Here’s the interview snippet from the interaction with Mr. Himanshu Mali, Solutions Architect Leader, MongoDB
Saumya: Can you throw some light on the highlights of 2022?
Himanshu: Developers and software engineers have become the bloodline to business innovations as organisations today rely on apps, software and digital products to drive competitive advantage. Over the years MongoDB has helped make developers’ life easier and increase their productivity, while helping organisations reduce complexity, scale, improve flexibility & efficiency as well as keep their dev teams engaged and happy.
Some key highlights from 2022 for us both in India as well as globally were:
- Launch of Queryable Encryption in MongoDB 6.0 – With this added capability, data will remain encrypted at all times on the database and will not be accessible by the database server. This end-to-end client-side encryption with the new update will use novel encrypted index data structures in such a way that for the first time, developers will be able to run expressive queries on fully encrypted confidential workloads.
- Relational Migrator – This transformative way will make it easier for companies to move away from legacy. Relational Migrator will grant developers and other technical teams a greater degree of control while migrating their relational workload to MongoDB. With the capabilities to design, map and migrate the dataset, it will make data more accessible for analysis and decision making.
- A first-of-its-kind report on ‘Innovation Tax’– Our own research conducted at the beginning of 2022 identified the focus of developers on innovation and the challenges they face in spending time on it. As part of this study, we surveyed 2,000 developers and IT decision-makers (ITDMs) across Asia to understand their viewpoints revealing the importance of innovation — and the hidden tax that holds it back.
- MongoDB University’s New Curriculum – We announced a number of new features and enhancements to our MongoDB University program very recently with a commitment to strive to help close the widening skills gap that is being felt across the globe.
Saumya: How is MongoDB helping customers?
Himanshu: MongoDB’s adoption continues to grow with over 37,000+ customers across all industries. Industries like healthcare, financial services, education, gaming, etc., have seen massive growth in data consumption over the last two years due to the pandemic surge in online activities. Some of our customers include the likes of Ludo King, Slice, L&T Sufin, Slice, Clear (formerly ClearTax) and thousands of others. We work with both startups and large enterprises to help them become agile and innovate faster. Here is some perspective on the kind of work that we do for some of our clients and the manner in which in are enabling them scale:
Cleartax: Cleartax is a large software organisation transforming an important part of finance: Taxation, both personal and corporate. They’re now expanding into invoicing and other parts of the finance world. Given the scale of its operations, it was getting difficult for them to ensure a seamless experience for all users despite large spikes during peak usage windows. But with MongoDB, they have achieved considerable optimization. Their customers are often surprised by the pace of execution. There is a significant improvement in the performance, with as much as a 2900% jump in processing speed in some instances.
Slice: It is an app-based credit card challenger in India that aims to build a smart, simple, and transparent financial platform to redesign the financial experience for the millennials. One of the major challenges faced by the company was to provide a seamless credit experience for customers by transforming the KYC process. With the help of MongoDB Atlas, credit underwriting decisions can be taken in under 30 seconds by calculating 100+ user variables in real-time. With a resilient distributed architecture, slice canachieve a 99.995% uptime SLA. There have been no outages except for those due to manual errors. Currently, MongoDB supports 15+ clusters with 17.5 TB data, which is used by 12 million + registered users. slice can carry out about 15,000 MongoDB input/output operations per second (IOPS) during peak hours.
Darwinbox: Darwinbox provides an HCM platform solution for 600+ enterprises across the Globe. They started using MongoDB Atlas in December 2017. They use MongoDB as their primary database. They have optimized their database infrastructure and how they manage backups. Not only did they bring down costs by 40%, but by leveraging the queryable snapshot feature, they are able to restore the data they actually need 80% faster.
HippoInnovations: StoreHippo slashes storage consumption by 50%, reduces latency by 30% and lowers DevOps overhead by 10% with MongoDB Atlas and Atlas Search. Hippo Innovations is a market leading E-Commerce Website platform (www.storehippo.com ) for global customers- Migrated from Community on Atlas and currently over 1500 customers deployed in a multi-tenant architecture.
Saumya: How is MongoDB growing in India? What are your plans and focus areas for 2023?
Himanshu: MongoDB is experiencing significant growth in the Indian region, with a strong focus on local partnerships (channel) to help deliver value for a wide range of large digitally-driven enterprises and fast growing start-ups, which is expected to continue as we step into 2023.
India is one of the top regions for downloads from the 300 million downloads globally. More than 350,000 of MongoDB University registrations are from India and the headcount is more than 500 and that has grown at over 70% in the past year. In fact, we have acquired over 2300+ customers in India and that number is growing at more than 50% year on year.
As we step into 2023, our continued focus will be on helping developers build great applications and helping businesses scale. As we embark on the journey of becoming a strategic technology partner and standard for our customers, it further enhances our ability to generate attractive growth at scale for the foreseeable future. We are also exploring different channels to reach our customers and grow our sales and engineering teams across the region to serve our customers better.
Saumya: How is MongoDB’s commitment to developer empowerment helping the organization?
Himanshu: Throughout the globe, MongoDB is helping developers to be able to build applications without having to think about database infrastructure or capacity management. MongoDB has a massive and engaged community of developers and the recent numbers reflect that the database was downloaded about 300 million times globally.
MongoDB works directly with developers in India, as well as through collaborations with system integrators and boutique independent software suppliers who then create solutions based on the company’s platform. We also offer MongoDB University, which helps developers build MongoDB skills and advance their career with courses and certification. The MongoDB university program is also hugely popular among the developer community in India with more than 360,000 registrations in the country.
In addition to this, we also run user groups and are planning to ramp this up this year as restrictions ease. Any developer can sign up to MongoDB Atlas and get started for free today. We also welcome them to our Developer Hub where they can ask questions and find support for building the next great application.
