>> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>> Man Offscreen: Standby. Dave is coming you in 5, 4, 3, 2. >> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Wikibon Action Item. (electronic music) Once again, we're broadcasting from theCUBE studios in beautiful Palo Alto. Here in the studio with me are George Gilbert and David Floyer. And remote, we have Neil Raden and Jim Kobielus. Welcome everybody. >> David: Thank you. >> So this is kind of an interesting topic that we're going to talk about this week. And it really is how are we going to find new ways to generate derivative use out of many of the applications, especially web-based applications that are have been built over the last 20 years. A basic premise of digital business is that the difference between business and digital business is the data and how you craft data as an asset. Well, as we all know in any universal Turing machine, data is the basis for representing both the things that you're acting upon but also the algorithms, the software itself. Software is data and the basic principles of how we capture software oriented data assets or software assets and then turn them into derivative sources of value and then reapply them to new types of problems is going to become an increasingly important issue as we think about the world of digital business is going to play over the course of the next few years. Now, there are a lot of different domains where this might work but one in particular that's especially as important is in the web application world where we've had a lot of application developers and a lot of tools be a little bit more focused on how we use web based services to manipulate things and get software to do the things we want to do and also it's a source of a lot of the data that's been streaming into big data applications. And so it's a natural place to think about how we're going to be able to create derivative use or derivative value out of crucial software assets. How are we going to capture those assets, turn them into something that has a different role for the business, performs different types of work, and then reapply them. So to start the conversation, Jim Kobielus. Why don't you take us through what some of these tools start to look like. >> Hello, Peter. Yes, so really what we're looking at here, in order to capture these assets, the web applications, we first have to generate those applications and the bulk of that worker course is and remains manual. And in fact, there is a proliferation of web application development frameworks on the market and the range of them continues to grow. Everything from React to Angular to Ember and Node.js and so forth. So one of the core issues that we're seeing out there in the development world is... are there too many of these. Is there any prospect for simplification and consolidation and convergence on web application development framework to make the front-end choices for developers a bit easier and straightforward in terms of the front-end development of JavaScript and HTML as well as the back-end development of the logic to handle the interactions; not only with the front-end on the UI side but also with the infrastructure web services and so forth. Once you've developed the applications, you, a professional programmer, then and only then can we consider the derivative uses you're describing such as incorporation or orchestration of web apps through robotic process automation and so forth. So the issue is how can we simplify or is there a trend toward simplification or will there soon be a trend towards simplification of a front-end manual development. And right now, I'm not seeing a whole lot of action in this direction of a simplification on the front-end development. It's just a fact. >> So we're not seeing a lot of simplification and convergence on the actual frameworks for creating software or creating these types of applications. But we're starting to see some interesting trends for stuff that's already been created. How can we generate derivative use out of it? And also per some of our augmented programming research, new ways of envisioning the role that artificial intelligence machine learning, etc, can play in identifying patterns of utilization so that we are better able to target those types of things that could be used for derivative or could be applied to derivative use. Have I got that right, Jim? >> Yeah, exactly. AI within robotic process automation, anything that could has already been built can be captured through natural language processing, through a computer image recognition, OCR, and so forth. And then trans, in that way, it's an asset that can be repurposed in countless ways and that's the beauty RPA or where it's going. So the issue is then not so much capture of existing assets but how can we speed up and really automate the original development of all that UI logic? I think RPA is part of the solution but not the entire solution, meaning RPA provides visual front-end tools for the rest of us to orchestrate more of the front-end development of the application UI and interaction logic. >> And it's also popping up-- >> That's part of broader low-code-- >> Yeah, it's also popping up at a lot of the interviews that we're doing with CIOs about related types of things but I want to scope this appropriately. So we're not talking about how we're going to take those transaction processing applications, David Floyer, and envelope them and containerize them and segment them and apply a new software. That's not what we're talking about, nor are we talking about the machine to machine world. Robot process automation really is a tool for creating robots out of human time interfaces that can scale the amount of work and recombine it in different ways. But we're not really talking about the two extremes. The hardcore IoT or the hardcore systems of record. Right? >> Absolutely. But one question I have for Jim and yourself is the philosophy for most people developing these days is mobile first. The