Quantinno Capital Management LP Sells 3156 Shares of MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDB)

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Quantinno Capital Management LP cut its holdings in shares of MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDBFree Report) by 36.5% in the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 5,491 shares of the company’s stock after selling 3,156 shares during the period. Quantinno Capital Management LP’s holdings in MongoDB were worth $1,280,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors also recently made changes to their positions in MDB. Bessemer Group Inc. purchased a new position in MongoDB during the fourth quarter worth about $29,000. BI Asset Management Fondsmaeglerselskab A S purchased a new position in MongoDB during the fourth quarter worth about $30,000. Lindbrook Capital LLC boosted its holdings in MongoDB by 350.0% during the fourth quarter. Lindbrook Capital LLC now owns 171 shares of the company’s stock worth $34,000 after purchasing an additional 133 shares during the last quarter. Y.D. More Investments Ltd purchased a new position in MongoDB during the fourth quarter worth about $36,000. Finally, CI Investments Inc. boosted its holdings in MongoDB by 126.8% during the fourth quarter. CI Investments Inc. now owns 186 shares of the company’s stock worth $37,000 after purchasing an additional 104 shares during the last quarter. 89.22% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

Insider Buying and Selling at MongoDB

In related news, CEO Dev Ittycheria sold 50,000 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, July 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $407.07, for a total value of $20,353,500.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 218,085 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $88,775,860.95. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link. In related news, Director Dwight A. Merriman sold 2,000 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Thursday, May 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $240.00, for a total transaction of $480,000.00. Following the sale, the director now owns 1,223,954 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $293,748,960. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO Dev Ittycheria sold 50,000 shares of the stock in a transaction on Wednesday, July 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $407.07, for a total transaction of $20,353,500.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 218,085 shares in the company, valued at approximately $88,775,860.95. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last ninety days, insiders sold 116,427 shares of company stock worth $41,304,961. 4.80% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of research firms have weighed in on MDB. Robert W. Baird boosted their target price on shares of MongoDB from $390.00 to $430.00 in a research note on Friday, June 23rd. Tigress Financial boosted their target price on shares of MongoDB from $365.00 to $490.00 in a research note on Wednesday, June 28th. Capital One Financial began coverage on shares of MongoDB in a research note on Monday, June 26th. They issued an “equal weight” rating and a $396.00 target price on the stock. Oppenheimer boosted their target price on shares of MongoDB from $270.00 to $430.00 in a research note on Friday, June 2nd. Finally, Citigroup boosted their target price on shares of MongoDB from $363.00 to $430.00 in a research note on Friday, June 2nd. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have issued a hold rating and twenty have assigned a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $378.09.

MongoDB Trading Up 0.7 %

Shares of NASDAQ:MDB traded up $2.69 on Friday, hitting $406.27. The company had a trading volume of 481,319 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,744,642. The firm’s 50-day simple moving average is $372.82 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $273.58. MongoDB, Inc. has a 1 year low of $135.15 and a 1 year high of $439.00. The company has a quick ratio of 4.19, a current ratio of 4.19 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.44. The firm has a market capitalization of $28.67 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -86.42 and a beta of 1.13.

MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDBGet Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, June 1st. The company reported $0.56 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.18 by $0.38. MongoDB had a negative net margin of 23.58% and a negative return on equity of 43.25%. The company had revenue of $368.28 million during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $347.77 million. During the same period last year, the company posted ($1.15) EPS. MongoDB’s revenue was up 29.0% on a year-over-year basis. Equities analysts anticipate that MongoDB, Inc. will post -2.8 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

MongoDB Profile

(Free Report)

MongoDB, Inc provides general purpose database platform worldwide. The company offers MongoDB Atlas, a hosted multi-cloud database-as-a-service solution; MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a commercial database server for enterprise customers to run in the cloud, on-premise, or in a hybrid environment; and Community Server, a free-to-download version of its database, which includes the functionality that developers need to get started with MongoDB.

Further Reading

Want to see what other hedge funds are holding MDB? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDBFree Report).

Institutional Ownership by Quarter for MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB)

This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest and most accurate reporting. This story was reviewed by MarketBeat’s editorial team prior to publication. Please send any questions or comments about this story to contact@marketbeat.com.

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Consul 1.16 Released with Reliability, UX and Security Improvements

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Consul 1.16 – the latest version of Hashicorp’s service mesh tool – has been released. This release contains many enhancements that improve service mesh reliability, user experience, and security. The release focuses on several key areas.

