Anoop Dhankhar (MongoDB)
2023 promises to be a vital year for MongoDB in New Zealand as the company aims to capitalise on the launch of local hyperscale cloud facilities.
A/NZ country manager Anoop Dhankhar told Reseller News the fast growing company, which hit US$1 billion in revenue earlier this year, already had partners on the ground locally as it also wooed local customers through the three major hyperscale cloud providers: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS and Microsoft Azure.
In a sign of that intent, MongoDB hosted an event in Auckland in November where it presented a business growth update and insights from key local customer Lumin, a Christchurch-based developer of electronic document technology.
While MongoDB's heritage is as an open source provider of database technology, since 2017 it has styled itself as the provider of a SaaS data platform for systems integrators and developers who need to build high-performance distributed applications quickly and at scale.
That platform, dubbed Atlas, is now where most of MongoDB's revenue comes from.
"That's not to say we’ve lost touch with our roots," Dhankhar said. "We still have over 265 million downloads of our open source software that people can use and it’s the same binary that we use in the cloud that we use on premise as well.”
New Zealand partners include Enterprise IT (now part of Servian), business intelligence and data specialist Optimal BI, Foster Moore and distributor Soft Solutions, which in Mongo DB's case acts more as a reseller than a distributor.
Among 200 local users are platform partners, those who use MongoDB to build SaaS and other products. These include Lumin, which boasts 75 million users globally on its cloud-based pdf editing platform, and customer on-boarding platform provider Credisense.
Kiwi marketing technology company Marsello is also a user while, in the corporate space, MongoDB can also boast NZX-listed multi-national tourism operator THL as a client.
Founded in Wellington in 2014, Marsello combines data-driven automation, email, SMS, and loyalty programs to deliver targeted marketing for retailers and e-commerce businesses of all sizes.
It can count more than 5000 retail and hospitality business customers in over 170 countries.
Dhankhar said recruiting more local partners was a priority.
"As hyperscalers set up in region we are actively considering opening this region rather than servicing it from Australia," he said. "It's on the plans."
Dhankhar said Atlas was now the growth driver because, firstly, it made the path from on premise to the cloud straightforward for organisations seeking transformation.
Secondly, data on the platform was encrypted by default, encrypted in transit and could also be encrypted line by line.
The final growth driver was Atlas' multicloud capabilities.
"You can have a workload in GCP and replicating in AWS," he said. "There is not a SaaS offering in the market today that allows you to do that. That is particularly important for large organisations: banks, large retailers and so on.".
Atlas users have 97 options to pick from where to put their data.
"Lumin is a great example with instances in Sydney, San Francisco, New York and EMEA," Dhankhar said. "That gives them flexibility."
While the three hyperscalers offered their own technology to do this, Dhankhar said MongoDB doesn't really compete with them.
"Yes, customers want a hyperscaler, but they also want best-of-breed," he said.
MongoDB was happy to be in coopetition with the hyperscalers and worked very closely with them.
Customers were typically people developing microservices or going digital, or with their primary app on, say, Oracle and all the stuff around that on MongoDB.
For some, that may have been a forced journey, accelerated in order to serve customers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As companies continue to transform their business, as companies continue to be digital, we continue to gain market share," Dhankhar said.
For customer THL, Mongo DB helps power a fleet of over 6000 rental vehicles across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
THL's Atlas-powered driver coaching application, Insights, helps improve driver behavior and reduces driver risk using a telematics device is installed in every vehicle. This records key information such as driver speed and location.
Each car’s device can alert drivers to a range of hazards, from exceeding the speed limit to attempting four-wheel-drive roads in a two-wheel-drive vehicle.
MongoDB is doubling down on R&D, with investment last year same as it put in over the last nine. The financial services market and business to consumer sectors loom large in those plans, because the company believes it has the right technology for running transaction workloads with speed and resilience.
Melbourne-based Dhankhar joined MongoDB last March after over six years at web data specialist Splunk. The company's APAC senior vide-president, Simon Eid, also based in Melbourne, is also a Splunk veteran.
While MongoDB had origins dating back to 2007, the development of Atlas has effectively made it a startup again.
"We are still so early in what is a massive, massive opportunity," Eid told Reseller News. "There is still so much growth to be had and that's what we are focused on at the moment."
