Ep. 125 The MongoDB World Series - Madhup Mishra From Hitachi Vantara

Shane McAllister: Welcome to the MongoDB podcast. As always, thank you for joining in and listening and subscribing, and hopefully also reviewing, as we always push and prompt you to towards the end of these podcasts. We are super glad to have you. I'm Shane McAllister on the Developer Advocacy team here at MongDB. And as always, but bittersweet, the last time I'm joined by Cedric, our intern here at MongoDB. How are you, Cedric?

Cedric: I'm fantastic, Shane. It's already the last week of the internship, which feels honestly crazy. We all delivered our final intern presentations last week, and it was really, really incredible to see how much work the interns have put in this summer. I've seen so many new features that have been developed, and some already put in production, even on our local dev center or dev hub site. So hats off to this year's intern class. And of course, all of the managers that have been bugged for the past few months constantly.

Shane McAllister: You got to get that one in there. All right. Yeah.

Cedric: Of course. Even on the weekends sometimes. Sorry, Michelin. I'll be back to Raleigh here soon, but there's always ways to connect back to MongoDB, like our. local events.

Shane McAllister: And they're coming up in the late fall, early winter. So keep an eye on mongodb. com for those there, where we, I suppose, take a smaller subset of what we did at World back in June. This is the World Series podcast. So we take a smaller subset of that and toured around the world in various cities. So keep an eye on our website for the details. I can't believe it's gone by so quickly, Cedric, you'll be sorely missed. So back to college for you then after this, right?

Cedric: Yep, yep.

Shane McAllister: Yeah. Skip college, just go stay with MongoDB, don't go back. Don't go back anyway. I'm sure I can't promise that, but we've had a great time with yourself, obviously, Cedric, and obviously all the other interns. We've had over 120 this summer internship program. And I know we, in our Southern hemisphere, we have a winter or their summer our winter internship program as well too. So for anybody who's tuning into these podcasts, who is a student in college in the year before their final year, check out our internship program on MongoDB. com. It's highly worth it. So as we said at the beginning, this is the last and final episode of what was recorded on the show floor at MongoDB World back in June. And in this episode, we hear from Madhup Mishra, who is the Head of Product Marketing for Lumada Software in Hitachi Vantara. And so Mike Lynn met up with him and it was a great conversation with Madhup on what Hitachi is doing. It's a 100 year old company more, and what it's doing in software and data and applications, and the sheer size and scale of their reach and the customers that they have, and how they go about building a data fabric for their customers with MongoDB. So let's listen to this episode with Mike and Madhup.

Madhup Mishra: Hi, my name is Madhup Mishra and I work for a company called Hitachi Vantara. I am the Head of Product Marketing for Lumada Software, which is the data and analytics software elements within the Hitachi's ecosystem.

Mike Lynn: Terrific. Well, Madhup, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on the show. Now, we're recording this from MongoDB World 2022. And I want to ask you, first of all, I mean it's day two of the conference, are you enjoying yourself so far?

Madhup Mishra: I am ecstatic. I've had a great day one. So just for some context, I haven't been to one of these in the past so I'm a rookie when it comes to this conference in particular. But I was amazed to see the energy and the vibe I'm seeing in the community, all the green in the room, all the cool solutions and use cases being discussed, and the length and the breadth of the conversations. I've seen some strategic conversations happening with executives, but also getting down to actually developers and how to write code and how to get value out of data and that's very energizing for me.

Mike Lynn: Oh yeah. That's key. So you're at the conference, what is it that you're doing here, apart from enjoying the vibe and the conversations? Are you speaking? Are you presenting? Are you meeting customers?

Madhup Mishra: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So Hitachi, it was a bit last minute from a Hitachi Vantara standpoint. We are sponsoring, we're a partner of MongoDB.

Mike Lynn: Thank you.

Madhup Mishra: Couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my executive senior leader that I'm going to be going to this conference and we need to pull a team together to make it all happen. So it's kind of been a fun ride. We're having lots of touchpoints with MongoDB, including the partner pavilion here, where we are doing a talk around industrial data operations and security around edge data and how that data comes in. We had the Cube interview between our Chief Product Officer, Radhika Krishnan, and Peder who is the Chief Marketing Officer for MongoDB.

Mike Lynn: Peder Ulander?

Madhup Mishra: Peder Ulander. And as well as a few other conversations that have occurred throughout the show. Lots of customer meetings, lots of analyst meetings, trying to get the joint message out with us and MongoDB solving all kinds of interesting use cases for all you guys.

Mike Lynn: Yeah. So what is it that you focus on at Hitachi Vantara?

