And Vijay Says…

USA celebrating its independence day tomorrow . And coincidentally, I have been pinged by a lot of people with messages along the lines of “I can’t do anything independent where I work. What should I do?” type stuff. It is a question I have asked myself as an employee and as a leader/manager.

In primary school – I learned a poem in malayalam that roughly translates to “even if the bird is put in a fancy golden cage, its world doesn’t have any independence” . A lot of corporate peeps feel that way that they are stuck in a fancy cage. So what can be done about it ?

Table stakes
To begin with there are some basics – which might seem obvious and downright trivial.

1. Live within your means – or ideally, a little under your means.
2. Max out our at least match the employer contribution for your 401K if possible
3. Save a litte bit for a rainy day, invest wisely
4. Take care of your health (something I definitely need to work on)

Even if all you do is these 4 things – you should have a little bit of a safety net to take a few big swings when opportunity arises.

Then comes the core issue of employment.

Let me share a few principles from my own career 

1. Always keep your skills sharp and up to date. Even in terrible economic slumps, my skills helped me switch jobs. It takes effort and passion to do this. If you treat your job as a way to earn a living and your heart is not in it – you will find it hard to keep your skills up to date. It is a choice you make – at a minimum, keep it sharp or develop a new skill to get a job where your heart is. For me – programming was where my heart was. So right out of Business school, I chose to code instead of trading equities.

2. Loyalty in a perfect world is a two way street – but alas, the world is not perfect. So while it is a great trait to be loyal at work place, don’t let it blind you as an employee or manager. End of the day – there is a business to be run, and the sooner things are put in that perspective – the easier it is to make and accept decisions.

Loyalty is a complex subject. When I joined the workforce – my role models were people like my father who spent decades at the same company, rising through the ranks. It was a serious problem if your CV looked like you were jumping every few years. Yet – I switched employers quite a bit in my early years, and it only helped me.

3. Network naturally. I can’t emphasize “naturally” enough. I am not a fan of aggressive networking – it turns me off. Make friends with your vendors, customers, peers etc just like how you make friends in social life. Help connect people where you can. And at some point – usually sooner than you think – you will have a useful network. Don’t mistake this for buying followers on social media. Also – don’t wait for shit to hit the fan before you start networking. Start when things are good. But if you have not done that – start today and not tomorrow. Quantity of relationships is not a factor – you just need a few who matter.

4. Always have a few options – plan B, C, D etc. You can’t always make plan B’s when bad things are happening. You need to have other options figured out when things are good. If your skills and network is kept alive and thriving, this should be a natural side effect. Don’t let loyalty stand in the way of having an alternate plan – you don’t need that plan B triggered if everything continues to be good.

And when it is time for the swan song

Despite all your best efforts and intentions – you might still have to get out of a job. Maybe you have a jerk as your boss, maybe you want to be your own boss, maybe you want more money – all are valid reasons. But there is a good way to leave – and some terrible ways.

1. Always leave gracefully. Burning bridges don’t get you far – it is really a small world and you should try as hard as you can to not piss anyone off. If your employer doesn’t deserve you – and you think it is their loss, just walk away smiling with a polite thank you. Don’t give in to the temptation of mass emailing everyone on your last day, yelling at your boss and stuff like that. It only shows you as immature. Walk away with grace – go home and scream your heart out (leave your family out of the yelling part if you can). I broke this rule once many years ago – shouted at my boss, emailed a terse resignation, and banged the door on his face for not promoting me. It was stupid of me to do that – and I repent it.

2. If you can’t stand your boss – try to get another one before you quit. If you are good at what you do, there is almost always a way to make it work in another team at the same company. Pardon me for saying this again – but this needs those skills and network to kick in. If you can’t find another boss – then don’t sit there and rot, actively use your plan B, C etc.

2. Leave on your terms whenever possible. It is almost always better than being fired. The only exception I can think of is when being fired comes with a nice farewell compensation package from the employer. But for this to happen – you needed to have those Plan B,C etc figured out when things were good.

3. Keep in touch with former colleagues, bosses and customers and help them whenever you can. The way I look at it is kind of in a “good karma” kind of way. Help as many people as you can – and some day, someone else will help you too when you don’t expect it. If you expect reciprocity before helping someone – in most cases it won’t happen, and you will end up bitter. I can assure you – in my life and career so far, this has only helped me. It has not once hurt me.

4. Plan and re-plan your career periodically. When I came out of business school – I thought I could retire at Thirty five. My goal was to get a job that lets me do some globe trotting, stay in fancy hotels and have a home with a pool and buy as many dogs as I needed. Those things were all accomplished by thirty five – but I also learned that none of those were worthwhile goals, and that I could not retire in that time frame. It also taught me to not trust any plan – planning is important, plan is not important. I replan my career every year or two. I am sure things won’t work the way I have laid it out even today – but I don’t feel bad about it any more.

