Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly spoke with Andrew Erlichson, VP Education & Cloud Services with 10gen, at MongoDB Days in New York.

Andrew is in charge with marketing, sales and day-to-day operations of 10gen cloud services, as well as with designing and implementing the online education efforts around MongoDB.

Having a passion for education, Andrew Erlichson was extremely happy when education platforms such as CodeAcademy emerged and actually managed to capture the interest of people, motivating them enough to graduate. Truly inspired by their success story, he approached 10gen with a proposition for an online education program regarding their products. To his surprise, and delight, they said yes.

They approached the companies at the forefront of Online Ed, and EdX, the Harvard MIT consortium, was receptive on working with them. Right after launch, after 30.000 people signed up for the classes. 70.000+ registration in the first year. “What we’re doing, the techniques, are not that original. They are a close copy of what’s going on in higher education, but very few companies have used it for workforce development and training,” says Erlichson.

Traditional online courses were not as entertaining, thinks Erlichson. What changed these courses, for the better, was the gamification effect. The classes were run for fixed intervals, and there were deadlines. “Nothing motivates like a deadline,” believes Erlichson. Besides, on completion, people were getting certificates of graduation, so they started “working for the badge.”

Aligning education with the larger corporate strategy

With a lot of companies, “education is marketing”, belives Erlichson. “As an open source company, we have to create value and then, to survive, we have to harvest some value to make money. The creation of value is due to open source software and having a community addition, and education is part of the creation of that value. By educating people how to use it, and by reducing the friction to adopting the software, we get more users. By having a bigger community of users, there’s more potential people who might be interested in our subscription additions, so it enhances the size of the whole ecosystem for MongoDB,” explains Erlichson.

For the second part of the interview, Erlichson talked about the 10gen cloud services, including MongoDB Monitoring Service and the recent launch of MongoDB Backup Service.

“We’re really building out the different tools that you need to run database in the Enterprise.” 10gen develops MongoDB and offers premium subscriptions, training, and consulting for the open source database. The backup process is mundane and boring and it’s only important when you risk losing data. Instead of running a backup process evey couple of hours, 10gen has a backup service that is very close to the actual time. It’s a “continuous, real-time backup.” If, for some reason, a client lost everything, they are able to restore up until a couple of minutes ago. Therefore, using 10gen services, the “window of vulnerability is really low”. About the term itself, Erlichson admits that customers rarely respond to the RPO (Recovery Point Objective), but “window of vulnerability” is very intuitive and very catchy.

MongoDB is a general purpose, open-source database, with built-in replication and automated failover for high availability. For MongoDB Days, 10gen brought together developers and IT professionals for a one-day conference dedicated to the leading NoSQL database.