Dominic Wellington

4 results

Data and the European Landscape: 3 Trends for 2022

The past two years have brought massive changes for IT leaders: large and complex cloud migrations; unprecedented numbers of people suddenly working, shopping and learning from home; and a burst in demand for digital-first experiences. Like everyone else, we are hoping that 2022 isn’t so disruptive (fingers crossed!), our customer conversations in Europe do lead us to believe the new year will bring new business priorities. We’re already noticing changes in conversations around vendor lock-in, thanks to the Digital Markets Act, a new enthusiasm for combining operational and analytical data to drive new insights faster, and a more strategic embrace of sustainability. Here’s how we see these trends playing out in 2022. Digital markets act draws new attention to cloud vendor lock-in in Europe We’ve heard plenty about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act , which, in the name of ensuring fair and open digital markets, would place new restrictions on companies that are deemed to be digital “gatekeepers” in the region. That discussion will be nothing compared to the vigorous debate we expect once the EU begins the very tricky political business of determining exactly which companies will fall under the act. If the EU sets the bar for revenues, users, and market size high enough, it’s possible that the regulation will end up affecting only Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But a European group representing 2,500 CIOs and almost 700 organizations is now pushing to have the regulation encompass more software companies. Their main concern centers around “distorted competition” in cloud infrastructure services and a worry that companies are being locked into one cloud vendor. A trend that will likely increase in 2022 that pushes back on cloud vendor lock-in is embracing multi-cloud strategies. We should expect to see more organisations in the region pursuing multi-cloud environments as a means to improve business continuity and agility whilst being able to access best of breed services from each cloud provider. As we have always said …”it’s fine to date your cloud provider….but don’t ever marry them.” The convergence of operational and analytical data The processing of operational and analytical data is almost always contained in different data systems, each tuned to that use case and managed by separate teams. But because that data lives in separate places, it’s almost impossible for organisations to generate insights and automate actions in real time, against live data. We believe 2022 is the year we’ll see a critical mass of companies in the region make significant progress toward a convergence of their operational and analytical data. We’re already starting to see some of the principles of microservices in operational applications, such as domain ownership, be applied to analytics as well. We’re hearing about this from so many of our customers locally, who are looking at MongoDB as an application data platform that allows them to perform queries across both real-time and historical data, using a unified platform and a single query API. This results in the applications they are building becoming more intelligent and contextual to their users, while avoiding dependencies on centralized analytics teams that otherwise slow down how quickly new, data-driven experiences can be released. Sustainability drives local strategic IT choice Technology always has some environmental cost. Sometimes that’s obvious — such as the energy needs and emissions associated with Bitcoin mining. More often, though, the environmental costs are well hidden. The European Green Deal commits the European Union to reducing emissions by 55% by 2030, with a focus on sustainable industry. With the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) recently completed in Glasgow, and coming off the hottest European summer on record, climate issues have become top of mind. That means our customers are increasingly looking to make their technical operations more sustainable — including in their choice of cloud provider and data centers. According to research from IDC , more than 20% of CxOs say that sustainability is now important in selecting a strategic cloud service provider, and some 29% of CxOs are including sustainability into their RFPs for cloud services. Most interesting, 26% say they are willing to switch to providers with better sustainability credentials. Historically, it’s been difficult to make a switch like that. That’s part of the reason we built MongoDB Atlas — to give our customers the flexibility to run in any region , with any of the three largest cloud providers, and to make it easy to switch between them, and even to run a single database cluster across them. Publicly available information about the footprint of individual regions and even single data centers will make it simpler for companies to make informed decisions. Already, at least one cloud platform has added indicators to regions with the lowest carbon footprint. Source: IDC, European Customers Engage Services Providers at All Stages of Their Cloud Journey, IDC Survey Spotlight, Doc #EUR248484021, Dec 2021

