Rackspace Promotes ObjectRocket MongoDB as a Service

MongoDB may or may not be on most MSPs’ radar. Yet. But the fact that one big cloud services provider is heavily promoting customer use cases for its new cloud-hosted value-added MongoDB as a service indicates that maybe it should be on your radar.

About a year after its acquisition of MongoDB as a service provider ObjectRocket, Rackspace (RAX) has begun promoting customer use cases of the service. MongoDB, an open source noSQL database (often used for big data analytics and scaling large volumes of mobile app data) came up recently in the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts, and also in a webcast that looked at two use cases of the technology.

This kind of service may play a bigger role in Rackspace’s strategy going forward. The promotion comes as Rackspace has made some changes in its top management and committed to focusing on its value-added cloud services and hosting rather than making an effort to try to compete head-to-head with commodity public cloud providers Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN).

Rackspace CEO Graham Weston identified “pragmatic businesses” as the next generation of its customers during a recent earnings call with analysts. These companies want software engineers to create differentiators for their core businesses “rather than operating infrastructure and learning the endless succession of complex new tools. These customers will want the trusted partner to keep their IT operations running smoothly. They will want expert advice as they move to a hybrid cloud architecture and they will want specialists to help them leverage the latest tools to exploit Big Data and digital marketing.” (from the SeekingAlpha transcript).

Rackspace President Taylor Rhodes told analysts during the same call that big data solutions such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB play a key part of its strategy of value added services. “Customers have told us that these databases are critical to their business, but can be very hard to run at scale in a cloud world, so they’re seeking our expertise and support.”

Rackspace’s recent MongoDB webcast featured executives from AppBoy, a company providing analytics to mobile app providers, and Untappd, a social media service for beer enthusiasts. Both companies described their use of ObjectRocket’s cloud-based MongoDB implementation and the practical pros and cons of using it.

The free webcast replay is available here, and slides are here. In addition, Rackspace has scheduled a Google Hangout to field the many questions that the presenters were unable to answer during the original webcast due to time constraints. That is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 19, at 2 pm ET.

So what about it? Have you heard of MongoDB? Is it something your customers are asking about? Let us know in the comments.