2017 was a banner year for MongoDB's partner ecosystem. We remain strategic about engaging with our channels, and the results are validating our approach. Our strong network of ISVs, global system integrators, cloud, resellers, and technology partners is a competitive differentiator that helps us scale.
We are especially excited about the innovation and growth in store for our ISV business in 2018. It's already off to a great start. Our newest ISV partner Stratifyd is a fantastic example of how platforms built around MongoDB address serious market needs with the most cutting-edge, innovative technology.
Stratifyd is an end-to-end customer analytics platform powered by AI. The platform provides competitive advantages to some of the most recognized brands in the world. LivePerson, Etsy, MASCO, Kimberly-Clark, and many more rely on Stratifyd for a 360-degree view of their end customers.
Stratifyd analyzes customer interactions such as online reviews, social media posts, phone calls, emails, chats, surveys, CRM data, and more to turn them into actionable business insights which increase customer acquisition and retention, which is critical to the continued success of Stratifyd’s clients. In addition to these benefits, Stratifyd is just a flat-out cool implementation of AI.
I caught up with Stratifyd's CTO, Kevin O'Dell, to discuss the data technology behind the platform, and how MongoDB drives value for their customers.
For anyone that isn’t familiar with Stratifyd yet, how do you describe the platform?
Stratifyd uses human generated data to analyze, categorize, and understand intent with the purpose of changing human behavior. This changes the way brands interact with their customers, but also the way customers interact with brands, increasing customer acquisition and raising retention rates.
What was the genesis of the company? Why did you set out to build this?
Stratifyd was a result of postdoctoral research done at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Our founders were researching how AI could analyze unstructured data. During their research, they discovered strong business and government use cases. The founding team was working with numerous three letter agencies on predicting terrorist and disease movements globally. They were able to raise millions of dollars in funding from these agencies. The demand for a product organically grew from there, which led to the development of the Stratifyd platform.
I love the insights Stratifyd can provide – how would you describe the unique advantages that Stratifyd gives its customers?
Stratifyd provides near real-time business intelligence for contact center, marketing, product, and customer experience teams, all based on customer interactions. These insights enable businesses to be proactive rather than reactive in regard to business strategy. Stratifyd customers are able to respond to customer requests, complaints, or general feedback in near real time, changing the way companies interact with their end users. For example, we have empowered a customer with the knowledge to launch a new product line. Another customer gained insights that fundamentally changed how they are rolling out a 700+ million-dollar brand in a new continent.
What kind of feedback are you getting from customers that have deployed Stratifyd in their businesses?
Our customers love using our platform. They are surprised at how simple it is to use, and how powerful it is. They really appreciate how Stratifyd is making AI and machine learning meaningful for them in their day-to day-lives. Stratifyd helps ensure measurable results from day one. Speaking of implementation, they REALLY love that we don’t just use the term day one figuratively – customers are up and running in less than a day.
Talk to me about how you landed on MongoDB. What were you looking for in a database, and what problems were you having before moving to MongoDB?
That's an easy one to answer: speed and flexibility. Stratifyd ingests data from hundreds of sources. We needed a database that could keep up with high read and write request rates while handling a flexible schema. The hardest problem we were trying to solve was lack of secondary indexes; with those, MongoDB accelerated our query response times by at least 100x.
Can you share any best practices for scaling your MongoDB infrastructure? Any impressive metrics around the number of interactions, the volume of reads / writes per second, response times?
As a SaaS-first platform, being always-on is a HUGE best practice for us. MongoDB’s innate replication and failover abilities ensured less than 17 minutes of total downtime last year! Using MongoDB as our backend system, our AI can process a quarter of a million words in less than a minute.
How do you measure the impact of MongoDB on your business?
Our business wouldn’t be able to succeed without MongoDB. The uptime, failover, query response times, secondary indexes, and dynamic schemas have empowered most of Stratifyd’s key differentiators.
What advice would you give someone who is considering using MongoDB for their next project?
With all projects, I recommend truly understanding the requirements for the end results. There is a ton of excellent technology out there, but picking the wrong one can be detrimental to project success. Always run numerous tests, comparing different stacks to make sure you find the right one and fail fast on the wrong technology stack.
Stratifyd has some impressive customers, from the Fortune 500 to some really innovative startups: what’s next for the company?
We have some pretty big things planned for 2018. We're now providing more than just actionable intelligence; we are now streamlining and automating workflows. We are closing the customer feedback loop, which enables us to plug Stratifyd into any business process quickly to deliver measurable results.