you know, one thing John, they never tell me, they never tell me that they're innovating too quickly. In fact, they always tell me the reverse. They tell me all the obstacles and impediments they have to be able to be able to be able to move fast. So one of the reasons they gravitate to MongoDB is just the speed that they wish they can build applications to, to your point, developer productivity. And by definition, developer productivity is a proxy for innovation. The faster you can make your developers, you know, move, the faster they can push out code, the faster they can iterate and build new solutions or add more capabilities on the existing applications, the faster you can innovate either to, again, seize new opportunities or to respond to new threats in your business. >>And so that resonates with every C level executive. And to your point, the developers not some side hustle that they kind of think about once in a while. It's core to the business. So developers have amassed enormous amount of power and influence. You know, their, their, their engineering teams are front and center in terms of how they think about building capabilities and and building their business. And that's also obviously enabled, you know, to your point, every software company, every company's not becoming a software company because it all starts with softwares, software enables, defines or creates almost every company's value proposition. >>You know, it makes me smile because I love operating systems as one of my hobbies in college was, you know, systems programming and I remember those network kind of like the operating systems, the cloud. So, you know, everything's got specialized capabilities and that's a big theme here at Reinvent. If you look at the announcements Monday night with Peter DeSantis, you got, you got new instances, new chips. So this whole engine kind of specialized component is like an engine. You got a core and you got other subsystems. This is gonna be an integral part of how companies architect their platform or you know, Adam calls it the landing zone or whatever they wanna call it. But you gotta start seeing a new architectural thinking for companies. What's your, can you share your experience on how companies should look at this opportunity as a plethora of more goodness on the hardware? On hardware, but like chips and instances? Cause now you can mix and match. You've got, you've got, you got everything you need to kind of not roll your own but like really build foundational high performance capabilities. >>Yeah, so I I, so I think this is where I think Amazon is really enabling all companies, including, you know, companies like Mon db, you know, push the envelope and innovation. So for example, you know, the, the next big hurdle for us, I think we've seen two big platform shifts over the last 15 years of platform shifts, you know, to mobile and the platform shift to cloud. I believe the next big platform shift is going from dumb apps to smart apps, which you're building in, you know, machine learning and you know, AI and just very sophisticated automation. And when you start automating human decision making, rather than, you know, looking at a dashboard and saying, okay, I see the data now, now I have to do this. You can automate that into your applications and make your applications leveraging real time data become that much more smart. And that ultimately then becomes a developer challenge. And so we feel really good about our position in taking advantage of those next big trends and software leveraging the price performance curves that, you know, Amazon continues to push in terms of their hardware performance, networking performance, you know, you know, price, performance and storage to build those next generation of modern applications. >>Okay, so let me get this straight. You have next generation intelligent smart apps and you have AI generative solutions coming out around the corner. This is like pretty good position for Mongo to be in with data. I mean, this is what you do, you're in that exactly of the action. What's it like? I mean, you must be like trying to shake the world and wake up. The world's starting to wake up now through this. So what's, what's it like? >>Well, I mean we're really excited and bullish about the future. We think that we're well positioned because we know as to your point, you know, we have amassed amazing amount of developer mindshare. We are the most popular modern data platform out there in the world. There's developers in almost every corner of the planet using us to do something. And to your point, leveraging data and these advances in machine learning ai. And we think the more AI becomes democratized, not, you know, done by a bunch of data scientists sitting in some corner office, but essentially enabling developers to have the tools to build these very, very sophisticated, smart applications will, you know, will position as well. So that's, you know, obviously gonna be a focus for us over the, frankly, I think this is gonna be like a 10 year, 10 15 year run and we're just getting started in this whole >>Area. I think you guys are really well positioned. I think that's a great point. And Adam mentioned to me and, and Mike interviewed, he said on stage talk about it, the role of a data analyst kind of goes away. Everyone's a data analyst, right? You'll still see specialization on, on core data engineering, which is kind of like an SRE role for data. So data ops and data as code is a big deal making data applications. So again, exciting times and you guys are well positioned. If you had to bumper sticker the event this week here at Reinvent, what would you, how would you categorize this this point in time? I mean, Adam's great leader, he is gonna help educate customers how to use technology to, for business advantage and transformation. You know, Andy did a great job making technology great and innovative and setting the table, Adam's gotta bring it to the enterprises and businesses. So it's gonna be an interesting point in time we're in now. What, how would you categorize this year's reinvent, >>Right? I think the, the, the tech world is pivoting towards what I'd call rationalization or cost optimization. I think people obviously in, you know, the last 10 years have, you know, it's all about speed, speed, speed. And I think people still value speed, but they wanna do it at some sort of predictable cost model. And I think you're gonna see a lot more focus around cost and cost optimization. That's where we think having one platform is by definition of vendor consolidation way for people to cut costs so that they can basically, you know, still move fast but don't have to incur the tax of using a whole bunch of different point tools. And so we think we're well positioned. So the bumper sticker I think about is essentially, you know, do more for less with MongoDB. >>Yeah. And the developers on the front lines. Great stuff. You guys are great partner, a top partner at AWS and great reflection on, on where you guys been, but really where you are now and great opportunity. David Didier, thank you so much for spending the time and it's been great following Mongo and the continued rise of, of developers of the on the front lines really driving the business and that, and they are, I know, driving the business, so, and I think they're gonna continue Smart apps, intelligent apps, ai, generative apps are coming. I mean this is real. >>Thanks John. It's great speaking with >>You. Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much. Okay.

