Changing Of The Channel Guard At MongoDB

Long-time channel executive Alan Chhabra departs to take a channel chief post at AI company Cerebras while MongoDB veteran and global cloud VP Olivier Zieleniecki assumes the top channel job at the data platform company.

Next-generation data platform developer MongoDB has undergone a channel management changing-of-the-guard as long-time channel chief Alan Chhabra has left the company after nearly 10 years and nine-year company veteran Olivier Zieleniecki (pictured) takes over the top channel management post.

Chhabra is now executive vice president of worldwide partners at Cerebras Systems, an AI systems developer headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. Zieleniecki, meanwhile, is now global vice president, worldwide partners at MongoDB.

In an interview with CRN, Chhabra said he decided back in November to “take some time off and figure out what I wanted to do next” and “create space for potentially something new. Because it's been 10 years, I kind of had the craving to go build something again.”

While Chhabra had anticipated some downtime before finding his next job, the Cerebras opportunity quickly appeared and the time off turned into a job change.

Cerebras builds high-powered computer systems for complex AI training, deep learning and inference applications. The company just unveiled Sonar, an AI model built on Llama that’s optimized for the Perplexity AI-powered search engine.

At Cerebras Chhabra will lead the company’s global partner ecosystem and “expand and strengthen strategic relationships across industries, and drive adoption of Cerebras’ groundbreaking AI technology,” according to a company announcement of Chhabra’s hire.

“Alan’s track record of scaling partner ecosystems and driving impactful business growth will be invaluable as we further expand our global footprint,” said Andrew Feldman, Cerebras co-founder and CEO, in the announcement that cited Chhabra’s achievements at MongoDB.

Zieleniecki, MongoDB’s new channel chief, has been with the company since April 2016 and worked his way up through several sales management positions before being named vice president of worldwide cloud pursuits in February 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile. (Before joining MongoDB he held sales jobs between 2009 and 2016 at Analog Way, ClickFox and ClearSlide.)

In January 2023 he joined Chhabra’s organization as managing director and global vice president of cloud and then, in January in anticipation of Chhabra’s departure, global vice president of worldwide partners.

In recent years MongoDB has broken away from the pack of next-generation NoSQL databases to become a leading development platform for building cloud and – more recently – AI and generative AI applications. The company’s offerings include its flagship “document” database software and popular Atlas cloud database and developer data platform.

MongoDB is expected to reported revenue for fiscal 2025, which ended Jan. 31, of approximately $2 billion.

MongoDB’s channel operations under Chhabra’s leadership has been a big part of the company’s growth. “The company is in great shape. The partner organization has never been better,” Chhabra said in the interview.

One of Chhabra’s biggest accomplishments during his term has been the establishment of deep strategic alliances with the major hyperscalers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, along with Chinese multinational giant Alibaba. That despite the fact some of those companies sell database products that compete with MongoDB’s open-source database software.

Today partners are responsible for sourcing and influencing more than 80 percent of MongoDB’s new business, Chhabra said, and channel partners and the hyperscalers also source a large part of the company’s annual recurring revenue. “So we’ve come a super long way with partnerships.”

Chhabra, Zieleniecki and the channel organization also played a significant role in last year’s launch of the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP) that provides a complete technology stack, services and other resources to help partners and customers develop and deploy at scale applications with advanced generative AI capabilities.

“We've got a great ecosystem of partners in the MAAP program,” Chhabra said.

Zieleniecki has played a key role in recent years in building up MongoDB’s cloud operations and establishing the relationships with the cloud hyperscalers. In the interview he said that over the next year he will be particularly focused on two major initiatives.

The first is working with partners to leverage generative AI technology to help businesses and organizations move workloads from legacy relational database systems, such as Oracle or Sybase, to MongoDB’s Atlas cloud platform, “for a fraction of the cost and fraction of the time,” Zieleniecki said. “Customers are responding very well to this.”

Both executives said the millions of lines of application code written for legacy databases has always been a hurdle for organizations looking to move to MongoDB. In the last year the company has been investing in partner training and resources to help consulting and service partners leverage GenAI copilots and code assistant tools to better capitalize on those migration opportunities.

MongoDB is currently involved in just such a migration project for a major European insurance company that also involves AWS and several system integrator partners, Zieleniecki said. “We're not a service company, so obviously we're going to need help to scale this. And we want to do more of these,” he said.

Zieleniecki’s second initiative is ramping up production of the MAAP effort, working with partners – including service providers and AI technology partners – to “help our customers get the most ROI out of their new AI applications moving forward,” he said.

“Alan has built a fantastic team and we want to continue to build our partner ecosystem and to increase partners as a key component of where MongoDB is going,” Zieleniecki said. “In 2025 the two objectives that I mentioned are at the center of the MongoDB vision [and] partners will play a critical role.”

Chhabra, when asked what he sees as his biggest achievements at MongoDB, points to the alliances with the cloud hyperscalers as a major win. But perhaps most important was how he has ensured that partners were always a key part of MongoDB’s strategy rather than “an afterthought.”

“I've been in every single board meeting MongoDB has had since I've joined…so partners have a seat at the table at MongoDB and I believe that is something that other ISVs should learn,” he said.