$7.5 billion MongoDB explains how its partnership with Google Cloud is paying off with lots of new customers: 'We're benefiting from that macro-level push Google has in the market'
- MongoDB's cloud database Atlas works with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud - but says that it's seen the biggest rate of growth in customers going to Google.
- Last year, Google Cloud announced an expanded partnership with MongoDB and six other companies, which tightly integrates their software into Google Cloud and allows their sales teams to work together.
- MongoDB says that this partnership has borne lots of fruit: "We're benefiting from that macro-level push Google has in the market."
- Ultimaker, Precognitive, and Panoskin shared why they picked Google Cloud and MongoDB, as well as how they're using those services for applications like 3D printing, fraud detection, and virtual tours.
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The database company MongoDB works with the three major cloud providers - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud - but it's seeing the fastest growth with customers going with Google.
Atlas, MongoDB's cloud database service, can run on any of those three clouds, but adoption on Google Cloud Platform is ramping up the fastest, the company says. Atlas is one of MongoDB's core products, generating $200 million in annual recurring revenue for the company.
For its part, Google Cloud last year also announced an expanded partnership with MongoDB and six other open source-based software companies to integrate their products more closely - and share revenue, as Business Insider reported at the time. It was part of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's plan to catch up to AWS and Microsoft by appealing to open source developers and customers alike, and it's paid off for MongoDB, it seems.
"We're benefiting from that macro-level push Google has in the market," MongoDB chief product officer Sahir Azam told Business Insider. "Google is taking a different approach from the other cloud providers in the way they partnered with open source cloud providers."
Azam is referring to how Amazon Web Services and some foreign cloud providers like Baidu are known to take popular open source software, repackage it, and sell them as a commercial product. He praises Google Cloud for its different approach of actively partnering with the companies that create and manage these open source projects.
Through this partnership, MongoDB works with Google Cloud's sales teams, with incentives for both companies to cross-sell their products.
"In the field we have tight collaboration there, both in every geography, as well as to a variety of company sizes," Azam said. "There's a lot of traction and uptick we're seeing in GCP."
Azam also says that Google Cloud benefits from how more companies are using multiple clouds, instead of just picking one. Google Cloud last year announced a product called Anthos that allows customers to easily manage their work on multiple clouds, as well as their own data centers. Likewise, he says MongoDB can be used on multiple clouds as well - customers can use any combination of the clouds it supports.
"It's something more organizations are implementing as a best practice," Azam said. "Especially large organizations, they don't want to place their bets on a single cloud provider. They want to avoid lock-in. As multi-cloud becomes a bigger and bigger thing, I think GCP will benefit."
Here's why three companies are betting on Google Cloud and MongoDB.
'We wanted something that could offload most of the work'
The 3D printing company Ultimaker looked at AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud to help manage its printers on the cloud, but it picked Google for two reasons.
The first is that Google Cloud has a partnership and managed service with MongoDB, which Ultimaker uses. In addition, Utlimaker also felt that Google Cloud was the most developer-friendly and suitable for microservices, the method of using many lightweight services that communicate with each other to help run a large-scale application.
Because of that, Ultimaker felt that working with Google Cloud was the most flexible for scaling its applications.
"We saw an increased need for managing infrastructure with more printers," Chris ter Beke, software architect at Ultimaker, told Business Insider. "We saw that opportunity. In order to provide that, we were really looking for a cloud provider. We wanted something that could offload most of the work."
By using Google Cloud, Ultimaker allows its customers to 3D print products or prototypes that they're designing, even if the printer is located far away. Before, making changes to a product could take at least a month, but now, companies can do that within days, Ultimaker said.
Working with both Google Cloud and MongoDB has also allowed Ultimaker to scale. Last year, the company did less than a million print jobs a week, and now it supports 2 million a week, says Paul Heiden, senior vice president of product management at the 3D printing company Ultimaker.
"It's these types of scenarios where we really need the scalability of the Mongo database," Heiden told Business Insider.
'It's been great for us having these two pieces tied together'
When the fraud prevention platform Precognitive first started working with Google Cloud in 2016, Google Cloud was still in its early stages and certain features were missing, says Zac Rosenbauer, vice president of technology at Precognitive.
Now, he says Google Cloud has "quickly learned from the other cloud players."
Precognitive had considered AWS, but it picked Google Cloud because of its work with Kubernetes, a popular open source cloud computing project that makes applications easier to scale and run anywhere. In fact, Kubernetes was started at Google.
Rosenbauer also says Google Cloud has done a good job at how it approaches working with open source software companies.
"The other thing that Google has done really well is a tendency of some of the other cloud players to piggyback off existing open source things and benefit from having managed versions of that," Rosenbauer said. "Google has taken an opposite approach."
Rosenbauer says that by embracing the cloud, the company is able to push out updates to customers faster. He also says MongoDB was Precognitive's database of choice "from day one" because of how quickly it can sort through documents and data. And now that those two companies have partnered up, Rosenbauer says it's been helpful being able to get support from them both.
"As a startup we had a lot of things changing very quickly," Rosenbauer said. "Just the fact that MongoDB and Google Cloud partnered together - it's been great for us having these two pieces tied together."
Putting everything on the cloud was the 'obvious choice'
Tom Chomiak, CTO and co-founder of the virtual tour software company Panoskin, says it was the "obvious choice" for the startup to put everything on the cloud. It already relies on Google Street View for its virtual tours, making Google Cloud a logical pick, Chomiak says.
Besides Google Cloud, Panoskin also runs some of its applications in its private data centers, as well in AWS. Chomiak says this approach helps mitigate risks, in case one cloud or data center goes down. Likewise, he says MongoDB Atlas works well on any cloud.
"Once we started using Atlas, our entire team loved it," Chomiak told Business Insider. "It's super easy to contain everything. It's a really intuitive interface."
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