>> Welcome back to New York City everybody. This is The Cube's coverage of MongoDB World 2022, Dev Ittycheria, here is the president and CEO of MongoDB. Thanks for spending some time with us. >> It's Great to be here Dave, thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So your keynotes this morning, I was hearkening back to Steve Ballmer, running around the stage screaming, developers, developers, developers. You weren't jumping around like a madman, but the message was the same. And you've not deviated from that message. I remember when it was 10th Gen, so you've been consistent. >> Yes. >> Why is Mongo DB so alluring to developers? >> Yeah, because I would say the reason we're so popular Dave is that our whole business was founded on the ethos, so making developers incredibly productive. Just getting the infrastructure out of the way so that the developers is really focused on what's important and that's building great applications that transform their business. And the way you do that is you look at where they spend most of the time. and they spend most of the time working with data. How do you present data, the right data, the right time, at the right place, and the right way. And when you remove the friction of working with data, you unleash so much more productivity, which people just say, oh my goodness, I can move so much faster. Product leaders can get products out the door faster than the competitors. Senior level executives can seize new opportunities or respond to new threats. And that was so profound during COVID when everyone had to think about pivoting their business. >> When you came to MongoDB, why did you choose this company? What was it that excited you about it? >> I get that question a lot. I would say conventional wisdom would suggest that MongoDB was not a great choice. There weren't that many companies who were very successful in open source, Red Hat was the only one. No one had really built a deep technology company in New York city. They say, you got to do it in the valley. And database companies need a lot of capital. Now turns out that raising capital of this past decade was a lot easier, but it still takes a lot of time, and a lot of capitals, you have to have a lot of patience. When I did my diligence, I was actually a VC before I joined MongoDB. The whole next generation database segment was really taking off. And actually I looked at some competing investments to MongoDB, and when I did my diligence, it was clear even then. And this is circa 2012, that MongoDB is way ahead in terms of customer attraction, commercials, and even kind of developer mind share. And so I ended up passing those investments. and then lo and behold, I got a call from a very senior executive recruiter who said, Dev, you got to take a meeting with MongoDB, there's something really interesting going on. And they had raised a lot of capital and they had just not been able to kind of really execute in terms of the opportunity. And they realized they needed to make a change. And so one thing led to another. One of the things that really actually convinced me, is when I did my diligence, I realized the customers they had loved MongoDB. They just really weren't executing on all cylinders. And I always believe you never bet against a company whose customers love the product. And said, that's something here. The second thing I would say is open source. Yes, is true that open source was not very successful, but that was open source 1.0. Open source 2.0, the technology is much better than the commercial options. And so that convinced me. And then New York, I lived in New York a big part of my life. I think New York's a fabulous place to build a business. There's so much talent, your customers are right... You walk out the door, there's customers all over the place. And getting to Europe is very easy, Almost like flying to the west coast. So it's a very central place to build a business. >> And it's easier to fix execution, wouldn't you say? And maybe even go to market than it is to fix a product that customers really don't love. >> Correct, it's much easier to fix leadership issues, culture issues, execution issues. Nailing product market fit is very, very hard. And there were signs, there's still some issues, there's still some rough spots, but there a lot of signs that this company was very, very close, and that's why I took the bet. >> And this is before there was that huge influx of capital into the separating compute from storage and the whole cloud thing, which is interesting. Because you take a company like Cloudera, they got caught up in that and got kind of washed over. And I guess you could argue Hortonworks did too, and they could have dead ended both. And then that just didn't work. But it's interesting to see Mongo, the market kind of came to you. And that really does speak to the product. It wasn't a barrier for you. You guys have obviously a lot of work to get into the cloud with Atlas, but it seemed like a natural fit with the product. It wasn't like a complete fork. >> Well, I think the challenge that we had was we had a lot of adoption, but we had tough time commercializing the business. And at some point I had to tell the all employees, it's great that we have all these people who are using MongoDB, but if you don't start generating revenue, our investors are going to get tired of subsidizing this company. So I had to try and change the culture. And as you imagine, the engineers didn't really like the salespeople, the salespeople thought the engineers didn't really want to make any money. And what I said, like, let's all galvanize around customers and let's make them really excited and try and create a lot of value. And so we just put a lot more discipline in terms of how we prosecuted deals. We put a lot more discipline in terms of what are the problems we're trying to solve. And one thing led to another, we started building the business brick by brick. And one of the things that became clear for me was that the old open source model of trying to find that happy medium between what you give away and what you charge for, is always a tough game. Like because finding that where the paywall is, if you give away too much new features, you don't make any money. If you don't give away enough, you don't have any adoption. So you're caught in this catch-22. The best way to monetize open source, is open source as a service. And we saw Amazon do that frankly. We learned a lot from how Amazon did that. And one of the advantages that MongoDB had that I didn't fully appreciate when I joined the company, but