So that is it – those are probably the principles that helped me gain some independence in my career. I hope some of them will help your career too. Please share any tips you have too.

In theory, I am on vacation this week – except that I have not managed to get out of email yet. And to top that, I caught up on a lot of reading and as usual, have some thoughts to share. As always – these are just my personal opinions, not that of my employer.

The good(?) and bad thing about big data is that it has no rigid definition – it is more or less what we want it to be at that point in time. I like to think of “big” in terms status quo of a customer. If the customer only reports out of their ERP data, and now wants to combine CRM and SCM data with it , or maybe combine social data with it – it is already BIG for them. For a stock exchange – they have already figured out how to manage lots of fast and furious data. It is hard to tell them data is BIG now – data was always big for them. It might be a bit “bigger” now, but you get the point. “big” is relative to status quo.

At the moment – there are very few big data projects (as a % of all projects ) that add outrageous business value. Its like a white tiger – a majestic animal with great abilities and all, but rarely seen in the wild. But they are not a myth and they really exist. I saw one just this week and took a photo. I know many friends who tend to look at big data as a white elephant – and I now like to think of the current situation of  big data as a white tiger 🙂

So where is it all trending to? I have some opinions/guesses – not backed by any scientific research. So take it with a pinch (or pound) of salt.

1. Vendor Consolidation

I definitely think there is some consolidation about to happen in 2 to 5 years time. This could take many forms – established firms like Oracle, IBM, MS, Intel, SAP etc could buy some Hadoop/NoSQL type companies. Some of the newer players could merge. The big ones have enough cash in their war chest and those that don’t have cash might not mind a bit of stock dilution to be successful in the brave new world . Big data is what is going to sell more analytics, more hardware and more databases in future – so the incumbent big players in those areas will have all the incentive to jump in as soon as they feel a big data start up is up for grabs.

Oracle might be the one exception to the rule here. A lot of big data startups were founded by people who can’t stand Oracle for some reason or other . So they might not sell to Oracle (but then we know what happened to peoplesoft few years ago, so who knows). End of the day, almost everyone has a price at which they will sell – and these big vendors might pay such a premium given the long term gains. Oracle, IBM etc have an enviable customer base, and have some very driven leaders – I won’t for a second under estimate them.

2. Partnerships

I am a guy that heads a team focused on partnerships, and if I didn’t think partnerships are an integral part of this big data story, I would not have taken my current job. I am firmly convinced that no one vendor can solve an end to end business problem for a customer. Most customers don’t want to spend a lot of time and money in integration work. While no integration is exactly seamless – customers expect a significant part of the integration to be available off the shelf.

Not only that, they probably don’t want the hassle of chasing multiple vendors for making a solution. So I expect to see a lot of OEM/reseller licensing in big data world where even competitors sell each other’s products. It is not new – IBM and Oracle, SAP and Oracle etc are all relationships based on co-ompetition. I think we will see this become mainstream across the board in less than 5 years. I also think that some companies will shy away from this model – and probably perish in the process.

Even the vendors who buy out big data startups cannot avoid this partnership thingy – customers will force the issue if they shy away.

3. Open source will become the norm for software business models

I will go out on a limb to say in 5 to 7 years, open source will be the normal way a company thinks of software. Even the closed source vendors will embrace it more openly (pun intended). The reason for this is simple – as the newer big data vendors take a stance that they don’t need to maximize any given transaction, and are willing to give customers more value than they pay for , it becomes harder and harder for closed source, maintenance revenue based businesses to keep up their current model. Even if they get bought out by closed source vendors – customer expectation will not change much I think.

So why should it take 5 to 7 years ? It takes time to make a dent in the universe 🙂

a. Open source big data vendors need time to mature their code base. They need to build tooling around their products that enterprises need. Remember the time before say Oracle 8i? I think open source vendors will go through that kind of evolution, except that they have to do it in 5 years instead of 20 .

b. Also, for the incumbent vendors to take notice of the new companies seriously – they need to be at least a $500M revenue (or a  trajectory to that kind of revenue) business . I saw this first hand with SAP Hana – Oracle and IBM did not say anything against Hana for a while till SAP started showing big numbers in hundreds of millions of dollars. I fully expect the same to play out against open source too.

c. Unlike ERP etc – I don’t think there will be one big mothership of a big data project at most customers. Instead, I think there will be a lot of parallel projects of smaller size. Some will go live and some will get killed as better use cases evolve. I think big data will drive a trend towards “disposable apps” in enterprise.  But it aint happening overnight.

