Database Migration, AI Initiatives Highlight MongoDB Developer Event

At MongoDB.local NYC Thursday the database company also launched a number of new AppDev capabilities designed to encourage developers to build their next-generation applications on the MongoDB Atlas cloud database.

MongoDB has unveiled a wave of new software products and capabilities for its MongoDB Atlas developer data platform, new offerings that the company said will help partners and customers build new classes of data-intensive applications.

The company, which is holding its MongoDB.local NYC developer conference in New York Thursday, also said its MongoDB Relational Migrator, for transforming and moving legacy applications to the cloud, is now generally available.

And artificial intelligence was high on the event’s agenda with the launch of the AI Innovators Program to help businesses and organizations build applications using generative AI technology.

[Related: MongoDB And Alibaba Cloud Extend Strategic Partnership By Four Years]

“Our mission is truly to enable or empower innovators to create, transform and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data,” MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria said in his MongoDB.local NYC keynote. “We want developers to have the biggest impact they can [through] the applications that they’re building.”

Ittycheria said the average developer spends anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of their time working with data.

“When you think about impact and how can we impact developer productivity, then the obvious answer is, make it easy to work with data,” the CEO said. “And this has essentially been our Northstar as a company in terms of the products we’re building, the features we’re thinking about, the capabilities we’re introducing, everything is all about making it incredibly easy to work with data. And that started with our database. It was the first database designed by developers for developers and the focus was all about the developer experience.”

MongoDB’s NoSQL, document-oriented, high-scalability database is designed for running big data application workloads, making application developers a key constituency for the company. MongoDB Atlas is the company’s database-as-a-service built on the company’s database server.

“We think that in the years to come there’s going to be an explosion in the number of workloads,” said Andrew Davidson, MongoDB senior vice president of product, in a press briefing prior to the Thursday event.

“Essentially, we find ourselves in a software-defined economy. And a software-defined economy is a developer-defined economy,” Davidson continued. “Developers are making all this possible [and] choosing the technology, the databases, that are powering all of these applications. And new development technologies, ranging from generative AI to low- and no-code, will all democratize and accelerate this trend. There’s going to be more and more software, more and more workloads. Everything that we’re doing is in line with this.”

Artificial intelligence was a major component of the MongoDB.local NYC announcements.

“We see AI as a driver for enormous economic value in the form of new applications in every industry. We think MongoDB will be a preferred platform for all of these AI powered applications,” said Davidson, who called AI the next development paradigm. “AI will accelerate application modernization.”

“Generative AI is an accelerant to developers writing new applications. It’s just fast. The trend is pretty obvious that developers will use AI to code faster but also write applications that help businesses become more agile,” said Alan Chhabra, MongoDB executive VP of worldwide partners, in a pre-event interview with CRN. “As part of our general AI strategy, we want companies to build on MongoDB.”

He noted that the extensive alliances MongoDB has forged with the major cloud platform providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; provide the database company with a competitive advantage in AI given the hyperscalers’ out-sized role in that space.

MongoDB is launching a new initiative with Google Cloud to help developers leverage generative AI and build AI-powered applications. Expanding on the existing MongoDB-Google Cloud partnership, developers can use MongoDB Atlas and partner integrations with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI large language models, along with new quick-start architecture reviews with MongoDB and Google Cloud professional services, to jump-start software development.

At the New York event MongoDB also debuted the MongoDB AI Innovators Program, which provides organizations developing AI technology with access to credits for working with MongoDB Atlas, partnership opportunities within the MongoDB partner ecosystem, and joint go-to-market activities. The program includes the AI Startups track for early-stage companies and the AI Amplify for more established companies.

Topping the development announcements at the New York event is a slew of new capabilities for MongoDB Atlas that the company is now offering on a preview basis.

MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, now in public preview, is built into the core platform, enabling organizations to build next-generation applications that use generative AI for information retrieval and personalization to enhance end-user experiences and improve productivity, according to the company. MongoDB Atlas Search Nodes, currently in private preview, provides dedicated resources for scaling search workloads independent of their database, enabling workload isolation, resource optimization and better performance at scale.

The new MongoDB Atlas Stream Processing helps developers build applications that can better analyze high-velocity streams of complex data in real-time and adjust application behavior in response.

“The real world is not static. Every business is driven by software, people are basically building real-time businesses. Software also has to be real time. Software applications need to become more real time as ever,” CEO Ittycheria said in his keynote while introducing MongoDB Atlas Stream Processing.

Enhancements to the database’s MongoDB Time Series collections functionality offer improved scalability and the ability to modify time series data after data ingestion. And new multi-cloud options add Microsoft Azure support to MongoDB Atlas Online Archive and Atlas Data Federation, in addition to Amazon Web Services.

MongoDB also announced the general availability of MongoDB Relational Migrator, a tool for simplifying the transformation of aging applications running on legacy relational database systems and migrating them to the MongoDB Atlas database and its document-based data models.

Relational Migrator will support both one-time migration and continuous change data capture use cases. It analyzes legacy databases, automatically generates new data schema and code, and executes a migration to MongoDB Atlas, according to the company.

“I feel this is game-changing for systems integrators, ISVs, and the cloud providers themselves, Chhabra said.

“We think this will help customers modernize to MongoDB faster, more affordably, which will definitely help the SIs because they sell consulting, they’re looking for a competitive angle to do that, to win deals, and this tooling helps them do that,” the channel chief said. “We think it’ll help the cloud partners because they want to drive more applications to the cloud, driving consumption, we will help them do that. And it will help ISVs because many ISVs are trying to transform from on-premises to SaaS and they need a way to move from a legacy architecture to MongoDB.”

Partners already working with Relational Migrator include systems integrators Accenture and Capgemini and digital consultancy Globant.

“Along with Accenture’s own capabilities and solutions, the release of MongoDB Relational Migrator will enable customers to accelerate their modernization strategies,” said Stephen Meyer, Accenture associate director, cloud first software engineering, NoSQL lead, in a statement. “Our partnership [with MongoDB] helps enterprises unlock value from data by modernizing and building new applications faster.”

“We are seeing more and more customers leverage MongoDB’s Relational Migrator to migrate from traditional relational databases to MongoDB Atlas with no downtime, making it a seamless and efficient solution,” said Nicolas Avila, Globant chief technology officer for North America, in a statement.

MongoDB is also launching MongoDB Atlas for Industries, an initiative to provide developers with industry-specific expertise, programs, partnerships and integrated solutions to accelerate cloud adoption and application modernization. The effort includes workshops with industry experts from MongoDB and partners, access to the company’s industry-specific partner integrations and toolchains, and “industry knowledge accelerators” – tailored MongoDB University courses and learning materials.

The first set of vertical-industry solutions in MongoDB Atlas for Industries covers the rapidly changing financial services industry with offerings for manufacturing and automotive, insurance, healthcare, retail and other industries to follow over the next year.