I was very grateful. It is that they had a much more restrictive license. Which we ended up actually changing and made it even more restrictive, which allowed us to perfect ourselves from being cannibalized by the cloud providers, so that we could build our own business using our own IP that we had invested in and create a cloud service. >> That was a huge milestone. And of course you have great relationships with all the cloud providers, but it got contentious there for a while, but, you give the cloud providers an inch, they're going to take a mile. That's just the way, they're aggressive like that. But thank you for going through the history with me a little bit, because when you go back to the IPO, IPO was 2017, right? >> Correct. >> I always tell young investors, my kids especially, don't buy a stock at IPO, you're going to have a better chance, but the window from Mongo was very narrow. So, you didn't really get a much better chance a little bit. And then it's been a rocket ship since then. Sure, there's been some volatility, but you look at some of the big IPOs, like Facebook, or Snap, or even Snowflake, there was better opportunities. But you guys have executed really, really well. That's part of your ethos in your management team. And it came across on the earnings call recently. >> Yep. >> It was very optimistic, yet at the same time you set cautious tones and you got, I think high marks. >> Yes. >> For some of that caution but that execution. So talk about where you feel the business is today given the economic uncertainty? >> Well, what I'd say is we feel really good about the long term. We feel like the secular trends are really in our favor. Software's fundamentally transforming every industry. And people want to use modern software to either automate inefficient processes, enable new capabilities, drive better customer experiences. And the level of performance and scale you need for today's modern applications is profoundly different than applications yesterday. So we think we're well positioned for that. What we said on the earnings call was that we started seeing a moderation of growth, slight moderation of growth in our low end of the business in Europe. It was in our self-serve business and in the SMB space for the NQ1, towards the end of Q1. And we saw a little bit of that show up in the self-serve business in may in Q2. And that's why while we raised guidance, we basically quantified the impact, which is roughly about 30 to 35 million for the year, based on what we saw. And in that assumption, we assumed like... We just can't assume it's going to only be at the low in the market, probably some effect at the enterprise market. Maybe not as much, but there'll be some effect. So we need to factor that in. And we wanted to help kind of investors have some sort of framework to think about what the impact is. We don't want to be one of those companies that said absolutely nothing. And we don't want to be one of those companies that just waves the hand, but then it wasn't really that useful for investors. >> Yeah, I thought it was substantive. You talked about those market trends, you cited three things. The developers recognize that there are limits to legacy RDBMS. You talked about the, what I call point solutions creep. And then the document model is the best for developers. >> Great. >> And when the conversation turned to consumption, everybody's concerned about consumption obviously. You said... My take, somewhat insulated from that because you're running mission critical apps. It's not discretionary. My question to you is, should we rethink the definition of mission-critical? You think of Oracle mission critical running a bank. Mission -critical today in this digital world seems to be different, is that fair? >> Gosh, when's the last time you ever saw a website down? Like if you're running like any kind of digital channel, or engaging with the customers, or your partners, or your suppliers, you need to be up all the time. And so you need a very resilient, highly available data platform. It needs to be highly performance as you add more users, you need to be scale. And we saw a lot of that when COVID hit. Like companies had to completely repovit. And we talked about some examples where like a health and beauty retailer who was all kind of basically retail, had to suddenly pivot to e-commerce strategy. We've had streaming and gaming companies suddenly saw this massive influx of data that they scaled their operations very, very quickly. So I would say anytime you're engaging with customers, customers they're so used to the kind of the consumer facing applications. I almost joke like slow is the old down. If you're not performant, it doesn't matter. They're going to abandon you and go somewhere else. So if you're an e-commerce site and you're not performing well and not serving up the right skews, depending on what they're looking for, they're going to go somewhere else. >> So it's a click away. You talk about a hundred billion TAM, maybe that's even undercounted as you start to bring new capabilities in there. But there's no lack of market for you. >> Correct. >> How do you think about the market opportunity? >> Well, we believe... Again, software is transforming so many industries. IDC says that 715 million applications will be built over the next two to three years by 2025. To put that number of perspective, that's more apps that will be built the next three to four years than were built in the last 40. The rate and pace of innovation is as exploding. And people are building custom applications. Yes, Workday, Salesforce, other companies, commercial companies are great companies, but my competitors can use Workday or Salesforce, some of those commercial companies. That doesn't gimme a competitive advantage, what gives me a competitive advantage is building custom software that better engage my customers, that transforms my business in adding new capabilities or drives more efficiency. And the applications are only getting smarter. And so you're seeing that innovation explode and that plays to our strength. People need platforms like MongoDB to build the next generation of applications. >> So Atlas is now roughly 60% of your business, think is growing at 85%. So it's at least the midterm future. But my question to you is, is it the future? 