And all this will take time to shake out – which is why I am pegging it at 5 to 7 years. But I have no doubts that open source will dent the universe !

We just finished our big annual event – MongoDB World in NY. I am in equal parts excited and exhausted. My channels team totally rocked at the show – and I could not be more pleased with my gang.

I have been here at MongoDB for about 3 months now – but I had no idea how awesome an event this would turn out to be . A big thanks should go to the able leadership of Meghan and Dina . And looking at my calendar – I think maybe the first one to thank would be my most efficient  assistant , Kaila Hecht , for getting me through the zillion meetings on schedule . Special thanks to Jen Seelin for a first class job handling AR/PR.

I have had busy schedules at conferences as a leader in IBM and SAP, but this was at a whole different level of intensity.

We had about 2000 people attend – and it was our first multi day conference ever. More than a hundred people told me they could not believe this was our first big conference. I can’t blame them – I could not believe it either. On Tuesday afternoon, I walked out of a meeting with a large SI partner, and I found a really long time along the corridor. I was curious why all these people were lining up and stood on tip toes to see what was up. All I could see from where I was standing was the Men’s room. I was telling myself that we should have had planned better for bio breaks, and started walking towards the head of the line to tell people where the other rest rooms were – only to find that this was a line of people who could not get into the session for time series 🙂

We had a pretty good discussion with the customer CIOs on the first day, moderated by my pal Paul Cross and the most well respected Merv Adrian of Gartner

As the dude running channels – it was gratifying – scratch that – downright THRILLING to see the kind of support our partners are giving us . Many of them had booths at the expo and unlike most tech conferences where people on booth duty out number visitors, here I saw plenty of traffic . For a first conference – how many companies will have representation from partners from North America , EMEA and APAC ? We did ! A huge thank you to all our partners !

I did have one regret – something I plan to fix next year. I could not listen in on most of the customer sessions. I can’t tell you how bummed I am to miss those. Next year, I am going to fix that and block some time for customer sessions. That is the most inspiring part of the whole event, and we had some rock star customer successes. I am used to conferences where majority of the content is produced by the vendor, and a small percentage of customers telling amazing stories. Boy was I thrilled – there was no shortage of amazing use cases. We had a partner from Israel who showed us how a telecom billing system was built on MongoDB. We had Citi and Goldman Sachs telling us about their MongoDB as a Service implementation. We had Parse ( now a part of Facebook) telling us how 275000 apps were enabled by MongoDB. And many many more .

What stood out clearly was the trend for some really big customers to think of MongoDB as a common platform for multiple projects, as opposed to a small little “toy” project. Enterprise software does not typically boast of tens or hundreds of thousands of apps – so this was very interesting for me to watch. There are a few different reasons for this. MongoDB being open source definitely helps in viral adoption. The price point for MongoDB paid subscription is low enough that cost pales into background in front of value. This is the opposite of typical enterprise selling motion – where a vendor tries to maximize every transaction. We don’t do that, and customers like it and use our technology more . And then there is the most amazing part of our story – our community.

We have over 600 partners now in our partner program ! We have technology integration with  a broad range from exciting brand new start ups to household names in enterprise software like IBM, Teradata and SAP . As I have said before – it is not what we make , it is what we make possible . Partners are the ones primarily driving the “what is possible” – and they have been doing a fantastic job at that .

Our partnership philosophy is pretty simple – whether they are systems integrators, resellers, distributors, ISVs or IHVs, we want to enable and support them and get out of their way of scaling customer success. There are many things partners do that we can’t do by ourselves. A database by itself doesn’t have any direct business value – business value is delivered by the variety of apps we enable. Those are written by our partners and customers. So pretty much everywhere a partner can add value to a customer – we try to support them to the fullest extent, and get out of their way. The primary yardstick is to make sure we don’t compromise customer or user experience in the process.  We will succeed together – Our customers, partners and us – and we will do so at scale. If you are a partner reading this and want to know more about our partner program, please visit us at http://mongodb.com/partners

If you did not get a chance to watch the keynotes – you absolutely should watch the videos. Plenty of tech goodness there – document level locking , pluggable storage engine, MMS automation etc – , as well as a lot of explanation of the big picture vision, customer successes etc. You will love it. I had fingers and toes crossed for the live demos – but Eliot and gang pulled it off in style. For me in particular – I loved the fact that all keynotes were short and to the point. Understated , elegant and yet quite enthusiastic. Hopefully this becomes the trend in tech conferences. Same deal for tech talks – they were concise and had time for Q&A.

I am going to take a few days off to recover, but I am looking forward to the next MongoDB World already 🙂