How Google Cloud MongoDB and Forbes partner on data driven insights

Thank you so much for everyone joining our fireside chat. I'm Stephanie Wong, developer advocate at Google Cloud, and I'll be your moderator. Today we have Dave Itticheria, CEO of MongoDB, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, and Vadim Supitsky, CTO of Forbes. Thomas, so glad to have you here with us today. Let's start with you. Google Cloud and MongoDB share a common vision for digital transformation in the cloud. So what are some challenges you see businesses are experiencing with their digital transformation initiatives, especially as organizations navigate what will be the new normal? You know, the biggest change that we see is that every industry has had its customers, whether they are consumers in, if you're a consumer facing company, or a business, if you're a B2B company, wanting to do a couple of things. They want to have you deliver your services online to them and have you understand them better in order to provide them better service. And the heart of the whole process of digital transformation is helping people manage their data, whether that's about products or customers, and also to then connect to customers online using new digital medias. And so a lot of our work with Dave and his team at MongoDB have been to facilitate that whole process of digital transformation, whether that's in retail or healthcare or manufacturing or automotive or media. And a lot of the work has been to facilitate that. Yes, absolutely. The pandemic has really encouraged the acceleration of digital transformation and also highlighted some challenges around data synthesis. So for Dave, in today's increasingly digital world, data is a key asset for organizations and it plays a vital role in digital transformation for an enterprise. So when speaking with customers, what challenges and trends are you observing? So as you said, what the pandemic has really reinforced is that a company's competitive advantage today is using software and data to drive their business. And so when you need to connect to the customers digitally, when you need to be digital first in terms of how you engage with not just your customers, but your partners and your suppliers, knowing how to use software and data becomes really, really important. And you can't really buy a competitive advantage. You have to build it. What I mean by that is you can buy third-party software, you know, whether it's CRM software or supply chain software or HR software, but your competitors can do that as well. Your real competitive advantage comes down to really building these software applications that really transform your business. So what that really means is, are you giving your developers the tools to be as productive as possible? And that's where we think we add a lot of value in partnership with Google, where we can help developers really increase the pace of acceleration to build amazing applications that really transforms the business. And when you talk to development teams, the biggest challenge they have is actually managing data. Data is this very important asset. Think about any application. What would it be without relevant, timely data? And so data becomes a really important part of how people build these applications. And if you don't have a data platform that enables that, you really struggle. And the challenge really comes home when people start using legacy technologies like relational databases that are not designed for the way developers think and the way they code. They're not designed to scale and they're not really designed for fault tolerance. And those are the problems that we're addressing in our partnership with Google. And we're seeing a lot of success with customers who are using, you know, the combined technologies. Data can be a double-edged sword, but we're so excited about what MongoDB and Google Cloud have done to make data more accessible and manageable. So for Vadim, how has Forbes Digital Transformation played a vital role in captivating record-breaking audiences during the pandemic? Since we launched Forbes.com website 25 years ago, we always focused on innovation and digital transformation. In recent years, it only has accelerated. Our traffic has been steadily growing and then came the pandemic. And our traffic really, really spiked driven by our coverage of COVID-19 pandemic and our foresight to create a breaking news team. We saw record-breaking numbers. 120 million unique visitors every month came to Forbes.com. At that point, I was extremely happy that we were in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas because it really allowed us to scale and our users didn't see any degradation at all. It also allowed us to continue to innovate even during the most difficult circumstances. Technology and data is at the core of everything that we do at Forbes and having the data consolidated in one place, highly available with very little latency has been really transformational for us. So I'm very happy that we migrated when we did. That's fantastic. It's so great to see Forbes thrive. Now, Thomas, over the years, we have seen MongoDB and Google Cloud work very well together. Can you share a little bit more about the partnership and how Google Cloud and MongoDB are helping their customers in their journey to the cloud? You know, just following on the comments that Dev and Vadim made, we're helping customers in three very important ways. One is bringing the developer ecosystem of our two organizations together to help, as Dev said, allow developers to use our two technologies together to build great applications that will provide the foundational advantage for companies. Whether that's helping 1-800-Flowers accelerate their e-commerce, helping auto trader sell products online more effectively, helping an organization like Spoke use Google's AI and ML along with data in MongoDB. All of these are examples where the developer ecosystems are being brought together to help people build the core applications that drive their business. That's number one. Number two, it's about simplifying the experience people have with the platform. Just as an example, when you look at auto trader, when we started our work with them, they were doing about 15,000 releases a year in production. And