'Cause when we start to think about the edge, it's not necessarily the cloud. You're not going to be able to go that round trip and the latency. And we had Verizon on earlier, talking about what they're doing with 5G, and the Mobile Edge. Is Mongo positioning for that edge? And is our definition of cloud changing? Where it's not just OnPrem and across clouds, but it's also out to the edge, this continuous experience. >> So I'll make two points. One, definitely we believe the applications of the future will be mobile first or purely mobile. Because one with the advent of 5G, the distinction between mobile and web is going to blur, with a hundred times faster networking speeds. But the second point I make is that how that shows up on our revenue on our income table will look like Atlas. Because we don't charge nothing for the end point, it's basically driving consumption of the back end. And so we've introduced a bunch of very, very sophisticated capabilities to synchronized data from the edge to the backend and vice versa with things like flexible sync. So we see so many customers now using that capability, whether you're field service technicians, whether you're a mobile first company, et cetera. So that will drive Atlas revenue. So on an income statement, it'll look like Atlas, but we're obviously addressing those broader set of mobile needs. >> You talk a lot about product market fit former VC, of course, Mark Andreen says, product market fit you kind of know when you see it, your hair's on fire, you can't buy a service. How do you know when you have product market fit? >> Well, one, we have the luxury of lots of customers. So they tell us pretty clearly when they're happy, and we can see that by usage behavior. Now the other benefit of a cloud service, is we can see the level of activity. We can see the level of engagement. We can see how much data they're consuming. We can see all the actions they're taking. So you get the fidelity of feedback you get from Atlas versus someone doing something behind their own firewall. And you kind of call 'em and check in on them is very, very different. So that level of insight gives us visibility in terms of what products and features have been used, gives us a sense how things going well, or is there something awry. Maybe they have misconfigured something or they don't know how to use some capabilities. So the level of engagement that we can have with a customer using a service is so much different. And so we've really invested in our customer success organization. So the byproduct of that is that our retention rates are also very, very strong. Because you have such better information about what's happening in terms of your customers. >> See retention in real time. You've been somewhat... Is just so hard to say this 'cause you're growing at 50% a year. But you're somewhat conservative about the pace of hiring for go to market. And I'm curious as to how you think about scaling, especially when you introduce new products. Atlas is several years ago. But as you extend your capabilities and add new products, how do you decide when to scale? >> So it's a constant process. We've been quite aggressive in scaling organization for a couple reasons. One, we have very low market share, so the market's vastly under penetrated. We still don't have reps in every NFL sitting in the United States, which just kind of crazy. There's other parts of the world that we are just still vastly under penetrated in. But we also look at how those organizations are doing. So if we see a team really killing it, we're going to deploy more resources. Because one, it tells us there's more opportunity there, and there's a strong team there. If we see a team that maybe is struggling a little bit, we'll try and uncover. Rather than just applying more resources in, we'll try and uncover what are the issues and make sure we stabilize the organization and then devote resources. It's all in the measure of like being very disciplined about where we deploy our resources, to get those kind of returns. And on the product side, we obviously go through a very iterative process and kind of do rank order all the projects and what we think the expected returns are. Obviously, we look at the customer feedback, we look at what our strategic priorities are. And that informs what projects we fund and what projects kind of are below the line. And we do that over and over again every quarter. So every quarter we revisit the business, we have a very QBR centric culture. So we're constantly checking in and seeing how the business is operating. And then we make those investment decisions. In general, we've been investing very aggressively in terms of expanding our reach around the world. >> It seems like, well, with Mongo, your product portfolios... From an outside observer standpoint, it seems like you've always had pretty good product market fit. But I was curious, in your VC days, would you ever encourage companies to scale go to market prior to having confidence in product market fit? Or did you always see those as sequential activities? >> Well, I think the challenge is this part it's analysis part is judgment. So you don't necessarily have to have perfect product market fit to start investing. But you also don't want to plow a bunch of resources and realize the product doesn't work and then how you're burning through a lot of cash. So there's a little bit of art to the process. When I joined MongoDB, I could tell that we had a strong engineering team. They knew how to build high quality products, but we just struggled with commercialization. The culture wasn't great across the company. And we had some leadership challenges. So that's when I joined, I kind of focused on those things and tried to bring the organization together. And slowly we started chipping away and making people feel like they were winners. And once you start winning, that becomes contagious. And then the nice thing is when you start winning, you get a lot more customer feedback. That feedback helps you refine your products even more, which then adds... It's like the flywheel effect that starts taking off. >> So it seems the culture's working now. Do you have a favorite product from the announcements today? >> Well, I really like our foray to analytics. And essentially what we're seeing is really two big trends. One you're seeing applications get smarter. What applications are doing is really automating a lot of processes and rather than someone having to press a button. Based on analytics, you can automate a lot of decision making. So that's one theme that we're seeing as applications get smarter. The second theme is that people want more and more insight in terms of what's happening. And the source of that is insights is your operational database. Because that's where you're having transactions, that's where you know what products are selling, that's where you know what customers are buying. So people want more and more real time data versus waiting to take that data, put it somewhere else and then run reports and then get some update at the end of the night or maybe at the week. So that's driving a lot of really interesting use cases. And especially when you marry in things like time series use cases where you're collecting a lot of data people want to see trend analysis what's happening. Which I think it's a very exciting area. We introduced a very cool feature called Queryable Encryption, which basically... The problem with encrypting data, is you can't really query it because my definition's encrypted. >> Yeah, you're right. >> But obviously data security is very important. What we announced, is we're using very sophisticated cryptography. People can query the data, but they don't have really access to the data. So it really protects you from like data breaches or malicious users accessing your data, but you still can kind of make that data usable. So that was a very interesting announcer that we made today. >> Sounds like magic without the performance hit. >> Yes. >> You can do that. Dev, thanks so much for coming in The Cube. Congratulations on all activity, bumper sticker on day one. >> Oh, it's super exciting. The energy was palpable, 3,300 people in the room, lots of customers, lots of users. We had lots of investors here as well for our investor day, have a dinner tonight with a bunch of senior execs, so it's been a busy day. >> Future is bright for MongoBD. Dev, thanks for so much for coming on The Cube. And thanks for watching, this is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

