MongoDB Allies With Alibaba To Bring Database Cloud Service To China

Chinese internet giant Alibaba joins other cloud service giants in providing MongoDB-as-a-Service to businesses and developers.

Next-generation database developer MongoDB has struck a deal with Alibaba Group under which the giant Chinese Internet company will globally sell the MongoDB database as a cloud service.

Under the OEM agreement Alibaba Cloud will sell MongoDB-as-a-Service through what MongoDB channel chief Alan Chhabra described as Alibaba’s “vast partner ecosystem.”

“This agreement has been inked at the highest level at both organizations,” said Chhabra, MongoDB’s senior vice president of worldwide partners, in an interview with CRN in which he called the deal “a seminal moment” for the database developer.

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China is one of the biggest database software markets in the world. It is the country where MongoDB has been most frequently downloaded for the last four years, Chhabra said, and the country has a huge MongoDB developer community. Globally there have been more than 75 million downloads of the MongoDB software.

“Not only is China one of the largest markets for database software, but there also has been enormous adoption of MongoDB in this market. In fact, over the past four years the most downloads of MongoDB have been from China, reflecting the global popularity of MongoDB’s next-generation database platform,” said Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB president and CEO, in a statement.

MongoDB, a cross-platform, document-oriented database, is one of a new generation of database software products that are designed to better handle today’s huge volumes of data – data that’s often unstructured and in motion – than the relational databases that are at the core of most enterprise IT systems today.

Under the new OEM partnership, Alibaba will provide MongoDB-as-a-Service, including related management and support services for current and future versions of the MongoDB database. While the agreement is global, the focus of the deal is on businesses and developers in China, Chhabra said, as well as Chinese companies that have operations around the world and U.S. companies that do business in China.

In recent years the trend is for businesses and organizations to move more data to cloud-based systems such as Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage or cloud data warehouse systems like AWS Redshift and Snowflake Computing. And more developers are relying on cloud systems to do their job.

The new-generation databases are also becoming more popular for digital transformation initiatives in which data is a key component – and often a major challenge.

Alibaba will provide first- and second-tier support for customers with MongoDB providing behind-the-scenes support for the Chinese company.

“MongoDB is a popular database worldwide, and with the latest Community and Enterprise Advanced editions of MongoDB running on our platform, we are able to support a wide range of customer needs from open-source developers to enterprise IT teams of all sizes,” said Feifei Li, vice president of Alibaba Group, and president and senior fellow of database system, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, in a statement. “Combined with Alibaba Cloud's native data analytics capabilities, working with partners like MongoDB will empower our customers to generate more business insights from their daily operations.”

MongoDB has an active partner community of systems integrators like Accenture and Capgemini, ISVs, solution providers and cloud service providers AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. (MongoDB has an especially tight relationship with Google Cloud: The MongoDB Atlas cloud database service is a designated “first-class service” on the Google Cloud Platform and is integrated directly with the GCP Console.)

A large percentage of MongoDB’s sales transactions are conducted through VARs, Chhabra said.