Improving reliability and scalability, Sameness Groups have been introduced as a beta feature in Consul Enterprise, allowing seamless handling of failover between active-standby clusters under common administration. Sameness Groups allow administrators to group Consul peers and partitions logically, facilitating efficient failover should there be an issue in a particular cluster or region, to an equivalent standby cluster without interrupting service.

Also in Consul Enterprise, Control plane protection is enhanced with per-IP rate limits, providing better control over resource utilization and preventing resource exhaustion and service disruptions by allowing administrators to control and limit requests based on their source IP address.

For security concerns in regulated environments, Consul Enterprise now offers FIPS 140-2 compliant builds, meeting security requirements for federal agencies by using a certified cryptographic module and specific safeguards to comply with Level 1 requirements.

JWT authentication for service-to-service traffic is now possible, authorizing connections based on claims in JSON Web Tokens. This allows administrators to offload JWT validation to Consul, providing a uniform method for authorized communication between services.

Service Mesh user experience is improved as the transparent proxy mode now supports failover between service instances deployed across clusters, and routing to virtual services, providing operational simplicity for cross-cluster failover. In prior versions of Consul this was operationally complex, but this now works seamlessly by transparently routing traffic to a backup service. The transparent proxy also now supports virtual services without explicit configuration.

Permissive mTLS is now enabled, to enable gradual onboarding of services to the service mesh while maintaining connectivity with external downstream applications. This allows upstream services to accept mTLS traffic secured through Consul’s service mesh, and traffic from external downstream applications not yet managed by Consul.

Several extensions for Envoy have been added. Firstly, an external Authorization Envoy extension for augmenting Consul’s service intentions with custom authorization solutions, Next, a property override extension allows administrators to fine-tune their Envoy configuration from within Consul configuration entries. Finally, a WebAssembly (Wasm) Envoy extension allows running of custom WebAssembly plugins on TCP and HTTP listeners, on either a per-service or mesh-wide basis.

In Service Discovery, catalog sync now supports health checks and ingress resources. This means that Kubernetes pod health status is directly linked to service instances which improves traffic routing and provides a more comprehensive and integrated view of Kubernetes resources within Consul.

Overall, Consul 1.16 aims to enhance scalability, reliability, and security for service networking, empowering organizations to build resilient and efficient applications in distributed environments, and is available now.

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Oracle MySQL’s Unyielding Success – Analytics India Magazine

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Oracle, a major player in the cloud and relational database management systems domain, firmly believes in its approach to make this sector intriguing and user-friendly by introducing products that simplify data querying, making it both efficient and cost-effective for enterprises.

Oracle recently announced general availability of MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse which enables customers to query data in object storage as fast as querying data inside the database. 

In an exclusive interview with AIM, Oracle India’s technology head Saravanan P, said that the most common problem that the enterprise customers face is creating consolidated reports as there are multiple copies of databases. “We brought the MySQL Heatwave to address these multiple data source challenges, specifically, here is a database which can run both OLTP and OLAP on a single database”. 

Saravanan further added HeatWave Lakehouse enables customers to process and query hundreds up to hundreds of terabytes, stored in object stores like CSV and Parquet formats, as well as Amazon’s Aurora and Amazon Redshift backups. “Majority of customers of MySQL are digital native companies which heavily rely on clouds to manage their data,” he added. 

The aim of MySQL HeatWave Lake House is to enable  customers to easily obtain valuable real-time insights by combining data from object storage with database data. MySQL Heatwave Lakehoue  delivers significantly improved query performance and faster data loading, all at a lower cost. 

Currently MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse can load data from object storage that amounts to 400 terabytes, and it does this 8 times faster than Redshift and 2.7 times faster than Snowflake. 

As demonstrated by a 500 TB TPC-H* benchmark, its query performance is 9 times faster than Amazon Redshift, 17 times faster than Databricks, 17 times faster than Snowflake, and 36 times faster than Google BigQuery. (see below) 

Reason: MySQL HeatWave uses MySQL Autopilot. It is a unique feature of MySQL HeatWave that uses machine learning to automate and improve query execution. It learns from past queries and optimises the execution plan for future ones. This innovation is exclusive to MySQL HeatWave users and not found anywhere else.

