MongoDB global consulting services – lets get started

Yesterday , I took on the responsibility of leading the charge for MongoDB’s consulting services , in addition to my role as the leader of global channels and BD . As I broke the news to my friends and family, the most common response was “we knew you would be back in consulting sooner than later” 🙂

I grew up in consulting – from TCS in late 90s till IBM GBS a few years ago . I have seen the good and bad of consulting and I left it for a technology job mostly because I thought there wasn’t a lot more value I could add as a consulting guy after all those years . The travel schedule for consultants is kind of brutal too – and that played a role in my decision too .

So what changed my mind to jump back into consulting with both feet in ?

Services business for me has exactly one KPI – outrageous success for our clients . Services is not a transactional business for me . We aim to be trusted advisors and partners for our clients . And that is essentially what I mean when I say “we don’t have customers – we have clients”.

Here is the short answer – MongoDB in 2014 gives me the same energy to jump on a plane at 4AM every week , that I used to have as an SAP consultant in late 90s. It checks every box for me of what an interesting and challenging leadership job should be .

And here is the much longer answer 🙂

1. My Gang

Our consulting team has some of the the smartest people one can work with . My daughter has a favorite short that says “I got mad ninja skills and stuff” . As I learned more about my new team – and as I spent time talking to Richard K, my consulting director – the visual I had in mind was standing in between a lot of people wearing a similar Tshirt 🙂 .

I would love to work with them and see them grow to great heights as we make our clients transform their apps to a modern paradigm .

Yes I am hiring – if you are an expert in building apps on MongoDB and/or operating database clusters in complex landscapes , and love to work closely with clients – we should talk . Leave a comment below with your linkedin profile and I will be in touch if there is a match .

2. The Client

Vast majority of apps that enterprises use today run on legacy RDBMS technologies . It is not because those legacy technologies are the best suited for those apps – mostly it is because there was limited choice at the time these apps were built . Policies and procedures that exist in IT shops were formulated to suit the needs and cover the deficiencies of these old technologies .

Many clients pay a lot for that choice today . They pay a hefty maintenance bill every year . They are stuck with apps that can’t change fast enough because of rigid relational schemas .

I believe we can show customers a better path to success . At least 70% of apps can work better on a newer database like MongoDB – with way more agility and much less cost . My team can do that assessment quickly and we can partner with customers to do the redesign of those old applications and creation of those new modern applications that will grow with your changing business needs .

If you are a company with such applications – and would like us to take a look at modernizing your applications – we should talk . Shoot me a note to vijay at mongoDB dot com .

I should make myself very clear here – I don’t hate SQL at all . I am as big a fan as the next person and have spent a lot of time developing on relational databases . If you want to run SAP ERP – by all means use a relational DB. It is optimized for that workload .

I won’t ever tell a customer to rip and replace a legacy technology unless there is a tangible outcome . I would also be the first to tell them if SQL is the better way to go for their given use case . Old relational technologies also have more tooling built for their stuff – and I expect customers to have some inertia in moving away from what is familiar to them .

3. The product

MongoDB is no doubt a hugely popular technology – a database that gets downloaded tens of thousands of times a day . I don’t need to convince clients to use it – they already love it . I believe that most of what my Gang needs to do is to show them the “art of the possible” on development , operations etc .

It is also a technology that is rapidly advancing . Who better to help our customers and partners with these innovations than our services experts ?

4. Our partners

We have more than 700 partners today – and my channels Gang and I are committed to their success in helping our customers successfully transform . Every partner I have spoken to so far have assured me of their full support in working closely with our services team on customer engagements . They are seeing the customer pain daily of working with legacy database technologies . Together we can partner with customers to build applications that suit the needs of today and tomorrow .

MongoDB also has a great ISV program . We want to be a great database for building modern applications . Anything that is not core to our database – we partner heavily . We work with a spectrum of enterprise vendors like IBM and SAP to tiny startups who have great products that interoperate with MongoDB .

We codevelop solutions and we go to market together . For example – our hadoop connector is certified on Cloudera , Hortonworks and MapR . If there is a heavy analytics workload that needs to be triggered – we offload it to hadoop (or a Datawarehouse like teradata ) rather than try to do it inside our database .

Another example is Adobe Experience Manager which uses MongoDB as a database option . We work with Adobe and our SI partners to help mutual customers succeed . This commitment to interoperability is crucial to customer success and something that our consultants hold dear to their hearts .

That is it – can you tell I am excited ? 🙂