Customers see us as mission-critical ready, says MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria

Mixed fortunes for MongoDB which saw Q2 revenues rise 53% year-on-year this week, but Wall Street was jittery about a cautious forecast for the coming quarter and gave the stock price a pummelling.

The database firm turned in total revenues of $303.6 million, with a net loss of $118.9 million, up from $77.1 million a year ago. Subscription-based revenue was up 52% year-on-year to $291.6 million, while services revenue was $12.1 million, up 64%. Atlas revenue grew 73% year-on-year and now represents 64% of revenues.

CEO Dev Ittycheria said that firm ended Q2 with over 37,000 customers, up from 29,000 this time last year, citing as examples:

A multi-national trillion-dollar financial services company chose MongoDB to power the next-generation trading platform to cover all of their various trading businesses with one solution. Since launching the new service, the customer has been able to decommission eight legacy trading systems and realized cost savings of almost $50 million in annualized expenses.

A leading Canadian security provider migrated its IoT and AI security platform away from an open source relational database to Atlas. With the ability to use MongoDB's native charting to distribute their database over lower cost instances, the company has been able to significantly reduce their database spend by 60%, which is particularly compelling given the open source nature of their prior solutions.

Another one of our customer priorities is to invest in their core competencies and outsource or eliminate everything else. They understand that clinging to the old ways of delivering innovation is not only time-consuming, but also incredibly expensive. A global travel technology leader is in the process of getting out of the business of managing their own data centers. They turned to MongoDB in order to modernize a key legacy application and move it to the cloud. The monolithic application was originally built on Oracle and Elasticsearch but the customer decided to migrate the application to Atlas because they couldn't meet their timeline and performance requirements with their existing solution.

A Web3 pioneer started off by building and managing their own computing infrastructure. However, the development team quickly reached a point where they overwhelmed by day-to-day task of managing infrastructure. By migrating to MongoDB Atlas the company saved three years in development time and reduced the need to hire 40 developers.

And given Oracle’s enhanced focus on healthcare transformation, Ittycheria pointed to a particular use case:

One of the world's largest health care companies, historically an Oracle shop, was unable to meet their desired performance expectations and had to spend tens of thousands of hours just to maintain their existing environment. Over the last few years, they have implemented MongoDB for the most demanding new projects, such as the COVID vaccine application as well as their digital health app.

Mission-critical

The perception of MongoDB as a mission-critical investment among customers has changed, he said, highlighting an unnamed commercial investment bank:

Four years ago, a senior executive of the bank told me that he didn't think MongoDB was ready to be declared a standard for their mission-critical applications. At the time, they had a myriad of relational and non-relational technologies deployed across the organization.

Since then, not only has the bank become more focused on and confident in moving workloads to cloud, but the bank's leadership team also observed how overwhelmingly popular MongoDB had become with their development teams across the organization. As a result, they decided to make MongoDB one of their enterprise standard offerings as part of the journey to the cloud. In the second quarter, they signed a multi-million dollar agreement as a sign of their desire to use MongoDB as a preferred platform for mission-critical workloads.

He added:

The new business environment remains robust as evidenced by our record increase in direct sales customer account. We have seen no change in deal activity in sales cycles. We believe our strong new sales performance is a demonstration of the critical business value our developer data platform delivers and our superior go-to-market execution. As we have said in the past, nearly every organization uses software to drive their value proposition. Consequently, these organizations seek modern solutions that make their developers more productive.

But it’s still early days in terms of having a bigger share of business in large accounts, he said:

We are bringing more resources to bear to really drive the expansion of those existing accounts and get more workloads on our platform. But in terms of MongoDB's readiness for mission-critical platforms, we feel like we're really well-positioned. We've added some new capabilities, which we announced at MongoDB World, and our road map is very rich with features. So our customers truly view us as a strategic platform, and that's why you're seeing more and more customers standardize on MongoDB.

My take

The new business environment really remains quite robust.

An upbeat note on which to end the week. Wall Street, as ever, was skittish about lowered expectations for the coming months, but MongoDB’s ‘keep calm and carry on’ mindset is the rationale response. Onwards!