The Forbes Cloud 100 list is only in its second year, but it’s already established itself as one of the most prestigious media markers for success in the cloud computing world.
It’s fitting that just one year after MongoDB Atlas was introduced to the market, technically qualifying MongoDB for consideration, the company debuted on the 2017 Forbes Cloud 100 list at No. 40.
The Forbes Cloud 100 recognizes the best and brightest of privately-held “cloud companies.” The list is compiled by a combination of Forbes editorial staff, Cloud 100 partners at Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, and CEOs from 25 publically-traded cloud companies.
The recognition marks a good time to reflect on the success of MongoDB Atlas over the course of the last 12 months. The majority of MongoDB deployments are already in the cloud--public and private--and it made perfect sense to start offering MongoDB as a service for customers that don’t want any of the operational overhead that comes with running your own database. Instead, we manage it all for them. From massive opportunity for disruption, to the go-to-market-strategy and leveraging feedback from our community of users, we have been able to extend MongoDB, which was born in the cloud, into a major cloud provider.
Sahir Azam is the Vice President of Cloud Products and GTM at MongoDB. Sahir joined MongoDB in May of 2016, just in time for Atlas to be officially launched in June at MongoDB World. Earlier this week I was able to sit down with him to discuss the notability of the Forbes recognition, the success of Atlas and the future of MongoDB in the cloud.
He was earnestly proud to see MongoDB listed, “I’m honored to see MongoDB on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. Especially given that we’ve recently extended our offerings into fully managed cloud services heavily in the last year. It’s an important recognition to the early traction we’ve had in the market. The Forbes Cloud 100 seems to be an Enterprise centric list. Forbes has reinforced that cloud has entered the mainstream of modern Enterprise, and it is evident by the companies listed.”
Sahir recalled the energy around the MongoDB Atlas launch:. “Launch week was amazing. I was completely new to the company and I had never before felt the size and scope of a community like the one around MongoDB. Within a matter of days there were hundreds of users coming onto the platform. It was exciting to see how much pent up demand there was over time.”
While infrastructure as a service has already seen massive adoption, now users are going up the stack--consuming applications and databases as a service. Many see it as the future of the database industry. Redmond analyst Stephen O’Grady noted when Atlas was announced: “Of all of the various services offered by cloud providers, databases are among the most sticky. This is in part due to the inherent inertia that comes with large datasets that pose logistical challenges simply to move from one place to another, but also to the risks of changing production database infrastructure.”
When first released, MongoDB Atlas was based on an elastic pricing model that was metered on hourly usage. It was available only on Amazon Web Services in a limited regions. Over the last year a few key decisions were made which doubles down on the fact that MongoDB is a platform based on customer choice.
Sahir explained: “One big thing that we heard from customers globally was that they wanted Atlas available in more regions. We were able to go from 5 regions to 14 on AWS in the first year. At MongoDB World this year, we announced the expansion of Atlas to all major cloud platforms, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. We’ve also introduced a live migration utility, which allows customers to import existing clusters into Atlas to reduce migration time. In the spring we launched a free tier of Atlas which allows anyone to evaluate if Atlas is the right choice to them, at no cost. As you can imagine, both these offerings have been incredibly well received.”
The Cloud Team at MongoDB is more than triple the size than it was when it launched Atlas, and every function within MongoDB is expanding with a cloud focus as we continue to scale. Our engineers always strive to build the innovative features our customers and users request as a way to empower developers to deliver apps faster and deliver on our vision. They are working with some of the newest cloud technologies in the market to help continue to build out Atlas globally. The recently announced beta launch of the company’s newest cloud offering, the backend as a service MongoDB Stitch, at MongoDB World is a perfect example.
Stitch provides developers with a simple way to handle the routine--but complex and time consuming--backend plumbing including working with data, controlling data access and orchestrating commonly used services like payments or messaging. One of the main benefits of Stitch is that it frees up developer productivity to focus on the things that really matter when building an app experience that people love.
While we’re excited to see what users will do with Stitch as it matures in beta, we’ve already seen some incredible Atlas results through our customers. Biotechnology giant Thermo Fisher has leveraged MongoDB Atlas to reduce experiment times for 10K unique customers. Housing over 1.3 million experiments, it is one of the largest cloud platforms for the scientific community. “They are an established global scientific company, and a classic enterprise. It’s a really cool use case that allows scientists to have access to analytical data through the cloud using any Thermo Fisher cloud device.”
So what can we expect for the future of MongoDB Atlas? According to Sahir, “As cloud accelerates, MongoDB Atlas will be a key platform in delivering applications. The vision is to have a global database that is intelligent and self optimizing.”
And what about for MongoDB? “There is so much opportunity here, from cool emerging tech, solving real problems, and rapid career trajectory.”
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