(soft techno upbeat music) >> Hi there. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Dave Villante with Paul Gillon. Reinvent day one and a half. We started last night, Monday, theCUBE after dark. Now we're going wall to wall. Today. Today was of course the big keynote, Adam Selipsky, kind of the baton now handing, you know, last year when he did his keynote, he was very new. He was sort of still getting his feet wet and finding his guru swing. Settling in a little bit more this year, learning a lot more, getting deeper into the tech, but of course, sharing the love with other leaders like Peter DeSantis. Tomorrow's going to be Swamy in the keynote. Adrian Cockcroft is here. Former AWS, former network Netflix CTO, currently an analyst. You got your own firm now. You're out there. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks. >> We heard you on at Super Cloud, you gave some really good insights there back in August. So now as an outsider, you come in obviously, you got to be impressed with the size and the ecosystem and the energy. Of course. What were your thoughts on, you know what you've seen so far, today's keynotes, last night Peter DeSantis, what stood out to you? >> Yeah, I think it's great to be back at Reinvent again. We're kind of pretty much back to where we were before the pandemic sort of shut it down. This is a little, it's almost as big as the, the largest one that we had before. And everyone's turned up. It just feels like we're back. So that's really good to see. And it's a slightly different style. I think there were was more sort of video production things happening. I think in this keynote, more storytelling. I'm not sure it really all stitched together very well. Right. Some of the stories like, how does that follow that? So there were a few things there and some of there were spelling mistakes on the slides, you know that ELT instead of ETL and they spelled ZFS wrong and something. So it just seemed like there was, I'm not quite sure just maybe a few things were sort of rushed at the last minute. >> Not really AWS like, was it? It's kind of remind the Patriots Paul, you know Bill Belichick's teams are fumbling all over the place. >> That's right. That's right. >> Part of it may be, I mean the sort of the market. They have a leader in marketing right now but they're going to have a CMO. So that's sort of maybe as lack of a single threaded leader for this thing. Everything's being shared around a bit more. So maybe, I mean, it's all fixable and it's mine. This is minor stuff. I'm just sort of looking at it and going there's a few things that looked like they were not quite as good as they could have been in the way it was put together. Right? >> But I mean, you're taking a, you know a year of not doing Reinvent. Yeah. Being isolated. You know, we've certainly seen it with theCUBE. It's like, okay, it's not like riding a bike. You know, things that, you know you got to kind of relearn the muscle memories. It's more like golf than is bicycle riding. >> Well I've done AWS keynotes myself. And they are pretty much scrambled. It looks nice, but there's a lot of scrambling leading up to when it actually goes. Right? And sometimes you can, you sometimes see a little kind of the edges of that, and sometimes it's much more polished. But you know, overall it's pretty good. I think Peter DeSantis keynote yesterday was a lot of really good meat there. There was some nice presentations, and some great announcements there. And today I was, I thought I was a little disappointed with some of the, I thought they could have been more. I think the way Andy Jesse did it, he crammed more announcements into his keynote, and Adam seems to be taking sort of a bit more of a measured approach. There were a few things he picked up on and then I'm expecting more to be spread throughout the rest of the day. >> This was more poetic. Right? He took the universe as the analogy for data, the ocean for security. Right? The Antarctic was sort of. >> Yeah. It looked pretty, >> yeah. >> But I'm not sure that was like, we're not here really to watch nature videos >> As analysts and journalists, You're like, come on. >> Yeah, >> Give it the meat >> That was kind the thing, yeah, >> It has always been the AWS has always been Reinvent has always been a shock at our approach. 100, 150 announcements. And they're really, that kind of pressure seems to be off them now. Their position at the top of the market seems to be unshakeable. There's no clear competition that's creeping up behind them. So how does that affect the messaging you think that AWS brings to market when it doesn't really have to prove that it's a leader anymore? It can go after maybe more of the niche markets or fix the stuff that's a little broken more fine tuning than grandiose statements. >> I think so AWS for a long time was so far out that they basically said, "We don't think about the competition, we are listen to the customers." And that was always the statement that works as long as you're always in the lead, right? Because you are introducing the new idea to the customer. Nobody else got there first. So that was the case. But in a few areas they aren't leading. Right? You could argue in machine learning, not necessarily leading in sustainability. They're not leading and they don't want to talk about some of these areas and-- >> Database. I mean arguably, >> They're pretty strong there, but the areas when you are behind, it's like they kind of know how to play offense. But when you're playing defense, it's a different set of game. You're playing a different game and it's hard to be good at both. I think and I'm not sure that they're really used to following somebody into a market and making a success of that. So there's something, it's a little harder. Do you see what I mean? >> I get opinion on this. So when I say database, David Foyer was two years ago, predicted AWS is going to have to converge somehow. They have no choice. And they sort of touched on that today, right? Eliminating ETL, that's one thing. But Aurora to Redshift. >> Yeah. >> You know, end to end. I'm not sure it's totally, they're fully end to end >> That's a really good, that is an excellent piece of work, because there's a lot of work that it eliminates. There's are clear pain points, but then you've got sort of