Why MongoDB channel execs want its partners to take advantage of modernisation

Simon Eid and Olivier Zieleniecki explain why modernisation is the new lift and shift.

For database platform MongoDB, they want to help Australian partners embrace modernising their customer’s platforms.

As organisations continue to add new technologies onto their legacy tech stacks, it creates more complexity.

In an exclusive interview with CRN Australia, Simon Eid, SVP, APAC at MongoDB explained how the company is approaching the modernisation journey with its partners.

“The big discussion right now is there's so many legacy apps, especially within the large enterprise, not so much in the digital natives, where they're building from scratch,” he said.

“How do we do go on the modernisation journey?”

He noted that many large enterprises do “lifts and shifts” and don’t modernise the apps they have within their ecosystem.

“What happens is all these large enterprises went on this cloud journey, and a lot of it was around lifting and shifting,” Eid said.

“The challenge with a lot of the migrations versus modernisations that have happened is they've lifted and shifted an Oracle database to PostgresQL into the cloud.

“But they haven't broken it up into microservices, unlocking the value of the data because they just lifted and shifted versus modernising that app.”

Eid explained that MongoDB has programs to make it easier to modernise those legacy applications into a microservice platform.

“[This] unlocks the value of that data so they can build their Gen AI applications,” he said.

Eid highlighted that at least 80 percent of a company’s spend is going towards keeping the lights on to run a lot of those legacy applications.

“With our partner ecosystem, how do we genuinely modernise them, versus doing a lift and shift? Doing a lift and shift doesn't unlock the potential of AI, modernising them does,” he added.

AI can also hope organisations modernise their infrastructure. Olivier Zieleniecki, global VP worldwide partners for MongoDB told CRN Australia he wants to help his partners take advantage of AI.

“We're looking to unlock high value opportunities, and we are partnering with AI driven companies to help build already architectures, blueprints that either can be used right away or can they or can be customised,” he said.

To also help partners with their AI journey, MongoDB partners with the three hyperscalers, AWS, GCP and Azure.

"The partnership with those hyperscalers have evolved towards being a much more strategic, much more integrated in their platforms. We've built several solutions they're all together,” Zieleniecki said.

“We're much more focused on the industry and our customers, versus trying to have, a general approach and that's our strategy.”

Challenges

One of the speedhumps in modernisation is changing customer’s and partner’s mindset, Eid said.

“The biggest challenge is mindset, to be brutally honest, because people being fixed in a certain way. How do you change that mindset shift?” He asked.

Eid explained that modernisation teams are stubborn at first with the changes, but eventually they come around and enjoy the work.

“Week one, everybody's saying ‘we don't believe anything that is going on here, this is a fad’,” he said.

“By week two, they’re hands on keyboards, doing a lot of this modernisation work and training work. It’s been a mindset shift for them as well.”

He added, “It's a big change management journey as well. You've given them a new platform and a new technology they're not used to using. So that's the mindset shift.

“But then it's the change management shift on top of that, and then the training and the education as well.”