Working closely with the developer community and releasing a host of empowering features with MongoDB 6.0, the company is making faster and deeper strides into the Indian market with a variety of customers.
“The core audience of MongoDB has always been developers and we always look at enhancing the developer productivity. And this has borne results as we have consistently been ranked as the most preferred database amongst developers.”
Himanshumali, Solutions Architect Leader – MongoDB India
The world is increasingly being defined by software, just as Marc Andresseen declared way back in 2011. And software driven has ushered in disruptive changes giving us new business models; enabling us to leverage economies of scale and aggregation; affecting the way we consume services and participate in innovation approaches; influencing our lifestyles and ingressing into every aspect of our social, economic and personal lives.
Software driven is being facilitated by transformed organizations changes which have been adopting digital at a rapid pace. As digital becomes the new normal the metrics of winning are changing and time to market has taken on new meanings closely linked with the ability to release a new application, new features and capabilities. At the same time, the ability to create differentiation and business value is intrinsically connected with the ability to iterate and make changes quickly and easily.
The increased demand for custom software solutions in support of digital transformation has sparked the emergence of citizen developers outside of IT, which, in turn has influenced the rise in low-code. Gartner research says, on average, 41% of employees outside of IT – or business technologists – customize or build data or technology solutions. Gartner predicts that half of all new low-code clients will come from business buyers that are outside the IT organization by year-end 2025, too.
These changes are accompanied by dramatic changes in the technology landscape that itself has been innovating, evolving, maturing and coming into its own as an enabling and supportive environment. As data output increases dramatically, organizations require technologies that facilitate to store, organize and retrieve data efficiently.
Given the variety and velocity of data, traditional relational database systems become a stumbling block for developers to use data systems in innovative ways. Traditional database systems which are designed with relational schema are rigid, inflexible and difficult to scale and becomes a challenge for software developers to design applications.
This is where new database systems such as MongoDB are filling in the gap and making a difference in the market. Designed to store and retrieve data easily, MongoDB is a NoSQL database and is equipped with capabilities that is making the developer experience simpler and more productive.
“MongoDB aims at making the developer life simpler and easier, so developers are able to focus more on extending the use cases to a wider platform. In recent times MongoDB has expanded its offerings to facilitate the expansion of deployment from transactional usage to analytical use cases.”
The MongoDB Disruption
One such disruptive technology is MongoDB database, an enterprise open-source NoSQL database system that is built on a horizontal scale-out architecture and uses a flexible schema for storing data. The MongoDB architecture is designed for scalability, flexibility and supports developers endeavour to design and release software at speed and at scale.
The scale-out architecture allows many small machines to work together to create fast systems and handle huge amounts of data. Instead of spending time managing the underlying database infrastructure, developers are empowered to focus on designing and developing the application.
As opposed to relational database systems where data is stored in tables of rows or columns which are very rigid to store and retrieve, each record in a MongoDB database is a document. Document databases are highly flexible, allowing variations in the structure and can also store documents that are partially complete. Fields in a document play the role of columns and can be indexed to increase search performance. This significantly increases application performance and optimizes the search capabilities.
The Appeal to Developer Community
Since its inception in 2007, MongoDB has worked closely with the developer community and most developers find it easy to work with because it is a simple and powerful way to describe and store data as the developer controls the database schema as the application evolves without the help of a database administrator.
Speaking about the appeal to the developer community, Himanshumali, Solutions Architect Leader – MongoDB India says, “The core audience of MongoDB has always been developers and we always look at enhancing the developer productivity. And this has borne results as we have consistently been ranked as the most preferred database amongst developers.”
Over the last five years, the annual survey by Stack Overflow which is conducted amongst developers across countries has found MongoDB has ranked at number five, but a closer look tells a different story. MongoDB is the only one of the top 5 which is non-relational database and this can be better appreciated when viewed from the lens of another metrics – four of the top five most loved and most wanted database are NoSQL database.
Explaining the increasing appeal to the develop community, Himanshumali says, “MongoDB aims at making the developer life simpler and easier, so developers are able to focus more on extending the use cases to a wider platform. In recent times MongoDB has expanded its offerings to facilitate the expansion of deployment from transactional usage to analytical use cases.”
The company has announced several enhancements in its latest release MongoDB Atlas 6.0 to facilitate application development. MongoDB Atlas is the core offering, a fully managed Cloud database that manages the complexities of deploying and managing software applications on any of the three major public Cloud providers—AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Empowering new features in MongoDB 6.0 includes in-app analytics, analytics VMs which are dedicated to analytical nodes, Atlas Data Lake to easily store data at a centra location. At the same time, search and indexing has been significantly strengthened with native time-series collections and clustered indexing to measure and optimize application performance.
Another key enhancement in MongoDB 6.0 is Atlas Search which intrinsically elevates the value proposition of an application and boosts user adoption. Atlas Serverless and Cluster to cluster synchronization facilitates the roll out of Cloud-native modern applications and supports data migration in a multi-cloud environment.
Rapid Adoption of MongoDB in India
Speaking about the adoption momentum in India, Himangshumali says that there are more than 1800 customers and MongoDB adoption is experiencing 60% year on year growth. Predictably MongoDB adoption in India is more evident amongst new age business such as gaming, edtech, and fintech with gaming as the largest segment.
MongoDB customers in India include Ludo King—one of the most downloaded games during the pandemic; Byjus—India’s largest edtech; Vedantu—a well-known edtech; Zomato—one of world’s largest restaurant discovery and food delivery services; start-up customers like Seracle—that builds blockchain solutions and crypto exchanges and MyBillBook—India’s No.1 GST billing and accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses.
Even as the company is working towards penetrating traditional enterprises, driven by Cloud adoption and the imperative for digital transformation, traditional enterprises in India are experimenting with MongoDB to inject agility, speed and scalability into business operations.
Giving another metrics indicative of the platform’s popularity Himangshumali says, “Of the 1.5 million registrations on MongoDB University, 360,000 registrations are from India and that shows the tremendous uptake within the developer community in the country.”
The company is working closely with the developer community to bring about new use cases as well as drive adoption amongst larger enterprises. With more than 400 employees, currently MongoDB has offices in Gurgaon and Bangalore.
Betting on the start-up community, MongoDB is upbeat about its prospects in India. With more than 60,000 start-ups and 90 unicorns India is an attractive market, given that these businesses must build modern scalability and responsive applications that must be supported by scalable and agile database systems can leverage and monetize the huge amount of data.
Strong Foundation for future-proof Applications
MongoDB vision of empowering the developer to focus on designing and building great applications is making it a database of choice in the community. By creating an automated infrastructure layer for data services that abstracts the complexities of day-to-day deployment, management and scalability while increasing the ease and efficiency of data access, MongoDB is becoming the foundation for more applications that are leveraging data to deliver powerful outcomes for businesses.