December 21, 2021

MongoDB Rated an “Overall Leader” by Technology Analysts KuppingerCole

KuppingerCole, one of Europe’s leading technology analyst firms, has recognized MongoDB as an “overall leader” in a new report focused on enterprise databases in the cloud. In the report, KuppingerCole acknowledged MongoDB’s unique position as a database platform designed for the cloud age and well-suited to the applications that drive disruption, innovation, and competitive advantage. “Designed from scratch as a general-purpose database platform for the cloud age, MongoDB has grown into the world’s fastest-growing NoSQL ecosystem and one of the preferred engines for modern cloud-native applications,” wrote Alexei Balaganski, lead analyst for KuppingerCole. The report noted that, as the only overall leader in cloud databases that is not also a cloud services provider, MongoDB is uniquely committed to making sure data can move easily between multiple cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud). In addition to the overall leadership accolade, KuppingerCole gave MongoDB its “Strong positive” designation – the highest possible rating – in seven important areas: security, functionality, interoperability, usability, deployment, innovativeness, and market position. Excellence in Product, Innovation, and Market Position MongoDB was one of only four database services to achieve a leadership designation in each of the three areas key to the final categorization as an overall leader: product leadership, innovation leadership, and market leadership. Product Leadership. Here, KuppingerCole singled out MongoDB Atlas as the core of MongoDB’s cloud-agnostic database product, offered as a managed cloud service across the three major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). Balaganski also refers to MongoDB's popularity among developers, who have rated it the “Most Wanted” database four years running in StackOverflow’s annual survey . “MongoDB offers maximum deployment flexibility and an interface for developers so familiar that other vendors chose to implement the MongoDB protocol for their own databases,” writes Balaganski. Innovation Leadership. KuppingerCole defines leadership in innovation not so much as a constant flow of new features, but as a customer-oriented upgrade approach. The analyst firm wants to see backward compatibility, especially at the API level, and it wants to see new features that meet emerging customer requirements. Clearly, MongoDB delivers. KuppingerCole lauded MongoDB's history of listening to its customers and delivering new and relevant features. The result, the analyst firm said, is that MongoDB has been, “One of the most popular NoSQL databases for years.” KuppingerCole specifically pointed out Atlas Search, Atlas Data Lake, and mobile support. Market leadership. MongoDB was rated a leader in this category as well. While Oracle has, “Arguably the largest number of on-prem database customers,” it was far from assured that all of them would migrate to Oracle Cloud. KuppingerCole said MongoDB, “Dominates the NoSQL database market across all major cloud platforms.” MongoDB Atlas' Unique Advantages In its analysis of the “overall leader” cohort, KuppingerCole showed why it could confidently claim that MongoDB and the MongoDB Atlas cloud platform, “Provide a simple, universal alternative for developers that do not want to replicate the complexity of their legacy on-prem infrastructures in the cloud and would rather avoid a plethora of specialized database engines, opting instead for a single interface to manage, query, and analyze all of their data.” Two other prominent vendors, said KuppingerCole, focus on a database portfolio strategy, offering a purpose-built database for every conceivable need. But KuppingerCole said that approach runs the risk of locking data in silos, and complicates analytics across silos. The analyst firm said that management capabilities can vary between different database engines. It also noted that another leading vendor’s database engine was not well-suited to highly distributed modern application architectures. MongoDB addresses those challenges. Among its strengths, KuppingerCole noted that MongoDB provides a single platform for transactional, search, and analytics workloads. It also mentioned MongoDB’s multi-cloud availability in AWS, GCP, and Azure; its advanced security features, such as client-side field-level encryption; and comprehensive developer support with drivers, tools, and additional services. That makes it, as Balaganski writes, “A one-stop platform for developing modern highly scalable, and distributed cloud-native applications.” And, of course, an overall leader.

January 29, 2021

MongoDB Atlas Arrives in Italy | MongoDB Atlas Arriva in Italia

We’re delighted to announce our first foray into Italy with the launch of MongoDB Atlas on the AWS Europe (Milan) region. MongoDB Atlas is now available in 20 AWS regions around the world, including 6 European regions. Milan is a Recommended Region , meaning it has three Availability Zones (AZ). When you deploy a cluster in Milan, Atlas automatically distributes replicas to the different AZs for higher availability — if there’s an outage in one zone, the Atlas cluster will automatically fail over to keep running in the other two. And you can also deploy multi-region clusters with the same automatic failover built-in. We’re excited that, like customers in France, Germany, the UK, and more, Italian organizations will now be able to keep data in-country, delivering low-latency performance and ensuring confidence in data locality. We’re confident our Italian customers in government, financial services, and utilities in particular will appreciate this capability as they build tools to improve citizens’ lives and better serve their local users. Explore Atlas on AWS Today   In Italian, courtesy of Dominic: Siamo lieti di annunciare la nostra espansione in Italia rendendo disponibile MongoDB Atlas nella regione AWS Europa (Milano). MongoDB Atlas è ora disponibile in 20 regioni AWS nel mondo, comprese 6 regioni europee. Milano è una Recommended Region ; questo significa che ha tre Availability Zones (AZ). Quando viene creato un cluster a Milano, Atlas distribuisce automaticamente le repliche sulle diverse AZ per aumentare la disponibilità e l’affidabilità — nel caso in cui avvenga un disservizio in una zona, il cluster Atlas utilizzerà la funzionalità di failover per restare in esecuzione sulle altre due. Eventualmente è anche possibile creare cluster multi-region che incorporano la stessa logica di failover automatico. Siamo felici che anche le realtà italiane possano scegliere, come i nostri clienti in Francia, Germania, UK, ed altrove, di mantenere i propri dati all’interno dei confini nazionali, dando risposte a bassa latenza ai propri utenti ed assicurando loro la fiducia nella localizzazione fisica dei dati. Siamo sicuri che i nostri clienti in Italia, in particolare nel settore pubblico, nei servizi finanziari, e nelle utilities, apprezzeranno queste nuove possibilità per la creazione di nuovi strumenti per migliorare la vita dei cittadini e servire meglio i loro utenti in Italia. Scopri subito Atlas disponiblie su AWS

November 4, 2020