the competing thing, is like the MongoDB and it's like, it's just a way with one database keeps it simple. >> Snowflake, >> Or you've got on Snowflake maybe you've got all these 20 different things you're trying to integrate at AWS, but it's kind of like you have a bag of Lego bricks. It's my favorite analogy, right? You want a toy for Christmas, you want a toy formula one racing car since that seems to be the theme, right? >> Okay. Do you want the fully built model that you can play with right now? Or do you want the Lego version that you have to spend three days building. Right? And AWS is the Lego technique thing. You have to spend some time building it, but once you've built it, you can evolve it, and you'll still be playing those are still good bricks years later. Whereas that prebuilt to probably broken gathering dust, right? So there's something about having an vulnerable architecture which is harder to get into, but more durable in the long term. And so AWS tends to play the long game in many ways. And that's one of the elements that they do that and that's good, but it makes it hard to consume for enterprise buyers that are used to getting it with a bow on top. And here's the solution. You know? >> And Paul, that was always Andy Chassy's answer to when we would ask him, you know, all these primitives you're going to make it simpler. You see the primitives give us the advantage to turn on a dime in the marketplace. And that's true. >> Yeah. So you're saying, you know, you take all these things together and you wrap it up, and you put a snowflake on top, and now you've got a simple thing or a Mongo or Mongo atlas or whatever. So you've got these layered platforms now which are making it simpler to consume, but now you're kind of, you know, you're all stuck in that ecosystem, you know, so it's like what layer of abstractions do you want to tie yourself to, right? >> The data bricks coming at it from more of an open source approach. But it's similar. >> We're seeing Amazon direct more into vertical markets. They spotlighted what Goldman Sachs is doing on their platform. They've got a variety of platforms that are supposedly targeted custom built for vertical markets. How do successful do you see that play being? Is this something that the customers you think are looking for, a fully integrated Amazon solution? >> I think so. There's usually if you look at, you know the MongoDB or data stacks, or the other sort of or elastic, you know, they've got the specific solution with the people that really are developing the core technology, there's open source equivalent version. The AWS is running, and it's usually maybe they've got a price advantage or it's, you know there's some data integration in there or it's somehow easier to integrate but it's not stopping those companies from growing. And what it's doing is it's endorsing that platform. So if you look at the collection of databases that have been around over the last few years, now you've got basically Elastic Mongo and Cassandra, you know the data stacks as being endorsed by the cloud vendors. These are winners. They're going to be around for a very long time. You can build yourself on that architecture. But what happened to Couch base and you know, a few of the other ones, you know, they don't really fit. Like how you going to bait? If you are now becoming an also ran, because you didn't get cloned by the cloud vendor. So the customers are going is that a safe place to be, right? >> But isn't it, don't they want to encourage those partners though in the name of building the marketplace ecosystem? >> Yeah. >> This is huge. >> But certainly the platform, yeah, the platform encourages people to do more. And there's always room around the edge. But the mainstream customers like that really like spending the good money, are looking for something that's got a long term life to it. Right? They're looking for a long commitment to that technology and that it's going to be invested in and grow. And the fact that the cloud providers are adopting and particularly AWS is adopting some of these technologies means that is a very long term commitment. You can base, you know, you can bet your future architecture on that for a decade probably. >> So they have to pick winners. >> Yeah. So it's sort of picking winners. And then if you're the open source company that's now got AWS turning up, you have to then leverage it and use that as a way to grow the market. And I think Mongo have done an excellent job of that. I mean, they're top level sponsors of Reinvent, and they're out there messaging that and doing a good job of showing people how to layer on top of AWS and make it a win-win both sides. >> So ever since we've been in the business, you hear the narrative hardware's going to die. It's just, you know, it's commodity and there's some truth to that. But hardware's actually driving good gross margins for the Cisco's of the world. Storage companies have always made good margins. Servers maybe not so much, 'cause Intel sucked all the margin out of it. But let's face it, AWS makes most of its money. We know on compute, it's got 25 plus percent operating margins depending on the seasonality there. What do you think happens long term to the infrastructure layer discussion? Okay, commodity cloud, you know, we talk about super cloud. Do you think that AWS, and the other cloud vendors that infrastructure, IS gets commoditized and they have to go up market or you see that continuing I mean history would say that still good margins in hardware. What are your thoughts on that? >> It's not commoditizing, it's becoming more specific. We've got all these accelerators and custom chips now, and this is something, this almost goes back. I mean, I was with some micro systems 20,30 years ago and we developed our own chips and HP developed their own chips and SGI mips, right? We were like, the architectures were all squabbling of who had the best processor chips and it took years to get chips that worked. Now if you make a chip and it doesn't work immediately, you screwed up somewhere right? It's become the technology of building these immensely complicated powerful chips that has become commoditized. So the cost of building a custom chip, is now getting to the point where Apple and Amazon, your Apple laptop has got full custom chips your phone, your iPhone, whatever and you're getting Google making custom chips and we've got Nvidia now getting into CPUs as well as GPUs. So we're seeing that the ability to build a custom chip, is becoming something that everyone is leveraging. And the cost of doing that is coming down to startups are doing it. So we're going to see many, many more, much more innovation I think, and this is like Intel and AMD are, you know they've got the compatibility legacy, but of the most powerful, most interesting new things I think are going to be custom. And we're seeing that with Graviton three particular in the three E that was announced last night with like 30, 40% whatever it was, more performance for HPC workloads. And that's, you know, the HPC