MongoDB Inc., the company that’s trying to commercialize the MongoDB database, yesterday revealed the developer edition of its software has been downloaded more than 10 million times. What’s more, over 300,000 people have taken education classes in MongoDB, and the company boasts more than 1,000 technology partners.

That’s pretty impressive, but MongoDB still falls some way short of more established databases like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL in the enterprise user stakes, and that’s exactly where the company is now trying to make its mark.

At MongoDB World yesterday, the company made a number of announcements that show it’s bending over backwards in its efforts to woo the enterprise.

Probably the most significant of these is MongoDB’s new connector that links the database to popular data visualization and business intelligence tools like Microsoft Excel, IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects and Tableau.

Having this connector means that enterprises can now harness JSON data from disparate sources like mobile devices, web apps, IoT and social media and derive insights from it using the tools they already know.

Tableau presented the following use case scenario at MongoDB World yesterday, of a corporate visitor attending the event in New York and trying to get home while ensuring his flight is not cancelled. Tableau asked whether or not the visitor would be better off leaving tonight or the next day, or waiting until the weekend.

To know what day is best, Tableau gave a demonstration leveraging data from attendees at MongoDB World and the Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA), including filters for flights in and out of NYC, flight status, times and dates. Here’s a video that demonstrates how easily Tableau answered the question:

The point of course, is the presentation shows how simple it is for business users to leverage large amounts of data to facilitate decision making. It fulfills MongoDB’s main promised – to help enterprises make faster decisions, while simplifying data access for a much wider audience.

New security, GUI features

Of course enterprises have other basic demands too – including security and ease of use – and MongoDB made several announcements intended to meet these. One of the major ones is that with its 3.2 release, MongoDB will now encrypt all data at rest, something that will certainly appeal to pharmaceutical, healthcare and financial organizations that have tough regulations to satisfy.

While MongoDB is hoping to make its money in the enterprise, it hasn’t forgotten those who make it tick. As such, it announced a new GUI that should make life easier for the developers and DBAs, currently codenamed mongoScout. MongoDB pitched its new GUI as a “powerful, intuitive interface that lets users easily explore and understand data from disparate sources. The GUI is capable of both displaying individual documents and analyzing data collections to visualize the existence of fields and the cardinality of their values, the company said.

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