Bidhan Roy, vice president of APAC partners, says partners are key to helping organizations understand that data architecture in AI needs to be paramount..
MongoDB recently announced new capabilities to provide customers with a unified AI data platform. MongoDB runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, on-premises, and in hybrid environments, so its unified data planter gives customers one database, one API, and one skill set that works consistently no matter where they deploy.
To help customers truly take advantage of these capabilities, MongoDB’s partner ecosystem plays a critical role in the technology company’s global growth. In Asia Pacific, MongoDB continues to rely on partners to help reach customers in the region and provide them with the best possible outcomes.
In a conversation with CRN Asia, Vidhan Roy, Vice President, APAC Partners, said that data architecture needs to be paramount as the data layer is becoming a core part of AI. And this is where he believes MongoDB has the biggest opportunity in the region because of its position on databases.
Although there are many opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region, Bidan noted that many organizations still struggle to get their data architecture right. Specifically, many AI applications never see the light of day due to legacy databases and technical debt.
“89% of companies say they have a huge amount of technical debt. So what is that? It’s all the applications that exist in every company, written in very rigid, very legacy databases. That’s the operational data layer,” he said, citing IDC research.
According to an IDC study commissioned by MongoDB, by 2027, organizations that fail to address technical debt will face a 50% increase in AI initiative failure rates and higher costs. The research paper, Modernizing Legacy: Winning in the Age of AI, found that nearly half (43%) of organizations in the region say their existing architectures are too rigid, costly, and time-consuming for today’s requirements, making it impossible to build new applications without major modernization.
However, there is a group of leaders who have successfully invested in strategic modernization programs to move away from legacy architectures and are generating three times more digital revenue (71%) than their mainstream peers (23%). Supporting new AI initiatives is the top driver for database and application modernization in Asia Pacific, cited by 46% of organizations. However, nearly all organizations (90%) have experienced modernization efforts fail, citing siled and low-quality data as a key roadblock.
More AI tools have been developed and implemented over the past three years, and with all of these tools now packed together, it’s a big challenge for organizations to move beyond the experimental stage of AI, Bidan said.
Here, MongoDB works with its partner ecosystem to ease the data architecture and help organizations maximize the power of AI.
Partner role
Bidhan, who joined MongoDB just a few months ago, is already on a mission to help partners fully enable their customers’ AI journeys and ensure they have the right data architecture in place.
MongoDB also revamped its partner program to ensure partners have the right capabilities to work with customers.
“Our key markets in Asia Pacific, Japan and China are partners. In this part of the world, partners are not just important, they’re critical. They’re the ones actually managing the implementations, systems, applications and services, but also the advisory and consulting, so the importance they play in the customer environment is critical,” said Bidan.
However, there were a few things MongoDB needed to confirm in its go-to-market plans with regional partners. This includes identifying the types of partners that MongoDB actually needs to work with.
“So we chose partners with deep architectural expertise, partners with local experience, and, of course, partners with high-quality customer relationships, because these partners have an absolute presence in the boardroom.Today, AI is a hot topic in the boardroom, but the friction you’re going to see is the amount of AI, and that’s the recent IDC that we talked about. “It’s mostly in the report,” he said.
Bidan explained that addressing AI challenges, especially enabling organizations to move beyond experimentation, is about MongoDB working with partners.
Challenges for partners
For Vidan, the biggest challenge for partners today is the inability to move customers beyond lift and shift in their journey to cloud and AI.
“We’ve seen a really big explosion into the cloud. But having said that, most of it is still on-premises. But if you look at what’s actually happening, it’s definitely just moving from on-premises to the cloud. Customers haven’t started realizing the value of cloud yet, and the only way to see that when the transition happens is to incur technical debt. So that’s the No. 1 feedback we hear from our partners.”
For partners, data silos are another challenge they have to deal with. There are multiple types of data, from structured to unstructured data, and MongoDB is looking to bolt AI tools on top of it.
“This has been on the board’s agenda. But it’s a tool, and applications aren’t talking to data. How quickly can we actually integrate this? So, AI doesn’t provide cross-server answers, which aren’t necessarily reliable and secure. But it also drives insights and, most importantly, actions. So data platforms play a huge role, because our integrated data… “The platform just doesn’t provide a database. It provides built-in capabilities to do full-text search and vector embedding through Voyage AI. At the same time, the unstructured part also provides capabilities that can only be achieved from an operational data layer perspective,” he added.
These are just some of the feedbacks he receives from partners that MongoDB helps him overcome.
Four pillars with partners
For Bidan, the best way to serve customers in the region is to have a very close group of partners in the markets where we operate. This means that, depending on the market size, there are approximately 5 to 10 partners in each country, with very distinct roles and opportunities.
“This whole philosophy is built around four pillars that we are working on with our partners. The first is the skills and ability that we pass on to them because we know they are very capable. But as we move forward with AI applications, how they integrate legacy databases into AI native applications is paramount to us,” he said.
The second point is that MongoDB today is locked into a rigid layer where partners are probably looking at much more lift and shift than actual modernization.
“I’ve had the privilege of being on the other side of the table with the hyperscaler experience, where we’re seeing a huge increase in cloud adoption. But that particular cloud adoption was a huge factor in the lift and shift. As customers start to step up, we’re seeing a huge increase in cloud adoption over the next 12 months, 18 months. You don’t necessarily see the real value in a month’s time period. So the key is how do customers go back and rebuild or re-create that application, and what they need is a whole suite of automation tools to help them with their cloud adoption. So these are some of the things that we’ve really brought to the table in driving that particular modernization process.”
Third, we are focused on providing vertical expertise to our partners and passing that on to our customers.
“Because the way data is used and consumed in the banking industry, for example, is very different from the retail industry and a digitally native business. So these are some of the use cases that we are delivering,” he added.
The last pillar is to have a good working relationship with our partners in terms of co-sales and co-marketing, and it’s all about long-term partner profitability and long-term outcomes.
“The countries in which we operate in the region are either experiencing economic change, currency differentiation or even taxation. What our partners are bringing now is the ability to bring local nuance, local regulation and sovereign law to our customers as key areas. So a different mix of partners is what we are looking for, especially AI. “We’re definitely seeing an uptake in how our local partners are engaging with customers in the native world. They’re really going out and collaborating with us. “But some of these local partners are also working with customers on new applications that are being built.
At the same time, he pointed out that MongoDB’s GSI partners are very prevalent in Asia as a market because of the huge legacy databases there. Another group of partners are hyperscalers that have a strong relationship with MongoDB because it is a cloud managed database, data platform product.
“Those are the three groups of partners that we typically focus on. These particular pillars are more focused on local and regional GSIs because we want to bring local expertise there, have deep customer relationships, and help remove the blockers for AI-native applications and AI workloads,” he said.
While partner enablement is key for MongoDB, Bidhan also said the company is open to adding more partners. Here the company has launched a program to increase its suite of partners over the coming months.
“We’re also ramping up our own organization at scale from a partner perspective, which is a combination of partner specialists and partner solution architects, because I see this as a very important resource and a huge differentiator for helping partners move their own customers and our joint customers quickly,” he concluded.
