While the relational database has served us well for the last 40 years, the next 40 years requires a modern database tuned to the needs of modern applications, as Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB, declared from the stage at the inaugural MongoDB World, which drew nearly 2,000 people. With unstructured data already accounting for 80% of enterprise information, and growing at twice the rate of structured data, it's time for enterprises to rethink their data.

The World Has Changed

It's almost breathtaking to see how fast the industry has changed over the past 10 years. Everything from software delivery (data center to cloud) to how we interact with data (from mainframes to mobile) has undergone significant changes over the last few years. This, in turn, has pushed the pace of innovation: it's no longer good enough for enterprises to update their applications once each year: now enterprises must be constantly iterating on their applications to optimize how they interact with their customers and prospects.

These industry trends result in far greater volume, velocity and variety of data (Gartner's 3 V's of Big Data). Of these, by far the biggest challenge for organizations of any size is data variety, as Schireson highlighted:

Two key technologies dominate Big Data today: MongoDB and Hadoop. As Schireson noted, the strength of MongoDB doesn't exclusively or even primarily derive from MongoDB's engineering team, as good as it is. As Schireson insisted, much of the value of MongoDB comes from its community. How is that community measured? While exact numbers are difficult to determine, Schireson points to the tens of thousands of MongoDB deployments, tens of thousands of attendees to MongoDB events, and other metrics:

The Big Winner In Big Data? You

Though all of these numbers point to MongoDB's success, as Schireson stressed, the real winner is the MongoDB user:

Why? Because it's the enterprise like Medtronic or the startup like Hudl, both of which spoke at MongoDB World on their very different successes using MongoDB, that get to reshape their businesses and, in turn, the world by building on MongoDB. Schireson went into a bit more detail on a few of the companies speaking at MongoDB World:

• Mailbox, which turned to MongoDB to ensure it could scale from 0 to 1,000,000 mailboxes;
• Bosch, which is building the infrastructure for a highly connected world, where it's impossible to know today the new data types that will be required tomorrow;
• MetLife, which needed to bring together 70 different systems to generate a single view of the its customer data to dramatically improve the customer experience;
• City of Chicago, which turned to MongoDB to build a predictive analytics platform, starting on a single developer's laptop and has since scaled to many servers;
• Citi, which has embraced MongoDB across the enterprise for 50 applications and is building a MongoDB-as-a-Service to make it simple for even more adoption throughout the financial services giant.

As fantastic as these enterprise deployments are for MongoDB and its community, Schireson was quick to remind attendees that MongoDB's focus on improving development and operational productivity hasn't changed and, if anything, continues to grow. MongoDB is successful when individual developers and operations professionals - and the organizations that employ them - succeed.

In other words, MongoDB succeeds when its community succeeds. In the fast-changing world of Big Data, no company can hope to meet all possible needs. But a community? That's possible. And judging from the response at the event, probable.

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