market is going to have to deal with cloud. I mean they are starting to, and I was at Supercomputing a few weeks ago and they are tiptoeing around the edge of cloud, but those supercomputers are water cold. They are monsters. I mean you go around supercomputing, there are plumbing vendors on the booth. >> Of course. Yeah. >> Right? And they're highly concentrated systems, and that's really the only difference, is like, is it water cooler or echo? The rest of the technology stack is pretty much off the shelf stuff with a few tweets software. >> You point about, you know, the chips and what AWS is doing. The Annapurna acquisition. >> Yeah. >> They're on a dramatically different curve now. I think it comes down to, again, David Floyd's premise, really comes down to volume. The arm wafer volumes are 10 x those of X 86, volume always wins. And the economics of semis. >> That kind of got us there. But now there's also a risk five coming along if you, in terms of licensing is becoming one of the bottlenecks. Like if the cost of building a chip is really low, then it comes down to licensing costs and do you want to pay the arm license And the risk five is an open source chip set which some people are starting to use for things. So your dis controller may have a risk five in it, for example, nowadays, those kinds of things. So I think that's kind of the the dynamic that's playing out. There's a lot of innovation in hardware to come in the next few years. There's a thing called CXL compute express link which is going to be really interesting. I think that's probably two years out, before we start seeing it for real. But it lets you put glue together entire rack in a very flexible way. So just, and that's the entire industry coming together around a single standard, the whole industry except for Amazon, in fact just about. >> Well, but maybe I think eventually they'll get there. Don't use system on a chip CXL. >> I have no idea whether I have no knowledge about whether going to do anything CXL. >> Presuming I'm not trying to tap anything confidential. It just makes sense that they would do a system on chip. It makes sense that they would do something like CXL. Why not adopt the standard, if it's going to be as the cost. >> Yeah. And so that was one of the things out of zip computing. The other thing is the low latency networking with the elastic fabric adapter EFA and the extensions to that that were announced last night. They doubled the throughput. So you get twice the capacity on the nitro chip. And then the other thing was this, this is a bit technical, but this scalable datagram protocol that they've got which basically says, if I want to send a message, a packet from one machine to another machine, instead of sending it over one wire, I consider it over 16 wires in parallel. And I will just flood the network with all the packets and they can arrive in any order. This is why it isn't done normally. TCP is in order, the packets come in order they're supposed to, but this is fully flooding them around with its own fast retry and then they get reassembled at the other end. So they're not just using this now for HPC workloads. They've turned it on for TCP for just without any change to your application. If you are trying to move a large piece of data between two machines, and you're just pushing it down a network, a single connection, it takes it from five gigabits per second to 25 gigabits per second. A five x speed up, with a protocol tweak that's run by the Nitro, this is super interesting. >> Probably want to get all that AIML that stuff is going on. >> Well, the AIML stuff is leveraging it underneath, but this is for everybody. Like you're just copying data around, right? And you're limited, "Hey this is going to get there five times faster, pushing a big enough chunk of data around." So this is turning on gradually as the nitro five comes out, and you have to enable it at the instance level. But it's a super interesting announcement from last night. >> So the bottom line bumper sticker on commoditization is what? >> I don't think so. I mean what's the APIs? Your arm compatible, your Intel X 86 compatible or your maybe risk five one day compatible in the cloud. And those are the APIs, right? That's the commodity level. And the software is now, the software ecosystem is super portable across those as we're seeing with Apple moving from Intel to it's really not an issue, right? The software and the tooling is all there to do that. But underneath that, we're going to see an arms race between the top providers as they all try and develop faster chips for doing more specific things. We've got cranium for training, that instance has they announced it last year with 800 gigabits going out of a single instance, 800 gigabits or no, but this year they doubled it. Yeah. So 1.6 terabytes out of a single machine, right? That's insane, right? But what you're doing is you're putting together hundreds or thousands of those to solve the big machine learning training problems. These super, these enormous clusters that they're being formed for doing these massive problems. And there is a market now, for these incredibly large supercomputer clusters built for doing AI. That's all bandwidth limited. >> And you think about the timeframe from design to tape out. >> Yeah. >> Is just getting compressed It's relative. >> It is. >> Six is going the other way >> The tooling is all there. Yeah. >> Fantastic. Adrian, always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much. >> Yeah. >> Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thank you Paul. >> Cheers. All right. Keep it right there everybody. Don't forget, go to thecube.net, you'll see all these videos. Go to siliconangle.com, We've got features with Adam Selipsky, we got my breaking analysis, we have another feature with MongoDB's, Dev Ittycheria, Ali Ghodsi, as well Frank Sluman tomorrow. So check that out. Keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech, right back. (soft techno upbeat music)

