10gen, the company that started the MongoDB project, has just announced it received a strategic investment from two significant technology groups: Intel Capital and Red Hat.
With these funds, the company said it would use the funds to further develop its product while supporting its community and user base. Furthermore, the new investors are significant because it marks Intel Capital’s first investment in the NoSQL market while furthering the collaboration between RedHat and 10gen.
With 500 paying customers, the company has seen some advancement in the NoSQL marketplace and with adoption of MongoDB, an alternative platform to traditional relational databases that claims to offer much better agility and vertical scalability. Max Schireson, president of 10gen, said that his company is seeing a rapid expansion from its initial customer set from the likes of Shutterfly and Foursquare to more prominent ones like Craigslist and eBay, in addition to banks, telecommunication firms, health organizations, and more.
If you’re not familiar with MongoDB, it’s described as being a scalable, high-performance open source NoSQL database that is written in the C++ programming language. Some of the features that it includes are document-oriented storage, full index support, Fast in-place updates, querying, map/reduce, and commercial support. 10gen started developing this system in 2007 and is available for Windows, Linux, OS X, and Solaris.
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Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment and M&A organization, said it invested because it’s seeing a “huge transformation from a community-driven market to running production system for some of the world’s largest infrastructures.” For Red Hat, it previously had been a collaborator with 10gen back in 2011 with the launch of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Schireson says that while Red Hat is a customer, it still remains a big part of the open source ecosystem and has a dominate position in the Linux market, where a majority of MongoDB operates.
Today’s news adds to a year in which the company announced product news, top-tier partnerships, more funding, new hires, and the introduction of it’s free online training course. So far it has had over 29,000 people sign up just for the initial pair of courses.
10gen has declined to state the amount it received for the strategic investment, but says total-to-date, it has raised $50 million. Through the strategic investment, Schireson says that the company will focus on rolling out new enhancements that users have requested while also working to make it easier to operate MongoDB in the enterprise in addition to the developer usability, performance, and manageability.
Photo credit: Mandy Cheng/AFP/Getty Images
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