days of having an HTML layout on a screen have gone. If you aren't mobile first, that's going to be pretty well a disaster for any particular development. So Jim, how does RPA and how does your discussion fit in with mobile and all of the complexity that mobile brings? All of the alternative ways that you can do things with mobile. >> Yeah. Well David, of course, low-code tools, there are many. There are dozens out there. There are many of those that are geared towards primarily supporting of fast automated development of mobile applications to run on a variety of devices and you know, mobile UIs. That's part of the solution as it were but also in the standard web application development world. know there's these frameworks that I've described. Everything from React to Angular to Vue to Ember, everything else, are moving towards a concept, more than concept, it's a framework or paradigm called progressive web apps. And what progressive web apps are all about, that's really the mainstream of web application development now is blurring the distinction between mobile and web and desktop applications because you build applications, JavaScript applications for browsers. The apps look and behave as if they were real-time interactive in memory mobile apps. What that means is that they download fresh content throughout a browsing session progressively. I'm putting to determine air quotes because that's where the progressive web app comes in. And they don't require the end-user to visit an app store or download software. They don't require anything in terms of any special capabilities in terms of synchronizing data from servers to run in memory natively inside of web accessible containers that are local to the browser. They just feel mobile even though they, excuse me, they may be running on a standard desktop with narrowband connectivity and so forth. So they scream and they scream in the context of their standard JavaScript Ajax browser obsession. >> So when we think about this it got, jeez Jim it almost sounds like like client-side Java but I think you're we're talking about something, as you said, that that evolves as the customer uses it and there's a lot of techniques and approaches that we've been using to do some of those things. But George Gilbert, the reason I bring up the notion of client-side Java is because we've seen other initiatives over the years try to do this. Now, partly they failed because, David Floyer, they focused on too much and tried to standardize or presume that everything required a common approach and we know that that's always going to fail. But what are some of the other things that we need to think about as we think about ways of creating derivative use out of software or in digital assets. >> Okay, so. I come at it from two angles. And as Jim pointed out, there's been a Cambrian explosion of creativity and innovation on frankly on client-side development and server-side development. But if you look at how we're going to recombine our application assets, we tried 20 years ago with EAI but that was, and it's sort of like MuleSoft but only was for on-prem apps. And it didn't work because every app was bespoke essentially-- >> Well, it worked for point-to-point classes of applications. >> Yeah, but it required bespoke development for every-- >> Peter: Correct. >> Every instance because the apps were so customized. >> Peter: And the interfaces were so customized. >> Yes. At the same time we were trying to build higher-level application development capabilities on desktop productivity tools with macros and then scripting languages, cross application, and visual development or using applications as visual development building blocks. Now, you put those two things together and you have the ability to work with user interfaces by building on, I'm sorry, to work with applications that have user interfaces and you have the functionality that's in the richer enterprise applications and now we have the technology to say let's program by example on essentially a concrete use case and a concrete workflow. And then you go back in and you progressively generalize it so it can handle more exception conditions and edge conditions. In other words, you start with... it's like you start with the concrete and you get progressively more abstract. >> Peter: You start with the work that the application performs. >> Yeah. >> And not knowledge of the application itself. >> Yes. But the key thing is, as you said, recombining assets because we're sort of marrying the best of EAI world with the best of the visual client-side development world. Where, as Jim points out, machine learning is making it easier for the tools to stay up to date as the user interfaces change across releases. This means that, I wouldn't say this as easy as spreadsheet development, it's just not. >> It's not like building spreadsheet macros but it's more along those lines. >> Yeah, but it's not as low-level as just building raw JavaScript because, and Jim's great example of JavaScript client-side frameworks. Look at our Gmail inbox application that millions of people use. That just downloads a new version whenever they want to drop it and they're just shipping JavaScript over to us. But the the key thing and this is, Peter, your point about digital business. By combining user interfaces, we can bridge applications that were silos then we can automate the work the humans were doing to bridge those silos and then we can reconstitute workflows in much more efficient-- >> Around the digital assets, which is kind of how business ultimately evolves. And that's a crucial element of this whole thing. So let's change direction a little bit because we're talking about, as Jim said, we've been talking about the fact that there are all these frameworks out there. There may be some consolidation on the horizon, we're researching that right now. Although there's not a lot of evidence that it's happening but there clearly is an enormous number of digital assets that are in place inside these