“We are probably a very good fit to address the large Big Data challenges”
NoSQL is the current buzzword for both Indian and global companies. And that is where MongoDB senses the opportunities. The company has recently ventured into India with some great plans in place. Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You spoke to Kamal Br
Q MongoDB had an official launch in India very recently. Could you elaborate on the company’s activities in India right now? We started our operations in India just a couple of months back. Before that, we were established in Singapore, which was our headquarters for Asia Pacific. We have had quite a large presence in Asia, where we have primarily focused on global support for our customers. In essence, our presence in Asia was just around support. We never focused on growing a community or a commercial model. So that is what we thought we should be focusing on now and obviously, India being a very important market for us, we decided to have a physical presence in the country.
Q In what sense is India important for you and what sectors are you looking at to expand your footprint in the country? If you look at some of the applications being used in India and the sheer volume of data they involve, it is massive. If you look at any of the industries, whether it is telecom applications and systems, financial services, and even some of the largest core banking solutions, they are in India. So in that context, we are probably a very good fit to address the large Big Data challenges that we foresee our customers facing in the coming years. In India, the sheer volume of the population poses a lot of challenges in unique ways, and I think that is where open source and MongoDB provide a tremendous opportunity for the market. We have a large user community in India. I think about 1800 user members are currently with MongoDB in India and this number is growing aggressively. We see a tremendous uptake of the technology through the open source community and also through customers actively looking at enterprise-based solutions, which can help them address their data growth needs.
Q You are also expanding in terms of headcount. So, what kind of hiring are you looking at for the Indian office that you have set up? As I mentioned, we have support infrastructure in place already. We plan to expand that in the coming months, and that expansion should happen probably in various parts of Asia and not just India. The other area where we are heavily focused on is increasing our presence in not just India and China, but also in Japan and South East Asia. We are looking at hiring candidates who can help build the community efforts for us, and also help us build relationships with our enterprise customers.
Q Are you also planning to hire some developers in India? Our development is currently happening in New York and in Palo Alto, which is our headquarters for engineering. As of now, I am not aware of any plans
“In India, the sheer volume of the population poses a lot of challenges in unique ways, and I think that is where open source and MongoDB provide a tremendous opportunity for the market. We have a large user community in India. I think about 1800 user members are currently with MongoDB in India and this number is growing aggressively.”
of software development in India. However, if you look at our investment in R&D, which is aggressively ramping up with our new kinds of funding, the scenario could change. But there are no immediate plans of any investments in R&D in India.
Q Developers are now shifting from the established databases to the NoSQL databases. What do you think are the reasons for this increasing interest? If you look at some of the legacy relational databases, they have their inherent challenges of being data technologies to an extent. There are ways of developing applications, and developers are looking at different models of trying to address the different interface solutions. In many of the cases, they have to use legacy relational datastores and legacy architectures. And the shift among developers is to address these new challenges. The data that we are storing today is very different from the data that we stored in the past 10-15 years. That is really what is driving developers to look at datastores, and this is where we see the significant shift in the industry. If you look at MongoDB, we are a document-oriented database that effectively allows us to be a general-purpose database. We are not focused on niche solution areas, but we are very focused on providing an alternative to a strict relational datastore— something that we feel is dynamically scaling towards the Big Data solution for customers today.
Customers want agile data frameworks today and to do that, you need to move away from the legacy relational models, which are mathematically quite advanced. You do have some constraints that you need to make to your data but, ideally, you need agile capabilities built into the framework. That is where developers are actively looking at options on how to address and how to store the data today in different stores versus what they have done in the past. And that is where I think the shift has happened. It would be fair to say that a lot of applications in relational datastores are based on existing core applications, which require
“We are actively making efforts to drive the community adoption for MongoDB in India. We have around 1800 members across Bengaluru, Pune and Delhi. We see the community thriving and we host MongoDB community day in these regions. So that is very much a part of our focus. Reaching out to our community is extremely important to us.”
these relational models. Some of the new data actually doesn’t require that. That is where the big shift has happened. I think customers are realising that there are more innovative ways to solve the problem than they have had in the past. QWhat
are the gaps you see in the industry, where you feel there is a need for different databases because the traditional databases do not work? If you look at the social media and at the mobile content that is generated today, these involve very high volumes of data. In addition, if you look at some of the key upcoming trends around machine- to- machine interaction, that is a very large data volume again. Customers are looking for real- time access to this and at ways that they can analyse it. MongoDB provides solutions around it in a powerful way. If you look at the legacy banking or insurance solutions, customers today have lots of insurance policies— for example, life insurance, car insurance, et al. Being able to consolidate those systems once you grow them to a massive scale is a difficult task. One such case is Metlife, which has consolidated 70 different relational datastores into one MongoDB store. The firm invested around three years of its time and over US$ 20 million, yet could not achieve what it eventually could do with MongoDB— in less than 90 days. So, if you look at some very large scale applications, which are built around providing a single view of data, consolidating products and data hubs, and being able to accurately line up large volumes of data very quickly— MongoDB addresses that datastore requirement very well. QAt
an enterprise level, there is a widespread perception that NoSQL is not good for transactions. How do you counter this argument? As I mentioned, regarding the traditional ERP solutions, we are not actually out to replace or effectively suggest that MongoDB will be a perfect choice for that function. There are very good reasons why customers continue to use relational technologies that require transactions. Having said that, our database is transactional and is consistent. We are being deployed in financial services, static government systems and in solutions to ensure that the users have transactional data and secure data. If you look at the enterprise use cases, I think banking is one of the hard industry sectors to crack. If you have to prove the technology, with banking on your side, it becomes much easier. Banking is a difficult sector, with strict security mandates along with requirements around scalability and ensuring transactional integrity. And that is where MongoDB has proven its worth. We see tremendous potential in this space, not necessarily in the core banking solutions but also in a lot of trading capital markets, which involves several terabits of data and the mining has to be done rather quickly. QWhat
about MongoDB’s community in India? Will you make some effort to increase your reach across the community as well? We are actively making efforts to drive the community adoption for MongoDB in India. We have around 1800 members across Bengaluru, Pune and Delhi. We see the community thriving and we host MongoDB community day in these regions. So that is very much a part of our focus. Reaching out to our community is extremely important to us. While most of the members of the community are involved in the development, there are some members who are decisionmakers—who take a pilot of our technology. So this is clearly a very important part of our expansion plans in the country. QCan
you please elaborate on the training courses that you offer? We have three training courses that we will actively promote in the Indian market to those who are planning to build and design applications on top of MongoDB. The first course is the foundation course for developers who are planning to build and design applications on top of MongoDB. It covers data modeling, queries and insert/ update/ deletes, an introduction to MapReduce and basic administration. The other course is for administrators. This course covers everything a database administrator needs to know to successfully deploy and maintain a MongoDB database, diagnose performance issues, import and export data from MongoDB, and establish the proper backup and restore routines. We have a third course called the ‘ Essentials’. This course combines the developer and administrator training modules into one. It covers everything you need to know, from building and designing an application on top of MongoDB to successfully deploying and maintaining it. Instead of taking two 2- day courses, this training covers the same content in just three days.