With new products, MongoDB drives NoSQL database more deeply into the enterprise

MongoDB  has long been known as a niche player in the database wars. It’s one of the leading providers in the NoSQL segment of the database market, which emerged to handle data volumes in a scale-out architectures that traditional relational DBMSs struggled to support.

From the start, NoSQL databases such as MongoDB have been engineered to handle semistructured and machine data more flexibly than relational databases, which traditionally required a rigid database design before ingesting data. As the most iconic provider of  NoSQL platforms , MongoDB has grown its business by pitching the ease, flexibility, performance, scalability and versatility of the document model for data management.

And this week at its  annual developer conference  in New York, MongoDB accelerated its push into the enterprise database arena and scoped out further opportunities to deliver its offerings in public, private and hybrid multicloud environments. Before more than 2,200 attendees, the company, which went public last year, made  several key product announcements  today, outlined in detail below, that make its flagship document database platform a more attractive migration target for enterprise relational database users.

But even before this week’s announcements, MongoDB had already gained significant traction in enterprises around the world through core features that suit it for many uses:
File-based storage with load balancing and data replication features over multiple machines;
Horizontal scaling through sharding;
Connectors to popular  business intelligence  and  data analytics  development tools.
Strategic advantages

In addition to a well-engineered product, MongoDB has achieved sustained growth in the NoSQL segment by leveraging the following strategic advantages:
Enterprise users frustrated with the limitations of relational technology: The ease of migrating from the open-source distribution to the enterprise edition has made it easier for users not only to adopt the document database but also to “lift and shift” workloads to MongoDB from legacy relational databases when they’re ready.
Flexible data deployment options: Another longtime MongoDB advantage has been that it gives customers the freedom to run its document database anywhere, from on-premises deployments in private clouds to platform-as-a-service offerings in the public cloud. In the last few years, it has made put the cloud at the forefront of its go-to-market strategy, with impressive results. The company’s Atlas database-as-a-service offering is a runaway success, having shown greater than 400 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the past year.

Strong cloud partnerships: Mongo’s principal public cloud partners – Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC – all report that its document database is one of most popular services on their respective public clouds. This is doubly impressive considering that all of them offer competing NoSQL database-as-a-service offerings ( Amazon Aurora ,  Azure Cosmos DB  and  Google Cloud Bigtable ).

Open-source business model: MongoDB has benefited from an open-source business model under which users of the GNU licensed community version may convert to paying customers of the commercially licensed  Enterprise Advanced  edition to gain access to service and support. Its flagship database is available at no cost under the open-source  GNU Affero General Public License  as well as proprietary licenses. MongoDB Enterprise Advanced runs in the IBM and Rackspace clouds, and also comes with a commercial enterprise license for on-premises deployment, including the company’s 24×7 support and DevOps tooling.

For all these reasons, it’s getting harder to dismiss MongoDB as merely a niche data platform vendor.