web-based applications, whether it be relative to mobile or something else. And we want to find derivative use of or we want to create derivative use out of them and there's some new tools that allow us to do that in a relatively simple straightforward way, like RPA and there are certainly others. But that's not where this ends up. We know that this is increasingly going to be a target for AI, what we've been calling augmented programming and the ability to use machine learning and related types of technologies to be able to reveal, make transparent, gain visibility into, patterns within applications and within the use of data and then have that become a crucial feature of the development process. And increasingly even potentially to start actually creating code automatically based on very clear guidance about what work needs to be performed. Jim, what's happening in that world right now? >> Oh, let's see. So basically, I think what's going to happen over time is that more of the development cycle for web applications will incorporate not just the derivative assets, the AI to be able to decompose existing UI elements and recombine them. Enable flexible and automated recombination in various ways but also will enable greater tuning of the UI in an automated fashion through A/B testing that's in line to the development cycle based on metrics that AI is able to sift through in terms of... different UI designs can be put out into production applications in real time and then really tested with different categories of users and then the best suited or best fit a design based on like reducing user abandonment rates and speeding up access to commonly required capabilities and so forth. The metrics can be rolled in line to the automation process to automatically select the best fit UI design that had been developed through automated means. In other words, this real-world experimentation of the UI has been going on for quite some time in many enterprises and it's often, increasingly it involves data scientists who are managing the predictive models to sort of very much drive the whole promotion process of promoting the best fit design to production status. I think this will accelerate. We'll take more of these in line metrics on UI and then we brought, I believe, into more RPA style environments so the rest of us building out these front ends are automating more of our transactions and many more of the UIs can't take advantage of the fact that we'll let the infrastructure choose the best fit of the designs for us without us having to worry about doing A/B testing and all that stuff. The cloud will handle it. >> So it's a big vision. This notion of it, even eventually through more concrete standard, well understood processes to apply some of these AIML technologies to being able to choose options for the developer and even automate some elements of those options based on policy and rules. Neil Raden, again, we've been looking at similar types of things for years. How's that worked in the past and let's talk a bit about what needs to happen now to make sure that if it's going to work, it's going to work this time. >> Well, it really hasn't worked very well. And the reason it hasn't worked very well is because no one has figured out a representational framework to really capture all the important information about these objects. It's just too hard to find them. Everybody knows that when you develop software, 80% of it is grunt work. It's just junk. You know, it's taking out the trash and it's setting things up and whatever. And the real creative stuff is a very small part of it. So if you could alleviate the developer from having to do all that junk by just picking up pieces of code that have already been written and tested, that would be big. But the idea of this has been overwhelmed by the scale and the complexity. And people have tried to create libraries like JavaBeans and object-oriented programming and that sort of thing. They've tried to create catalogs of these things. They've used relational databases, doesn't work. My feeling and I hate to use the word because it always puts people to sleep is some kind of ontology that's deep enough and rich enough to really do this. >> Oh, hold on Neil, I'm feeling... (laughs) >> Yeah. Well, I mean, what good is it, I mean go to Git, right. You can find a thousand things but you don't know which one is really going to work for you because it's not rich enough, it doesn't have enough information. It needs to have quality metrics. It needs to have reviews by people who have used converging and whatever. So that's that's where I think we run into trouble. >> Yeah, I know. >> As far as robots, yeah? >> Go ahead. >> As far as robots writing code, you're going to have the same problem. >> No, well here's where I think it's different this time and I want to throw it out to you guys and see if it's accurate and we'll get to the action items. Here's where I think it's different. In the past, partly perhaps because it's where developers were most fascinated, we try to create object-oriented database and object oriented representations of data and object oriented, using object oriented models as a way of thinking about it. And object oriented code and object oriented this and and a lot of it was relatively low in the stack. And we try to create everything from scratch and it turned out that whenever we did that, it was almost like CASE from many years ago. You create it in the tool and then you maintain it out of the tool and you lose all organization of how it worked. What we're talking about here, and the reason why I think this is different, I think Neil is absolutely right. It's because we're focusing our attention on the assets within an application that create the actual business value. What does the application do and try to encapsulate those and render those as things that are reusable without necessarily doing an enormous amount of work on the back-end. Now, we have to be worried about the back-end. It's not going