Jeff Kelly and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, managed to talk to Matt Asay in New York during the 10gen MongoDB event.

Matt Asay is the VP of Business Development & Corporate Strategy at 10gen. He focused on topics such as legacy technology, innovation and partnerships.

“The Enterprises had been wanting to use what they saw in Silicon Valley start-ups. Big Data and the NoSQL databases were born on the web. We’ve been pulled into the Enterprise, whether we wanted or not,” confessed Asay. “But it turns out that we do really want to be there.”

10gen is pretty strong in the Enterprise business already, says Asay. He boasts 100 organizations (paying customers) in the last 6 months, switching off their existing relational database technology and moving to 10gen. Many other customers were not replacing their existing databases, being interested only in the new applications for net.

Why has MongoDB been so successful?

Vellante asked Asay for his personal opinion on MungoDB and which factors contributed to its success.

“The engineering team built a product that is super easy for developers to use. As IBM said on stage this morning, ‘it is a pleasure to use.’ It’s that approachability of the product and the fact that you get high performance and scale,” answered Asay. “But I think that more than anything else it’s the approachability that has set it apart. As far as I know, there aren’t so far any other relational or non-relational databases that are as easy to use as MongoDB.”

Prompted by Kelly to talk more about the partnership strategy of 10gen, Asay joked: “One thing about the Enterprise that’s NOT true in Silicon Valley is the use of the latest, greatest technology. They might use some, but they also use the crappiest, oldest, stargiest technology that’s been around for 5,000 years. And so, one of the things we have to do to crack the Enterprise is work with the technology that they have already embraced,” added Matt Asay.

He spoke more about the Partner momentum (IBM, Informatica and others) as part of his MongoDB Event presentation.

Regarding the MongoDB/Hadoop integration, a topic raised by Kelly, Asay replied: “We need to start doing more. We are in conversations with a number of Hadoop vendors, to figure out integration. We have a Hadoop connector that comes out-of-the-box, integrated to Tangent.”

“We find that the marriage between Hadoop for analytical processing and MongoDB for storage is perfect,” declared Matt Asay. Talking about frenemies in the business (AWS, Open Stack, WMware and IBM vs Oracle), Asay pointed out that he couldn’t think of any other enemy “than really crappy software.”