Interaction - Rajiv Thapar, Senior Director, Partners, MongoDB

Rajiv Thapar, Senior Director,Partners India/APAC, MongoDB speaks about the channel strategies of this organisation.

What is MongoDB’s value proposition for its channel partners in India?

Rajiv Thapar - With more than 80% of applications still needing to be cloudified, MongoDB offers Indian businesses the opportunity to move away from the pricey legacy relational databases and into the future with the modernisation of applications. MongoDB is a developer data platform. We enable organisations to build innovative and highly scalable applications faster than any other platform.

Over the last couple of years, we have seen extensive adoption across the Indian start-up ecosystem and with Indian enterprises. This provides a great opportunity for channel partners to fulfill this huge demand with MongoDB Enterprise Advanced (our self managed offering )and MongoDB Atlas, our managed Cloud platform. MongoDB’s document data model with complete ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) guarantee and multi cloud capabilities provides customers as well as  partners a unique way to build future ready modern applications with lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Given the size of the market and the significant shift in the importance of data and how applications are constructed, we are still in the very early stages of a major shift.  Building on MongoDB can be very powerful for channel partners as it helps them address modernisation and digital transformation initiatives in a very cost effective and flexible way.

What are your channel expansion plans and GTM strategy to reach enterprises in the country?

Rajiv Thapar - We have a multi-pronged go-to-market strategy, which is suitable for a data platform that is general purpose and applicable to solve just about any kind of data challenge. But partners are incredibly important and in almost everything we do there’s a partner involved. MongoDB’s partner program addresses four segments in India, which includes the cloud partners, the ISVs, the VARs and the SIs.

We work very closely with Cloud partners like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. There are many ways to run MongoDB in the Cloud, but far and away the most popular and efficient is MongoDB Atlas, our Cloud database service. Atlas can be deployed on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud - and can expand to be global, multi-region, or multi-Cloud when you need it.

The ISV business for us in India, has been existing for a long time but in recent years it has grown particularly quickly. This is because ISVs have more requirements which are becoming nearly impossible to fulfill efficiently with other databases. We have a programme to support ISVs to move from legacy infrastructure to MongoDB. Once they’ve migrated, we see that ISVs can expand their total addressable market (TAM) across to newer segments and regions in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

VARs on the other hand, are an exciting mix of box-sellers, service providers and custom app development shops. VARs have had a significant impact in the Enterprise segment, and we are doubling down on our effort to utilize the Consulting Partners of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Partners, and Azure to support our Digital Cloud Native and SMB customers. In months to come from a major chunk of our partner onboarding will be from VARs and technology partners.

System Integrators (SIs) also continue to be a huge focus. We have had great success with SIs / GSIs in other parts of the world and we would like to replicate the same success within India. With SIs we are geared to address large digital initiatives and modernisation projects for enterprise customers. Our SIs are very skilled and experienced in legacy transformation projects where they have helped customers to move away from legacy databases and adopt MongoDB and MongoDB Atlas.

How is MongoDB upskilling their channel partners?

Rajiv Thapar - We have a very comprehensive and structured roadmap to upskill and certify our partners. It's part of our Partner Program. Once the partners are on board, they can go through multiple options to upskill as a MongoDB Developer, DBA or Architect. We also provide toolkits, project support and best practices for our partners to get into modernisation/digitisation projects for their customers. We continue to invest in partners in India to take advantage of our global enablement programs and have also created a dedicated Partner Solutions Architect team in India to hand hold and support our partners on MongoDB.

For example, we have created a focused certification program for specific cloud partners which will help them be certified on MongoDB Atlas and primary complementing technologies. Moreover, presenting to our partners that since MongoDB Atlas is going at a high pace both from the adaptability and the usability point of view, we want partners to take advantage of this growth while putting a value proposition to their customers. It will be a value addition as they don't have to spend more to earn more.

More generally, we also recently launched a complete overhaul of our free MongoDB University programme with new courses, certifications, labs and a lot more. This helps our partners and their ecosystem of developers to gain MongoDB skills quickly and efficiently.

What challenges do you see ahead and how do you plan to resolve them?

Rajiv Thapar - We’ve seen the impact MongoDB can have for customers and that’s translating into massive adoption. So, really our main challenge is scaling our teams, operations and support to meet that demand we’re seeing for our products. There are many parts of addressing that but one of the most important for us is working with partners to help expand the surface area of MongoDB to help even more developers and businesses in India.

Given that we see a large number of partners already interested in joining the MongoDB Partner ecosystem in India. We are encouraging partners to contact us to find out more on how we can work together.

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