A couple of bad quarters will hardly be a speed bump in the connected economy’s journey in the final analysis, considering that it’s only about two years old and just learning to walk.
Speaking with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster on the eve of its annual developer’s conference, MongoDB Chief Product Officer Sahir Azam put his (micro) chips on data, naturally, observing the momentum now driving innovation in every corner of the forming connected economy.
Despite the current cooling of some hot pandemic-era sectors like subscription commerce, Azam told Webster that the level of data-driven product and service innovation remains elevated and is building to new experiences from a growing developer pool with better tools.
Talking about current action among those who build interconnected ecosystems in which we spend our online time, Azam said it’s all “powered on the backs of software that are creating network effects and giving reach and access. The typical geographic boundaries or physical boundaries are going away, and you can create these rich ecosystems.”
Calling developer data platforms like MongoDB “a component that enables that sort of interaction,” he commented on the notion that the party’s over in connected innovation.
Saying the pandemic created “a compression effect in a short amount of time as we were all reacting to living our lives and driving our businesses in obviously rough circumstances,” he added that there’s no stopping the new experiences we’ve come to expect.
“We deal with some of the most innovative companies in the world around this and they’re not slowing down,” he told Webster. “If anything, this gave them the confidence in many ways to transform their business even faster.”
Noting that there are roughly 25 million software developers worldwide working on new digital experiences — many of them payments related — Azam said, “To steal a line from our CEO, when we talk to executives, nobody says ‘I’m innovating too fast.’”
See also: The CE100™ Index Identifies Top Performing Enablers Behind the Connected Economy
Developing the Future
The need for digital transformation predates the first mention of COVID-19 by anywhere from one to 10 years, depending on who you ask. Whatever the timeline was, it’s been moved up.
“The market is so dynamic between new players, incumbents, this move to digital opens opportunity for business model expansion,” Azam said, all of which is being aided enormously by the data power of MongoDB and development platforms like it.
By getting “the infrastructure of data out of the way,” he said, it “allows developers to spend more of their precious time on innovation and creating that amazing software and technology that enables a connected economy, that’s a real asset for organizations.”
Harking back to the 25 million developers worldwide and counting, he added that “nothing’s more precious in a lot of ways than the mindshare and productivity of those developers building these experiences. Do you want them cobbling together infrastructure, or do you want them focusing on innovation? That’s where we come in.”
While he said the company’s core mission of empowering developers hasn’t changed, the demands on developers is shifting, and dev platforms need to keep up.
“The technology ecosystem is quite dynamic, and the demands of modern software, modern applications, modern consumer experiences and businesses experience grows every day,” he told Webster. “Think about the amazing apps we even have in our personal lives. They’re so much more capable than even five years ago.”
Extrapolate that across all connected ecosystems and it has “led us as a business to react to that and say, ‘How can we serve our customers by solving a bigger problem?’ For us, that comes across in sort of a broadening of the technology we offer them.”
A preferred database tool in the developer community already, MongoDB is beefing up the platform with a variety of capabilities and partnerships that make the developer’s job easier.
“We’ve added search capabilities, analytics capabilities, capabilities around enabling mobile developers into our platform so that we can solve more of the problem and get more of that plumbing out of the way,” he said.
“It’s allowed us to expand our business with our portfolio and serve a bigger part of the problem, but it’s fundamentally driven by the demands of these modern technologies and software that people are trying to automate and build in their business.”
Read more: How Consumers Live In The ConnectedEconomy
Innovation Goes Global
While there’s plenty to be juiced about in dev in the U.S., Azam is delighted at how the global developer community is growing, bringing fresh ideas from every corner of the world.
Noting that dev has historically been concentrated in places like Silicon Valley and other tech hubs, he said, “The breadth of reach and what’s happening globally is really amazing. We have FinTech startups in Africa. We have healthcare companies, one from Mongolia I think that started using us recently. Southeast Asia. India. These are huge markets of innovation right now and there’s so many innovative developers” using platforms like MongoDB to iterate.
“It’s really become sort of a worldwide phenomenon of innovation,” he said. “The ideas coming and sourcing from all over the world will just mean that we all benefit from that progression of technology globally, versus it just being [driven by] certain centers of gravity.”
Asked if Web3 is a threat or an opportunity for the status quo of digital development, Azam said no to likening Web3 to the early internet. It’s too early to know the impacts.
Of Web3, he said, “It’s super new, there’s a lot of unknowns, but from our point of view, we’re a backing technology for any type of software innovation. The more things move to software, the more vibrancy there is in the developer community. We stand to hopefully be a participant.”
Conceding that predictions are hard to trust in these changeable times, Azam said, “We are firmly in investment mode for the long term as we see this huge market opportunity to modernize legacy technology systems in the enterprise onto technologies like ourselves.”
He added, “I think there are more applications projected to be built in the next five years than in the past 40 years or something crazy like that. We want to optimize for that and we’re managing toward that long term opportunity.”
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