MongoDB Launches Bid To Recruit Oracle Customers To Migrate To Its Next-Gen Database

The initiative, in alliance with Informatica and Hitachi Vantara Pentaho, is designed to help businesses and organizations modernize applications rather than just “lift and shift” them to the cloud.

Next-generation database developer MongoDB has partnered with Informatica and Hitachi Vantara Pentaho to develop tools and blueprints to help businesses and organizations modernize their legacy applications running on relational database systems and migrate them to the MongoDB database and the MongoDB Atlas cloud database.

With the initiative, being announced Thursday, Mongo is particularly taking aim at Oracle customers with aging applications running on the Oracle relational database system.

Developers of next-generation database software like MongoDB, Couchbase and MemSQL argue that older databases like Oracle were not designed to handle the volume, speed and variety of data being generated today. (Last month MemSQL launched a marketing campaign with “Dump Oracle” billboards in San Francisco and New York.)

[Related: MongoDB Allies With Alibaba To Bring Database Cloud Service To China]

But the goal of the MongoDB initiative goes beyond just convincing businesses and organizations to move their database applications to the cloud, said Alan Chhabra, MongoDB senior vice president of worldwide partners and APAC sales, in an exclusive interview with CRN prior to the announcement. The real focus is on helping customers modernize those applications to get the full benefit of cloud computing.

“If you just lift and shift, you are not unlocking the full value of the cloud,” Chhabra said. “How many companies out there have lifted and shifted their apps to the cloud without getting any value? I think there are lots.”

Businesses and organizations with initiatives to migrate operational applications to the cloud – and the solution providers and systems integrators they work with – often face time constraints and just move their legacy systems to cloud platforms, Chhabra said. That means the applications are not updated with new capabilities or refactored/re-architected for microservices and other cloud-native features that make them nimble and more efficient.

The result is that businesses don’t realize the full value of application migration projects, Chhabra said, and may even find themselves with higher total cost of ownership.

Through the newly announced initiative MongoDB is working with Informatica, a developer of data ETL (extract, transform and load) and data migration tools, and Hitachi Vantara Pentaho, which provides a data blending, integration and business analytics platform.

The companies have developed a migration guide to help customers identify which legacy applications are good candidates for migration, and blueprints, white papers and best practices for renovating legacy applications and moving them and their underlying data to MongoDB.

MongoDB also offers its Modernization Scorecard to help customers evaluate the suitability of its database for new applications and application modernizations against several criteria including data modeling, query requirements, performance and scalability, availability and disaster recovery, operational management, and deployment and TCO. The company also provides training on how to remodel the data.

Informatica is contributing its Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog and Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services offerings to the initiative while Pentaho is bringing its Pentaho Data Integration tools to the table. MongoDB has certified those products to work with its database software.

MongoDB said the combined tools support one-time movement of applications and data from Oracle and other relational databases into MongoDB at scale, as well as provide continuous data modernization including data capture, reconciliation and validation procedures.

Auto Trader U.K., an automotive classified advertising business in Britain, has already undergone a legacy application and data migration using the modernization guide to move its online applications from Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases to MongoDB Atlas, according to a MongoDB blog.

It’s often the most mission-critical applications – and therefore the most painful to migrate – that stand to benefit the most from modernization and migration, according to Chhabra. He cited the case of a European energy company, which he declined to identify, that modernized its core billing application and moved it from Oracle to MongoDB.

Chhabra makes clear that regional and global systems integrator partners and ISV partners that work with MongoDB will play a major role in the migration initiative. “It’s about making systems integrators and customers to be more comfortable in making the move,” he said. Some system integrator partners are also developing data migration tools for MongoDB, although he said it’s too early to announce them.

ISVs who develop applications that run on the Oracle database are also candidates for using the new migration guidance and tools to move their software to MongoDB, Chhabra said.

In addition to systems integrators and ISVs, MongoDB partners with resellers, OEMs, technology companies and the leading cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba). “Cloud partners love this,” Chhabra said of the application/data migration effort.

Altogether about 53 percent of the company’s sales involve a partner in some way, according to Chhabra.