to do any good to do a whole bunch of RPA or related types of stuff on the front-end that kicks off an enormous number of transactions that goes after a little server that's 15 years old. That's historically only handled a few transactions a minute. So we have to be very careful about how we do this. But nonetheless, by focusing more attention on what is generating value in the business, namely the actions that the application delivers as opposed to knowledge of the application itself, namely how it does it then I think that we're constraining the problem pretty dramatically subject to the realities of what it means to actually be able to maintain and scale applications that may be asked to do more work. What do you guys think about that? >> Now Peter, let me say one more thing about this, about robots. I think you're all a lot more sanguine about AI and robots doing these kinds of things. I'm not. Let me read to you have three pickup lines that a deep neural network developed after being trained to do pickup lines. You must be a tringle? 'Cause you're the only thing here. Hey baby, you're to be a key? Because I can bear your toot? Now, what kind of code would-- >> Well look, the problems look, we go back 50 years and ELIZA and the whole notion of whatever it was. The interactive psychology. Look, let's be honest about this. Neil, you're making a great point. I don't know that any of us are more or less sanguine and that probably is a good topic for a future action item. What are the practical limits of AI and how that's going to change over time. But let's be relatively simple here. The good news about applying AI inside IT problems is that you're starting with engineered systems, with engineered data forms, and engineered data types, and you're working with engineers, and a lot of that stuff is relatively well structured. Certainly more structured than the outside world and it starts with digital assets. That's why a AI for IT operations management is more likely. That's why AI for application programming is more likely to work as opposed to AI to do pickup lines, which is as you said semantically it's all over the place. There's very, very few people that are going to conform to a set of conventions for... Well, I want to move away from the concept of pickup lines and set conventions for other social interactions that are very, very complex. We don't look at a face and get excited or not in a way that corresponds to an obvious well-understood semantic problem. >> Exactly, the value that these applications deliver is in their engagement with the real world of experience and that's not the, you can't encode the real world of human lived experience in a crisp clear way. It simply has to be proven out in the applications or engagement through people or not through people, with the real world outcome and then some outcomes like the ones that Neil read off there, in terms of those ridiculous pickup lines. Most of those kinds of automated solutions won't make a freaking bit of sense because you need humans with their brains. >> Yeah, you need human engagement. So coming back to this key point, the constraint that we're putting on this right now and the reason why certainly, perhaps I'm a little bit more ebullient than you might be Neil. But I want to be careful about this because I also have some pretty strong feelings about where what the limits of AI are, regardless of what Elon Musk says. That at the end of the day, we're talking about digital objects, not real objects, that are engineered, not, haven't evolved over a few billion years, to deliver certain outputs and data that's been tested and relatively well verified. As opposed to have an unlimited, at least from human experience standpoint, potential set of outcomes. So in that small world and certainly the infrastructure universe is part of that and what we're saying is increasingly the application development universe is going to be part of that as part of the digital business transformation. I think it's fair to say that we're going to start seeing AI machine learning and some of these other things being applied to that realm with some degree of success. But, something to watch for. All right, so let's do action item. David Floyer, why don't we start with you. Action item. >> In addressing this, I think that the keys in terms of business focus is first of all mobiles, you have to design things for mobile. So any use of any particular platform or particular set of tools has to lead to mobile being first. And the mobiles are changing rapidly with the amount of data that's being generated on the mobile itself, around the mobile. So that's the first point I would make from a business perspective. And the second is that from a business perspective, one of the key things is that you can reduce cost. Automation must be a key element of this and therefore designing things that will take out tasks and remove tasks, make things more efficient, is going to be an incredibly important part of this. >> And reduce errors. >> And reduce errors, absolutely. Probably most important is reduce errors. Is to take those out of the of the chain and where you can speed things up by removing human intervention and human tasks and raising what humans are doing to a higher level. >> Other things. George Gilbert, action item. >> Okay, so. Really quickly on David's point that we have many more application forms and expressions that we have to present like mobile first. And going back to using RPA as an example. The UiPath product that we've been working with, the core of its capability is to be able to identify specific UI elements in a very complex presentation, whether it's on a web browser or whether it's on a native app on your desktop or whether it's mobile. I don't know how complete they are on mobile because I'm not sure if they did that first but that core capability to identify in a complex, essentially collection and hierarchy of UI elements, that's what makes it powerful. Now on the AI part, I don't think it's