Almost all database companies are eyeing India owing to the country’s rapidly growing digital economy and the opportunities presented by cloud-native businesses.
Similar to mobile applications, these companies believe many AI applications will be developed in India, and they aim to support this growth.
MongoDB, a leading global database company, has successfully tapped into the market by capitalising on the mobile application market in India. So far, the company has accumulated over 3,000 customers in the country.
As MongoDB prepares for the generative AI era, it sees a huge market opportunity elsewhere. Speaking to AIM, Sachin Chawla, VP of India & South Asia at MongoDB, said, “I believe our main challenge now is figuring out how to migrate those legacy applications built on relational databases over the past 40 years. If you ask me, that’s the biggest hurdle we face.
“Currently, the market is still heavily dominated by these older systems, with only about 2% transitioning to modern solutions. That means 98% remains, much of it tied to antiquated relational databases. Transitioning these long-established systems is a significant challenge.”
Generative AI to Modernise Legacy Systems
Many enterprises, especially in the BFSI and manufacturing industries, have legacy systems that need urgent modernisation. According to Chawla, some of these systems are more than 40 years old.
Enterprises often struggle to modernise their legacy systems. In recent years, numerous companies have migrated their applications to the cloud without truly modernising them, leading to missed opportunities for modernisation. Chawla noted that generative AI could be extremely beneficial in addressing this issue.
“We undertook a unique initiative in Australia with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. Their challenge involved core banking systems with components that were written decades ago. Much of the code was created by someone long gone, leaving the bank in a difficult position,” Chawla said.
The bank needed to modernise these systems but felt uncertain about how to proceed. According to Chawla, the bank approached MongoDB as they felt generative AI could help.
“We focused on modernising various aspects of the application, including testing and schema design. By leveraging generative AI, we rewrote the front-end code, as the original database was different. This allowed us to migrate both the database and the front-end code in a fraction of the time—90% faster than traditional methods would have taken,” Chawla pointed out.
It Will Be Much Easier to Build AI Applications
Database companies also believe the next-generation applications enterprises will build will be generative AI applications. These will need robust, scalable data management solutions capable of handling vast amounts of unstructured data, real-time processing, and seamless integration with AI models to enable intelligent decision-making.
With over 50,000 customers globally, MongoDB believes it has an advantage.
Commenting on the same, Chawla said, “We believe we are in the early stages of AI development, where applications like chatbots and identification systems are still quite basic. However, as the technology matures, we can expect to see applications that deliver substantial productivity benefits and have the potential to transform industries, similar to what happened with mobile technology,”
This evolution is expected to simplify the development process for creators, leading to a significant increase in the number of applications being built.
“It will become easier, faster, and more cost-effective to develop new applications, likely resulting in a greater number of innovations than we witnessed during the rise of the internet or cloud computing,” he revealed.
Moreover, we are now in the era of AI agents, and databases that deal with real-time data and are scalable will play an important role.
MongoDB got Competition
While MongoDB remains the top choice for many enterprises both globally and in India, other database companies are actively seeking to capture market share from the leader in NoSQL.
Companies such as Aerospike, CockroachDB, TiDB, and DataStax, among others, have increased their sales activities in the country, aiming to attract new customers.
These companies are meeting prospective customers and showcasing how their databases are the most suitable and reliable ones in the era of generative AI.
DataStax, in a previous interaction with AIM, said that while MongoDB rode the mobile application era, they now aspire to be the ‘MongoDB of the generative AI application era.’
However, Chawla remains unfazed. “In the NoSQL world, we are there. The developers love us. Our biggest challenge now is to move those legacy, large, old applications, built on relational databases that were built over those 40 years.”
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