Developers and SI relationships are helping to drive customer adoption, according to MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria as the firm reported an 82% year-on-year increase in subscription revenues.
For Q1 2020, the database firm turned in overall revenues of $89.4 million, up 78% year-on-year subscription revenues making up $84.0 million of the whole. Net loss in the first quarter was $33.2 million as the firm continues to invest - or as CFO Michael Gordon put it “burn cash” - in future developments.
But investing to innovate is critical, argues Ittycheria, in order to tap into the potential of the market opportunity:
Achieving that requires a number of pieces to be in place, he adds:
For a new platform to succeed, it has to be embraced by the developer community, given the disproportionate influence developers have regarding technology decisions. Our developer mindshare…demonstrates that MongoDB has clearly established itself as the most popular modern database platform in the world. Second is the growing recognition that, because working with data is so critical in building applications, using a modern general purpose database platform enables businesses across every industry to innovate faster and respond more quickly to new market opportunities. Customers are increasingly choosing MongoDB for their mission-critical workloads to drive innovation. Third is the increasing importance of being able to easily move applications across any compute environment. Customers want the flexibility to run applications on-premise, in a private cloud and in the public clouds without being locked in with any cloud vendor.
Ittycheria sees a trend among customers of leaning towards hybrid cloud environments rather than placing ‘all or nothing’ bets. This plays well to MongoDB’s strengths, he argues:
We are at the early stages of the largest platform shift in history with the move to the cloud. Customers are still figuring out this transition and there are a number of approaches being taken. MongoDB provides complete optionality for customers to make this transition without locking themselves into a course of action and gives them the ability to make continuous adjustments. In short, customers can confidently future-proof themselves by choosing MongoDB.
He cites a number of use cases to make his point, beginning with tech vendor Splunk:
When Splunk needed robust handling for non-relational data to complement our extensive IP they naturally chose MongoDB. Splunk embeds MongoDB into the search head component of every deployment of MongoDB's Splunk Enterprise to store application state and configuration data. TIM, formally Telecom Italia, a leading telecommunications provider in Italy, is adopting MongoDB for their customer usage data, which was traditionally stored on a relational database. MongoDB is also used within their new service delivery platform as one of the fast data layers to guarantee quick access to information. Renewable energy provider Enphase Energy is a global energy technology company and the world's leading provider of solar micro-inverters. They decided to migrate from DynamoDB to MongoDB Atlas. Atlas will provide Enphase with the ability to reduce risk, automate processes, scale elasticities and meet their future global availability needs. Auto Trader UK, the UK and Ireland's largest digital automotive marketplace, has been using MongoDB since 2011.