as easy as pointing it at one app and then another and say go make them talk. It's more like helping you on the parts where they might be a little ambiguous, like if pieces move around from release to release, things like that. So my action item is say start prototyping with the RPA tools because that's probably, they're probably robust enough to start integrating your enterprise apps. And the only big new wrinkle that's come out in the last several weeks that is now in everyone's consciousness is the MuleSoft acquisition by Salesforce because that's going back to the EAI model. And we will see more app to app integration at the cloud level that's now possible. >> Neil Raden, action item. >> Well, you know, Mark Twain said, there's only two kinds of people in the world. The kind who think there are only two kinds of people in the world and the ones who know better. I'm going to deviate from that a little and say that there's really two kinds of software developers in the world. They're the true computer scientists who want to write great code. It's elegant, it's maintainable, it adheres to all the rules, it's creative. And then there's an army of people who are just trying to get something done. So the boss comes to you and says we've got to get a new website up apologizing for selling the data of 50 million of our customers and you need to do it in three days. Now, those are the kind of people who need access to things that can be reused. And I think there's a huge market for that, as well as all these other software development robots so to speak. >> Jim Kobielus, action item. >> Yeah, for simplifying web application development, I think that developers need to distinguish between back-end and front-end framework. There's a lot of convergence around the back-end framework. Specifically Node.js. So you can basically decouple the decision in terms of front-end frameworks from that and you need to write upfront. Make sure that you have a back-end that supports many front ends because there are many front ends in the world. Secondly, the front ends themselves seem to be moving towards React and Angular and Vue as being the predominant ones. You'll find more programmers who are familiar with those. And then thirdly, as you move towards consolidation on to fewer frameworks on the front-end, move towards low-code tools that allow you just with the push of a button, you know visual development, being able to deploy the built out UI to a full range of mobile devices and web applications. And to close my action item... I'll second what David said. Move toward a mobile first development approach for web applications with a focus on progressive web applications that can run on mobiles and others. Where they give a mobile experience. With intermittent connectivity, with push notifications, with a real-time in memory fast experience. Move towards a mobile first development paradigm for all of your your browser facing applications and that really is the simplification strategy you can and should pursue right now on the development side because web apps are so important, you need a strategy. >> Yeah, so mobile irrespective of the... irrespective of the underlying biology or what have you of the user. All right, so here's our action item. Our view on digital business is that a digital business uses data differently than a normal business. And a digital business transformation ultimately is about how do we increase our visibility into our data assets and find new ways of creating new types of value so that we can better compete in markets. Now, that includes data but it also includes application elements, which also are data. And we think increasingly enterprises must take a more planful and purposeful approach to identifying new ways of deriving additional streams of value out of application assets, especially web application assets. Now, this is a dream that's been put forward for a number of years and sometimes it's work better than others. But in today's world we see a number of technologies emerging that are likely, at least in this more constrained world, to present a significant new set of avenues for creating new types of digital value. Specifically tools like RPA, remote process automation, that are looking at the outcomes of an application and allow programmers use a by example approach to start identifying what are the UI elements, what those UI elements do, how they could be combined, so that they can be composed into new things and thereby provide a new application approach, a new application integration approach which is not at the data and not at the code but more at the work that a human being would naturally do. These allow for greater scale and greater automation and a number of other benefits. The reality though is that you also have to be very cognizant as you do this, even though you can find these, find these assets, find a new derivative form and apply them very quickly to new potential business opportunities that you have to know what's happening at the back-end as well. Whether it's how you go about creating the assets, with some of the front-end tooling, and being very cognizant of which front ends are going to be better or not better or better able at creating these more reusable assets. Or whether you're talking about still how relatively mundane things like how a database serialized has access to data and will fall over because you've created an automated front-end that's just throwing a lot of transactions at it. The reality is there's always going to be complexity. We're not going to see all the problems being solved but some of the new tools allow us to focus more attention on where the real business value is created by apps, find ways to reuse that, and apply it, and bring it into a digital business transformation approach. All right. Once again. George Gilbert, David Floyer, here in the studio. Neil Raden, Jim Kobielus, remote. You've been watching Wikibon Action Item. Until next time, thanks for joining us. (electronic music)