over the last year, they have reached 35,000 releases to production. So almost double the productivity of the developer organization. And we do that by making things simpler for people. And when I say simpler for people, eliminating complexity by offering them Atlas on GCP as a solution to help them get their work done. And the third is we do a lot of work that takes away complexity for operators as well. We want people to get capabilities. Vadim talked about handling scalability when you have a huge amount of traffic coming in, handling spikes in capacity requirements, ensuring that security and cybersecurity is provided on people's mission critical data that's stored in Mongo on GCP. So the third thing we want to make sure is not just the developer community, but the company that depends on our technologies working together can go to bed at night and not be worried about things like will we be able to handle capacity needs? Will we handle the availability requirements that mission critical applications need? Will we get the necessary cybersecurity protection? And a lot of that comes from the great work that the MongoDB team and the Google Cloud engineering teams have done together over the last year. Yes, all of our teams have been very busy at work over the last year. For Vadim, what led you to decide on working with MongoDB and Google Cloud? And what has changed since your journey to the cloud? The decision to migrate to Google Cloud was made because of the tool set that platform provides, its scalability and developer friendliness. Regarding MongoDB Atlas, we always evaluate different managed solutions. And if it meets our requirements and makes sense, we go with it. It was also a perfect time for us to migrate to MongoDB Atlas because we were migrating to Google Cloud and wanted to keep our products close to the databases to reduce the latency to the minimum. We also didn't want to be in the business of managing databases. We didn't want to do routine tasks like backups, patches, and over provisioning our environments. Instead, we wanted to focus on important things like innovation and our users' loyalty. We migrated to Google Cloud in about six months, so pretty fast. And right away, saw really, really great results. We've seen our speed to market increase by 58%. Last year, we released 73% more initiatives than the year before. And while our velocity has really accelerated, number of rollbacks, defects, and hard fixes has decreased by over 30% for us. So the results speak for themselves. Wow, those numbers, that's amazing. So for Dave, we are clearly seeing some great customer success, as Vadim's story is evident of. So what's next for Google Cloud and MongoDB, and what excites you about the future? Where do you see most of the opportunities? Well, it all comes back to the theme about helping customers innovate fast. You just heard Vadim talk about, and frankly, we hear this from lots of customers, sophisticated customers like Forbes, is just saying, you know, my biggest gating issue is how can I increase the speed of innovation? So I think what Thomas talked about is the integrations that between MongoDB and Google Cloud really make the developer experience very seamless. Things like unified billing, unified procurement, even the sales engagement model just makes it very simple for customers to engage with the two organizations. They don't have to deal with, you know, trying to understand what one hand is doing while the other hand does something else. And then on top of that, the integrations that we have across the products, integrations with some of Google Cloud's other data products, like BigQuery and a bunch of other capabilities, Datastream and so on and so forth, as well as all the technical integrations, security integrations that really offer a seamless experience for customers. And so those are the things that we've already doing and we're just doubling down on. And we're working closely with Google with some other value add services for customers so that they continue and can have a really incredible experience. So frankly, that, you know, the infrastructure gets out of the way for them to continue to innovate and build amazing applications that really drive their business. Vadim would love to hear what's next for Forbes as well. We're always looking at what's next and what the next era of information will bring. On the technology side, we're using serverless and cloud native more and more, as well as AI and ML. On the business side, we are obsessed with building our users' loyalty. We want to deliver bespoke experiences and really offer the most valuable products to our readers. We have very ambitious first-party data roadmap and having that product overall has allowed us to really deeply understand our user, as well as continuing to cultivate different audience segments, very valuable ones like C-levels, decision makers, entrepreneurs, and leaders in different verticals. We are continuing to build our communities. We're growing our audiences on-domain and off-domain and also focusing on newsletter subscriptions as well. We are really proud of our AI-powered CMS. We want to make publishing simple and we really, really focus on making our journalists' lives easier. We also have really invested in expanding our consumer product suite. Every day somebody comes to Forbes.com, we want to offer them more and more value. So for us, innovation and transformation truly never stops. Well, Vadim, thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience and a look towards the future. Thomas, do you have any closing thoughts? Vadim, thanks again for the great work you guys are doing using our platform along with Mongo's technology. It's amazing to see the impact you're having on readers in so many different parts of the world. Look forward to watching how your platform evolves. And then, Dev, thanks again to all of the engineers and everyone in your organization. It's been such a great partnership. And watching our customers succeed using our products together to build great experiences for people, just like we heard from Vadim and his team at Forbes, it makes us all feel super proud to be working with you. Vadim, Dev, Thomas, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation. And thank you to everyone watching.