Scaling up at MongoDB: How CEO Dev Ittycheria wants to make a fifth of the NoSQL database's users paid-for

MongoDB CEO says the firm has to do better at monetising, as less than five per cent of its userbase are currently paying to use the database

"His skills fit our next phase of growth better than mine do"

Not the words spoken by most exiting CEOs, particularly when they haven't worked alongside their successor before. But that is exactly what MongoDB's former CEO Max Schireon said of his replacement, Dev Ittycheria, in August 2014.

Fast-forward 10 months, and Ittycheria is relishing his role as CEO of a firm which has long been valued upwards of $1bn (£642m), at least by those with industry knowledge.

A recent fundraising round valued MongoDB at $1.2bn, and that has only increased after raising a further $80m at the beginning of the year.

Perhaps Schireon's point of view was right - Ittycheria's experience as an investor may have been a factor that helped the company to raise three times as much as it originally targeted in order to finance its acquisition of WiredTiger.

The acquisition itself was key for MongoDB, because the New York-based firm had been heavily criticised for its lack of scalability compared with its main rivals in the NoSQL database market, Cassandra and Couchbase.

"We were held back [with scaling]. There are some workloads that were more write-intensive or 50-50 read and write that we couldn't deliver as good of a performance for," Ittycheria admits in his interview with Computing.

"Cassandra was optimised for writes, so [with a company] like a Facebook, you're constantly writing - you're constantly pushing pictures and once in a while you might read information. Similarly with sensor data, you are constantly capturing it but you may not always read that data," he says.

"[In response to this] we had this notion of a pluggable storage engine. It's essentially a way to write or read data off disc or RAM, and there are different types of storage engines because some apps are very read intensive and some are very write intensive, so you want to optimise the storage engine," he says. "So with our 3.0 release we announced the acquisition of WiredTiger, which has the dedicated storage engine and that was optimised for write performance."

At MongoDB World in New York, the firm released figures from benchmarking tests it had carried out using the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB). The research was carried out by United Software Associates (USA), and used the latest versions of Couchbase, Cassandra and MongoDB with WiredTiger. MongoDB came out on top for scalability, but Couchbase hit back by claiming that other benchmark tests carried out by Avalon LLC proved that Couchbase Server outperformed both Cassandra and MongoDB.

Regardless of the back and forth between the firms, Ittycheria believes that WiredTiger will ensure that the problem MongoDB customers had with scalability is no longer an issue.

"We think the problem is pretty much gone," Ittycheria says, adding that the problem may still remain for those users who are still using older versions of the product.

When asked whether there would be similar instances of customers having to switch because of scalability issues - such as Israeli firm Viber, which chose to ditch MongoDB and Reddis in favour of Couchbase - Ittycheria said that since the 3.0 release, "no impartial customer would ever have to move off Mongo for performance reasons".

Scaling upwards

Ittycheria believes that MongoDB has already won over developers, but its next main challenge is to win over those in operations.

"The ops folks are more used to the SQL language and the Oracle kind of skill. In many cases they have built their careers learning how to manage and run Oracle, so change is always going to be difficult for them or more painful for them," he says.

In order to ease this transition, the company has built a suite of management tools and is investing in order to make the process of how to provision, monitor, replicate and run MongoDB easier.

"We're putting more investment [into this]," says Ittycheria. "A big percentage of our development capability is focused on building tools to make the ops people more comfortable about managing MongoDB, because we know that for Mongo to really get to the next level of growth people have to be comfortable deploying for the most critical applications."

And speaking of Oracle, is the behemoth tech firm looking over its shoulders in fear of MongoDB?

"I know that it tracks us all of the time," he says. "This is such a big market and Oracle is getting attacked in all places. It's getting hit in the apps place by people like Workday and Salesforce, by people in middleware areas and in the database layer.

"I think they're paying attention to us but we're still a fairly small business. Oracle does more business with our top two or three customers than we or our competition can buy."

And Ittycheria doesn't see Oracle going anywhere any time soon - he believes it will be the new version of what was the mainframe, over the next 10 or 20 years.

"They are going to be around for a long time," he says. "They aren't going to grow much but they're going to generate a ton of cash and they're going to milk their install base for a long time."

Monetising open source

MongoDB will continue with its current strategy of making many of its features free for developers, while making companies pay for the product if they are using it for critical applications.

Ittycheria admits the firm can do a better job of monetising the product, and it has a lofty target for the number of paying customers it expects to reach.

"I would say if we could get to 20 to 25 per cent of our user base then we would have a multi-billion dollar company; [at the moment] it's less than five per cent," he says.

The firm is concentrating its sales and marketing efforts on those people who aren't currently paying for MongoDB but if they were given a reason to do so, would be open to paying.

But that doesn't mean locking down any of its free features any time soon.

"Once it's free it is hard to go back, but we may do it the other way where a feature is paid-for at the moment that we can make free. You can always make something free later," he says.

The next stage of MongoDB and Ittycheria's challenge is to convince those in ops, and those who aren't paying for MongoDB at the moment, that the NoSQL database is worth the investment.

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