MongoDB turns attention to growing its partner ecosystem

MongoDB will invest more into “smaller technology company partnerships” and make partner onboarding more “programmatic” under the leadership of partner ecosystem vice president Lars Herrmann.

Herrmann joined MongoDB at the end of last year after 20 years at Red Hat. 

On a recent visit to Sydney, MongoDB’s chief product officer Sahir Azam foreshadowed to CRN Australia the forthcoming effort to scale up its partner ecosystem.

“I think that we’re really trying to invest more in smaller technology company partnerships just to drive more scale as we’re growing as a business,” Azam said.

“That is not Australia-specific but the opportunity is definitely here given the tech ecosystem.

“We just recently brought on a new leader for that part of the organisation [Herrmann] and he’s looking at really up-levelling the scale and sophistication of how programmatic we are on the onboarding [of new partners].”

More immediately, Azam’s visit to Australia included meeting with the local teams of the major cloud providers, with whom MongoDB has some joint accounts.

“We had a big meeting with Google Cloud the other day where we gave their technology field teams a full update on our roadmap and everything we’re doing,” he said.

“We also had a big presence at AWS Summit Sydney; we had a talk, and we worked with their go-to-market teams on accounts that we co-sell.”

MongoDB has a “pretty sizable” regional presence - “somewhere north of 150 people”, Azam said.

Part of the reason for that is that Australia hosts a long-term software engineering and product development presence.

The company’s WiredTiger core storage engine, Atlas Charts visualisation and BI product, and newer Relational Migrator tool are all built and maintained out of Australia.

Azam said that helping enterprise customers get more value out of existing investments had been a conversation topic at events the vendor ran, coinciding with his visit.

However, Azam said the optimisation focus wasn’t necessarily resulting in reduced spend, with money still in the market for “strategic” digital transformation projects.

“The interesting thing for us is we’re oftentimes at the centre of pretty strategic digital transformation initiatives, and I haven’t really felt like those are being paused,” he said.

“If you’re a bank and building a digital banking platform to remain competitive, I dont think there’s an appetite to pause those types of projects because they’re quite strategic. 

“We haven’t seen any real slowdown there.”

Azam said multicloud, privacy and security also dominated discussions at enterprise events it held.