MongoDB is world’s leading modern, general purpose database platform founded in the year 2007. It is among the newest and fastest growing database programs today. Below is a transcript from a recent interaction between team IT-Voice and Himanshumali, Solutions Architect Leader – MongoDB India.
Prateek: What is DIRT or Innovation tax?
Himanshumali: While trying to build their differentiation and address increasingly sophisticated application requirements and demanding customer expectations, companies are often forced to introduce numerous different data services. This is largely because they are hindered by the limitations of relational database systems, which still underpin most applications. Simply put, organizations typically start with a relational database ‘’and over time there are lots of modifications that happen on the application, so it grows bigger trying to address different use cases and then finally they reach a stage where it’s difficult to meet all their needs using the relational databases and need to add niche “NoSQL” datastores that are focused on solving specific needs.
In such cases, applications become very complex by adding multiple technology components to it, leading the team to spend their time maintaining and upgrading these components rather than spending time on innovating and improving the application. This growing complexity of the data infrastructure is a tax on innovation. And therefore, the effort, the money, and the mind share that must be spent on managing this complexity, is termed as ‘Data and Innovation Recurring Tax’, or DIRT.
It’s kind of an overhead that continues with you whenever you want to improve your application or try to adapt to the market.
Prateek: How it is affecting the businesses and threatening the budgets and resource allocation of the organizations?
Himanshumali: When different people in an organization have to constantly learn and stay up to date on so many different technologies, it becomes incredibly difficult to innovate in a scalable and sustainable fashion. Most of the time, the effort and cost of maintaining and upgrading is a recurring overhead for the IT team. The same holds true for multiple operational and security models used by each of these technologies. Teams need to learn, administer, and stay current on each one. Each also has its own operational, security, and performance quirks, and demands expertise and attention.
A few organizations make conscious efforts to streamline their data architecture. The rest spend considerable time, effort, and money trying to control and manage unnecessary data duplication. The implications go beyond just the cost spent addressing the issue and also produces a huge opportunity cost considering what else those developers could be spending their time on.
Prateek: What will be MongoDB’s role in cutting out this tax?
Himanshumali: MongoDB’s application data platform helps address the challenges of Innovation tax by offering an integrated suite of cloud data services that allow organizations to address a huge variety of use cases, from transactional to analytical, from search to real-time analytics and data visualizations. And this is all built on the underlying document database, which is the most powerful and intuitive way for developers to work with data.
Organizations of all sizes are beginning to realize the extent to which a needlessly complicated data architecture holds them back. The tax on innovation is a calling to both developers and IT decision makers to break down those barriers to growth and competitive advantage by working in partnership together.
Prateek: What will be the future roadmap and plans to educate the huge developer community in India on innovation tax?
Himanshumali: It is important for organizations to give their developers access to technologies that are aligned in the way they think and code, to enable high productivity. Developers are on the front line of innovation in organisations and therefore, supporting them with right skills and knowledge is vital. To keep these developers attuned with the latest tools and make them more aware about our data platform, we continue to host a lot of community events and MUG sessions i.e. MongoDB user groups. These sessions are conducted both at a global level as well as locally. The idea here is that we bring the developer community together, alongside existing as well as potential users.These sessions offer developers a chance to interact with technology leaders, learn best practices while they share their own user experience journeys with MongoDB.
These developer communities act as a great platform to propagate new capabilities that may have been added to our products. Similarly, we also have another platform named, MongoDB University, where anyone can go and sign up for free and learn MongoDB skills; which in turn will help solve the issue around innovation tax in your respective organization.
Prateek: Do you offer customized services to startups?
Himanshumali: MongoDB is a general purpose data platform and increasingly we’re becoming a strategic technology partner and standard for customers across all industries and all sizes of business. It is increasingly clear that the fastest and most compelling way to build modern applications is to use MongoDB. Startups in particular love using MongoDB because helps them scale, adapt and grow, while keeping the time spent worrying about infrastructure to a minimum.
We also have a program called MongoDB for startups, which is a selective program for early-stage high growth startups and is mainly meant for founders and CEOs to build and grow data driven organizations. There are various components in terms of the support that we provide. For instance, we give them access to the MongoDB data platform, and also provide some credits that can be used by them. Then we also provide consulting services to startups for free and try to sit with their technical teams to understand their architecture and give them suggestions on how to improve it with the help of our technical experts within the organization.
With all this and more, we also have a separate startup webinar series to educate the startups and make them more aware about using MongoDB in the right way to get the best benefit out of it. We truly believe it is the best thing for developers and enterprises who are building and scaling their business and are wanting to move fast.