Madhup Mishra: Yeah. Yeah. So, Hitachi is this big corporation. So we have over a 100 years of operational expertise, your trains and power plants and things of that nature. Very Japanese heritage. We've also been in IT for over 50, 60 years, a lot of which has been around data storage. But Hitachi has this division, which I'm a part of, called Hitachi Vantara that offers everything that helps you manage all your data. It helps customers engineer with data. So we provide the data storage hardware capabilities. We also offer the data management capabilities, your ETL technologies, being able to integrate that data, being able to catalog that data, being able to use that data via analytic dashboards and IML models. And then we also have experts, consultants that offer these proven solutions bringing Hitachi and Hitachi partners together to deliver help customers build certain applications, for a variety of use cases. We're in nine out of 10 top banks, nine out of 10 media companies, top telcos. So we understand the enterprise problem, and we feel like we can work with companies like Mongo to help solve those critical problems for our customers. My role is more around product marketing and I focus more on the data management software side of things. So Mongo is very near and dear to my heart. We feel like together Hitachi Vantara and Mongo can build a data fabric for our customers.

Mike Lynn: Yeah. And so this software suite that you have at your disposal, it's entirely written and maintained by Hitachi personnel?

Madhup Mishra: Yes. So the software suite, the name of that is Lumada Data Ops. So we have two flavors of it, one focused on the enterprise customers, your banks and retail insurance companies and like, and the other focus is on more industrial data ops. More focused on manufacturing, energy, power, utilities, oil, and gas and things of that nature.

Mike Lynn: Yeah.

Madhup Mishra: It's entirely written and supported by our engineering team. We sell it as software, and as well as software as a service. And, of course, it's an open ecosystem. No one company offers the entire end to end solution. So it's working with key partners like Mongo to bring it together. Plugging into whatever ecosystem, whatever products they already have in the environment to get value out of it.

Mike Lynn: Yeah. And I would imagine there's consulting services that go along with that. I'm trying to imagine, folks that are listening, we've got developers all the way up to C- level executives in small to medium startups all the way up to large scale enterprises, what would you want them to know about your software and services?

Madhup Mishra: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think to all your developers out there, application development is all about getting that value out to your customers, and building applications is awesome and getting very interactive user experience, but it all comes down to data. At the end of the day, the application is only as good as the data that you need, and what Hitachi Vantara can help you is deliver a data experience through which you can use trusted data to build your applications. We can help you understand your data, know your data, start to trust it, and get value out of it. So, we feel like we could be a perfect partner in your crime, as you're trying to look at pulling that data together from lots of different data sources into Mongo and help you leverage that for your use cases.

Mike Lynn: Yeah. So I'm curious, in the software stack itself that you're working with, is Mongo present there?

Madhup Mishra: So there are lots of different layers. Our software, our data catalog, Lumada Data Ops data catalog product, uses Mongo under the covers to store all metadata within it. So we are a Mongo customer to begin with. Layer on top of that, working with Mongo together to solve a use case for our customers. And the answer is absolutely. So we have connectors to Mongo, which allow us to bring in data from MongoDB into your data lake, into your data repository, into your cloud. We can also write to Mongo and bring data to Mongo, which in a lot of cases is what you guys are doing. Bringing data into MongoDB's Atlas product. And then on top of that, we use AI and ML to understand what that data really means. So imagine all the rows and columns to be able to label them using AI and apply business terminology to it, such that when you're building your applications, you can actually pull the right data because now you actually know what it actually means. The tags, the metadata off that data is much more in business parlance and context, which is what you need for you to be able to self- serve that data. You don't want to call UT and try to figure out what the cryptic name on the top of that column actually means. You want to be able to use it. You want to be able to see," Oh, this is customer data. Okay. This is the address of the supplier." So your normal terminology, your business glossary is what we can help you build on top of that. So we can help you bring data in Mongo, take data out from Mongo, make it easier, and then we can apply business meaning to it. And then ultimately, we can help build dashboards. So Pentaho has a very rich ecosystem of dashboards and capabilities that are out of the box. I mean, of course you can use Tableau and Grafana or whatever it is that you need for your analytic tools, but a lot of times customers embed Pentaho dashboards in their business operations. And out of the box, you can start to use that data and see the value come out of that really fast.

Mike Lynn: So, what are some of the positive business outcomes that your customers are enjoying, as a result of using your solutions?

Madhup Mishra: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think, ultimately isn't it all about business outcomes, from a customer standpoint? I think one of the key business outcomes that one of our banking customer actually here in New York City saw out of us was a better customer experience. So this was a regional Northeast US bank that was mostly physical. And if you go to one of these local banks, a lot of the relationship is happening by shaking the hand and making sure you know the person that you're trusting your money with. As COVID hit, they wanted to digitize all that and go online. Well, guess what? They had a lot of customer data and it was not trustworthy. It was changing so often that they were struggling with building their apps on top of it to provide the same customer experience as they gave in inside of the bank. So, that's a critical example of how, as you're moving from legacy onto this digital first environment, how do you bring in that trust in that data and use it to power your applications?

