What’s the opposite of a poisoned chalice?
Whatever it is, new MongoDB CEO CJ Desai appears to have been handed it.
Desai, leading a Q3 earnings call late Monday, reported quarterly revenues of $628.3 million, above analysts’ expectations – as the company bumped annual revenue expectations up $79 million, to up to $2.439 billion.
Total MongoDB customer count hit over 62,500 – up from over 52,600 year-on-year. Sustained growth of the NoSQL database provider’s Atlas multicloud DBaaS was a core driver; it’s now 75% of total revenues.
There is a large AI workload opportunity (New York-based MongoDB has been investing more heavily in marketing to AI startups in Silicon Valley, to make a case for it being better than Postgres or other alternatives.)
“What I have not seen is truly AI agents running in production that fundamentally transform the business or serve customers better,” he said – saying that there is a proliferation of “Copilots”, but more substantial agentic AI ambitions are very much at the pilot stage still in most firms.
The larger enterprise application modernisation opportunity is huge however, Desai told analysts, as organisations look to unlock data and develop apps that are more portable across clouds and easier to update.
He recalled a recent conversation with the CTO of a “large telecommunications company who said that they are moving 1,300-plus applications to a… hyperscaler and trying to determine which workloads are best suited for MongoDB,” – saying there is scope for MongoDB to penetrate existing Fortune 500 companies more deeply, as well as EU ones.
“The whole multicloud or a public cloud transformation is still going on.”
Strong Atlas growth, added outgoing CEO Dev Ittycheria, can be attributed in part to "price - performance gains that we've seen in [MongoDB] 8.0 and now even better in 8.2, I think that's really driving a lot of the traction we're seeing in our new customers they quickly see the performance benefits and they're scaling nicely."
The link has been copied!