(intense orchestral music) >> 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 gonna be having that conversation with Meagen Eisenberg who's the CMO of MongoDB, Meagen welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Well so, we're gonna 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 opensource company and so that means that that has some specific marketing challenges it recently went through an IPO, and the marketing role in IPO is especially interesting, but very importantly here's where I wanna 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 gonna 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 utilized the technology it's kinda this underlying from a product orientation to a services orientation it has a continuous relationship. >> Yes, that's right. >> Especially in the opensource 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 are user are using the product. You know, we wanna 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 you know, if we think of all size businesses there's thousands if not 10s of thousands of databases and applications, so we wanna 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 lemme amplify wat 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 wanna 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, do 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 the, many years ago I had a conversation with a CEO who's now worth billions of dollars, and I asked specifically, I thought that marketing had been essential to his success, and he said something very interesting, he said ah, marketing, that's what I put between my engineers and my sales people so they don't kill each other. (Meagen laughs) That can't be the role of marketing in a community-oriented company. Tell us about how marketing stands in a collaborative relationship between, with product and sales at MongoDB. >> Sure, so, I mean for myself personally as a CMO, I think the success of marketing is it's relationships not only with sales but with engineering, and that they're really, sales I see as a 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 a 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 a 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, hook the user in. >> So marketing helps sustain that journey, but also, also being, ensuring that sales is getting the appropriate information and insight on what customers are doing, but it's much more, it's multi-nodal 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 into the risk profile changes, and very importantly, especially for a company like MongoDB, as the number of use cases explodes. >> Yes, yeah I mean it's a good point, we are, from a marketing standpoint we're going directed developers who wanna 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 that's, 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 Martec stack, and we've sunset 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 is really optimized for that customer experience. >> Yeah, it's creating some sort of value with customers, not a distraction, not an annoyance. But if you think about it, another CMO once said, here on theCUBE, that they kinda summarize some of the new role marketing, is that marketing is creating the community, and marking is sustaining the community, where a community really is defined as people who are doing something in common. So your customers are trying to imply this technology that has enormous flexibility, I'm gonna ask you to explain a little bit about that in a second, we're not gonna get too deep, to a lot of new use cases, and that's what your users are trying to do bringing those together so they can share insights share experience, improve the quality tool, speed the process, the rate at which it all happens, there's gotta be a central feature of the marketing mission at MongoDB, is that right? >> Yes, definitely, I mean we're very 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, you know, things that they've learned that they wanna share, we have a pretty detailed documentation for new folks, we have a MongoDB university where we've had over 800 thousand developers take courses, it's definitely a highly engaged group that wants to innovate, and they wanna use the hottest technology, they don't wanna be on Legacy. You know, Legacy databases came out 40 years ago, the likes of Oracle, right, that was designed before cloud before mobile, before the volume and 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 wanna build that, the developer community, and make sure that engagement's strong while at the same time, obviously, sustaining relationships with other personas who are gonna 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 ya, 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 at 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 anywere, 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 opensource approach trying to ensure that there's a high quality offering associated with that promise, >> Sure. >> You're deploying it on a lot of different platforms, cloud, not cloud, so that people don't face fundamental infrastructure complaints as 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're, we've set it in a way where no matter where you are in the world or who you wanna 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, you know, you're not worried about the operational overload that comes with relational or Legacy databases. >> So we've talked a little bit 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 that marketing plays within IPOs, you've got finance with a very very well defined role, sales typically has a very well defined role, but marketing's trying 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 from a financial standpoint. You got, you joined MongoDB three years ago. >> Yes, yes three years ago. >> You had an IPO about halfway in your tenure. >> Yes. >> 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 Dev Ittycheria 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, you know, if you're not hyping the market, you can keep doing what you've been doing you can keep running 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, you know, that timing, 'cause you can't line those up too soon, you've gotta make sure everything's a go, and, you know, it really worked out and now we're just excited about the future of the market, 60 billion dollar market by 2020 according to IDC, so we've got a massive opportunity in front of us, so what can we do, certainly from a marketing standpoint, what do I need to be doing to get on that and work through that. >> So MongoDB is a growth company, you know, good solid set of employees, tell us a little bit about how marketing's role is gonna change in the next couple years, as MongoDB tries to grab more of this 60 billion dollar opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean we 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 SA- SIs like Accenture and Infosys and Wipro who have modern, you know, they're 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 we're excited to see-- >> Congratulations! That's not bad. (laughing) >> Thank you, yeah, thank you. That's a, you know, really exciting part of the business and so much moving to the cloud it's the right place to be, I feel like we've done a great job really, you know, looking at where we need to be and then highlighting that in the markets. >> So last question Meagen would be Mongo is carving out an interesting spot for itself within the marketplace and as you focus on customers, customers are increasingly dictating how the market's gonna 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 in what the customer needs, drive them to this modernization while at the same time acknowledging, recognizing, that they can't change everything on day one, that you have to coexist? >> Yeah, so, I mean MongoDB is doing a lot of work around migrations, making it very easy and frictionless. If you're gonna 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. >> Alright, Meagen 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. (intense orchestral music)