Mike Lynn: Yeah.

Madhup Mishra: Of course, it all comes down to building more money and make more money for your company. So top line growth by it being able to offer new data products faster, but also be more efficient in how you manage data. So to be able to automate a lot of these backend mundane processes, so you can actually focus on building the app and not just integrating that data and so on, so forth. I'll throw one stat out there that I read somewhere that blew my mind. And it's not a surprise, but if you think about it, it's over 50% of the time that's spent by business people or application developers is to sort of pull that data together from wherever that data lives in a form or format that can be used in the application. And that's a lot of time wasted. I mean, would you rather focus on just bringing that data together and combing it and making look nice and smooth, or do you want to focus on value added things, how you use that data to deliver that instant experience you're trying to deliver to your application users? So, from my standpoint, I think we can help you do that.

Mike Lynn: Yeah. That is an incredible stat. Over 50% of the time is essentially data manipulation?

Madhup Mishra: Essentially manipulating data. Because everybody likes to talk about AI and ML and all these cool things. The reality is that the majority of the fight happens in the basement, where all the plumbing resides. You got to get the data into shape, you got to get it in a format where it doesn't have gaps and errors, such that when you run your AI and ML, it gives you the output you're expecting it to give it. So, we help you with that plumbing. Hitachi is known for providing these type of solutions in the past. We can help you intelligently manage that data much better, and hopefully, get you out of the basement into your house.

Mike Lynn: Yeah. Fantastic. I like the analogy. So, Madhup, I want to give you the opportunity to let folks know how they can get in touch with you.

Madhup Mishra: Absolutely. So go check us out on Hitachivantara. com. We are under the data ops section of the website. Look us up, check out our product demos. There's a lot of material out there. You can download the product, you can try it out. There is an open source version of Pentaho available as well. We recommend you of course consider us as you're building your products more on the enterprise side. But there's enough tools and fun things to play with on the website. Please check us out.

Mike Lynn: Well, I'll include links in the show notes, make sure you visit those. That's podcast. mongodb.com. Madhup, is there anything else you'd like to share with the folks before we wrap up?

Madhup Mishra: No, I think I am amazed at what Mongo's user base and application developer community has built over the years. And I'm constantly am just energized by the fact that you guys are breaking the boundaries. You're you're going with digital first. You're the generation that's looking at... There was no legacy in the past. There's no boundaries. You start with digital first and imagine where the seating is or take it forward. And I feel like Hitachi and MongoDB and our partnership together can help you push those boundaries. Get away from that basement and out and building applications and driving customer experience.

Mike Lynn: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for taking the time out to talk with me.

Madhup Mishra: Thank you so much.

Shane McAllister: Another great conversation from the show floor at MongoDB World there. It's amazing the reach of organizations that Madhup spoke about and how data is all pervasive. And also, the jewel drive to get faster and more efficient for customers, and on their internal side, to get rid of the mundane development for their developers and their teams, and allow them to focus on their app, et cetera, as well too. So it was amazing. The statistic at the end, Cedric for me, was mind boggling. I must check out the reference there, but he said that 50% of app developers time is spent trying to pull disparate data sources together to be used in their app. That sounds like a huge waste of time. And I know he said MongoDB helped with that and reduced that and really allowed their developers. But that's a lot of wasted developer time, right?

Cedric: It is too much. Remind me not to be an app developer.

Shane McAllister: No, we would steer you that way, but once you get around to that, you always need to use MongoDB because you're not going to waste that amount of time pulling your data together. So, that concludes our episodes from MongoDB World this year. As we said at the beginning, there will be more episodes done with our customers and partners and clients and users at the future. local events that we will be doing. So keep an eye on MongoDB. com for that. Cedric, we've got to say goodbye to you. We are losing you back to college. So college's gain and MongoDB's loss. So you've been a pleasure to share this podcast with and I certainly enjoy our conversations and doing this with you. Any final words, Cedric?

Cedric: I just want to say thank you. I'm just so appreciative to have been able to do my last internship at MongoDB, and for you, for Mike Lynn, for the entire developer advocacy team, for the internship program, everybody who has kind of helped make this experience be so special in what it is. So hats off, thank you. It's a bittersweet time, being on the last World podcast, but we've appreciated all of you who've listened and tuned in and been engaged. Remember as always, links are in the show notes, and also remember of course, to review and subscribe. We'll be back to the regular programming of the MongoDB podcast with your host, of course Mike Lynn, and thank you as always. So, from me, Cedric.

Shane McAllister: And from me, Shane McAllister, it's been a pleasure. And Cedric, as I said, it's truly been a pleasure working with you. I wish you all the best of luck, and hopefully, our paths will cross again in the future. And to all our listeners, I'm sure they share the same sentiment. So thank you all for tuning in. We will talk to you soon.