MongoDB CEO On New AI, LLMs And GenAI Innovation In 2024

MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria dives deep into his company’s overall artificial intelligence strategy as well as a partner plan to drive AI momentum in 2024.

CEO Dev Ittycheria has bold innovation plans in store for MongoDB in 2024 around AI, generative AI, deeper integrations with AWS, Google and Microsoft, as well as investments in its Atlas Vector Search and Queryable Encryption offerings.

“Capturing the AI opportunity will not only require a collective effort from MongoDB and our current partner ecosystem, but also an investment in new partners to bring all of the cutting-edge innovation happening in the AI space to our customers through seamless integrations,” MongoDB CEO Ittycheria said in written responses to CRN as part of CRN’s CEO Outlook 2024 project.

MongoDB’s unified database platform has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, with the company owning thousands of customers in over 100 countries.

On the channel investment side in 2024, Ittycheria said his company is “revamping our reseller program” to better serve customers, especially in emerging markets.

MongoDB’s $1.7 Billion Run Rate

The New York City-based data platform company is on a $1.7 billion annual run rate and ranked as a Leader in Gartner’s new Cloud Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant.

For its third-quarter 2024, MongoDB generated $433 million in revenue, representing an increase of 30 percent year over year. Subscription sales topped $418 million, up 30 percent year over year.

This month, MongoDB said that it is a founding member of the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium under the U.S. Department of Commerce, a group dedicated to creating safe and trustworthy AI. “[2023] saw the emergence of AI as a driving force in technology, and this will continue to be the biggest opportunity for MongoDB and our partners in 2024,” Ittycheria said.

MongoDB’s CEO takes a deep dive into his company’s innovation and investment plans for 2024, along with its channel partner strategy.

What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2024?

We will continue to focus on building our developer data platform with the integrated capabilities that our customers need to meet the growing demands of new technologies like generative AI and the increasing importance of real-time data for modern, intelligent applications. The ability to tackle all of this in one unified platform sets MongoDB apart and is what we will deepen our investment in.

Specifically, we will focus on a few key areas:

Continuing to invest in MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, which allows developers to augment large language models (LLMs) with their proprietary data to build smarter and more powerful applications.

Creating deeper integrations between MongoDB Atlas with hyperscalers’ AI products and services (AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI) and collaborating with them to train their foundational LLMs on MongoDB documentation and best practices for coding assistants (Amazon CodeWhisperer, Google Codey, GitHub/Copilot) on MongoDB to make developers more productive.

Helping our customers modernize from legacy relational databases to MongoDB with tools like Relational Migrator, as well as going beyond data migration to the full life cycle of application modernization.

Doubling down on our run-anywhere strategy that enables customers to run their applications on-prem or across all major public clouds, as well as manage priorities as they migrate their applications to the cloud.

Continuing to invest in Queryable Encryption, a first-of-its-kind technology that helps organizations query and protect sensitive data when it is in use, not just in transit or at rest.

Expanding our API architecture so hyperscalers and our technology partners can integrate their services easily with MongoDB.

Click through to read more about MongoDB’s innovation and partner plans in 2024.

What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?

[2023] saw the emergence of AI as a driving force in technology, and this will continue to be the biggest opportunity for MongoDB and our partners in 2024.

We see this as a driving force in three ways: organizations are looking to generative AI to build AI-powered applications and deliver powerful new experiences to customers, gain operational efficiencies, and modernize traditionally difficult-to-replatform legacy applications.

To support customers on all fronts, we will continue investing in technology integrations with partners in our ecosystem, developing the MongoDB AI Innovators Program, which gives organizations from startups to established companies access to technology and partners that accelerate their product development and go-to-market strategy, and training popular code generation tools on MongoDB documentation and best practices for more efficient application development.

What impact do you expect AI to have on the business you and your partners do together in 2024?

AI is part of nearly every conversation we have with customers. We believe GenAI will make developers more productive, which will lead to the development of more applications and more sophisticated applications.

Capturing the AI opportunity will not only require a collective effort from MongoDB and our current partner ecosystem, but also an investment in new partners to bring all of the cutting-edge innovation happening in the AI space to our customers through seamless integrations.

In 2024, we will focus on continuing to integrate with the AI capabilities of our cloud partners.

Last year, our partnerships with AWS, Microsoft and Google on training models for natural language code generation, integrations with cloud providers’ managed LLM services, and other AI services including Amazon Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI, and Azure Open AI, received great feedback from customers, so we will continue to invest in this area.

[We will focus on] making the most of being open and composable, which allows us to unlock the power of our partner ecosystem, specifically where there are complementary AI infrastructure partners that can help create a complete, seamlessly integrated AI toolkit for customers.

[We will focus on] growing our partner ecosystem and providing our customers access to this ecosystem. One way we’ll do this is building on our series of hackathons that we launched in 2023. We hosted these events with key partners such as Anthropic, Together.ai, Langchain, Cohere, Fireworks and others to give developers first-hand experience with new platforms and frameworks.

[We will focus on] investing further in MongoDB for Startups, the program that puts founders first and gives early stage companies credits and tools to help build their business.

What are the toughest challenges facing customers in 2024?

Our customers continue to tell us that there’s a tension between the need to innovate and differentiate with the disruptive pressure of generative AI, while also being conscious of economic headwinds.

So, in 2024, we will continue to focus on helping them manage costs without compromising on innovation.

A key to this is increasing developer productivity, which is why we will continue to invest in our developer data platform that solves their organization’s core challenges rather than managing a complicated, costly estate of disparate data solutions.

What is the key to success for your channel partners in 2024?

It starts with the customers—their pain points, key projects and most impactful initiatives—and how we can make them successful by working together with them and our vast partner ecosystem.

For our systems integrator partners, we will continue to invest in training their architects and developers, especially on MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, so they can advise customers and deliver projects with AI capabilities.

With our cloud and technology partners, we will focus on building solutions and integrations so developers can build faster.

We are revamping our reseller program to serve our customers better, especially in emerging markets.

My top priority for 2024 is:

Last year, we focused on building new MongoDB capabilities that provide the functionality, performance, scale and flexibility our customers need to build applications that can transform their business.

Our priorities for 2024 remain the same. We will continue to listen to our customers as we build a developer data platform that allows them to innovate and build quickly.