In addition, files in the object store are queried directly by HeatWave without copying the data into the MySQL database. As a result, MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse sets new standards for scalability and performance of query processing, speed of loading data, cluster provisioning time, and automation to query data in object storage.

MySQL HeatWaveLakehouse provides customers the ability to query data in the object store in a variety of file formats and optionally combine it with data in the MySQL database. In addition, files in the object store are queried directly by HeatWave without copying the data into the MySQL database.

This explains why Oracle MySQL is the first name that comes to the forefront. Currently, MySQL holds a relative market share of 44.04% in the realm of database management tools. Within this market, it claims 31.39% in the U.S., 8.19% in India, and 6.75% in the U.K. As an open-source software, MySQL takes the lead among other relational databases in the market.

MySQL vs the World

Today, MySQL is not alone, there are multiple players including SingleStoreDB (SQL), alongside database companies such as Redis (Real-time), MongoDB (NoSQL), Neo4j (Graph) and others are offering more or less similar services to its customers, and the competition is only getting bigger. 

“It’s like horses for courses,” said Sarvanan. He believes that each kind of database has its own use case. He said that Oracle’s moat is managing multiple data sources. Customers do not need to store data on one cloud and at one location. They should have the option to store data at different sources. “If you asked me today, customers are more about user databases distributed,” he added, saying that MySQL’s perfectly fits in this equation. 

Multi-Cloud Approach

At the same time, MySQL faces heat from hyperscalers such as Google Cloud SQL, AWS SQL Server Databases, and Micrsoft Azure SQL Database, who are providing, similar platforms and services for its internal cloud customers. 

But, Oracle seems to be in the long game. Saravanan said that Oracle believes in multi cloud approach. “We don’t want to be homogeneous, we wanted customers to use this feature functionality, even if they’re on Azure or AWS,” he added. 

In other words, even if you are running your workload on AWS or Azure, you can take advantage of Oracle MySQL to query your data. “They get similar performance by using the MySQL Heatwave so that they can make use of it without migrating the data out of the cloud, and changing the application code” he added. 

Enterprise Data Security

Speaking on data security for enterprises, Saravanan told AIM that security is in the DNA of Oracle and it takes center stage at the company and OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) is a highly secured cloud. “Any data that moves within OCI is encrypted,” explained Sarvanan. 

Further, he said it takes the core security of OCI to MySQL as well. He emphasised  that  MySQL gives role based data access which means that you cannot get access to the data even though you are admin. Citing RBI and MeitY, he said OCI complies with regulatory requirements in the country, and strictly follows the law of the land across geographies. 

En route: Generative AI 

Last month, Oracle partnered with Cohere, where it looks to develop powerful, generative AI services for organizations globally. The duo plans to automate end-to-end business processes, improving the decision making, alongside enhancing customer experiences. 

What’s next? In the coming months, Oracle is planning to announce more such products and tools to unleash their generative AI strategy for enterprise , alongside a few announcements around its expansion into vector databases and more.

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DynamoDB vs. Cassandra: Which Database Is a Great Fit for Your Business?

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If you need a new database for your business, Amazon Web Services DynamoDB and Apache Cassandra are two of the most prominent options. Choosing between them isn’t easy, but this breakdown will help you feel more informed and confident.

Open-Source vs. Managed

One of the biggest differences between DynamoDB and Cassandra is that the former is a fee-based, Amazon-managed product, while Cassandra is open source and free to download. The open-source nature of Cassandra gives you more flexibility and prevents getting locked into the Amazon product ecosystem.

Conversely, you may want the additional support that comes with using a managed product such as DynamoDB. Amazon’s professionals handle provisioning and scaling details, which some decision-makers prefer.

Before finalizing your decision, familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of the open-source versus managed model. Making a confident choice requires carefully considering specific business needs to determine which product will operate the most cohesively with your operations.

Data Security

Both databases have excellent built-in data security features, but they differ slightly in functionality. For example, in Cassandra, users can specify access privileges to people based on roles. Someone with the tightest security and lowest privilege level could access a single row.

An administrator using DynamoDB would instead assign specific privileges and access keys per user. The lowest access level is to one attribute. That approach provides more customization, which could be advantageous if you have a large organization or people who need varying access based on how they’ll use the database.

Data Types

Thinking about the data your company has is also worthwhile. DynamoDB is a centralized database best for storing structured data. Cassandra is a distributed product people typically use to store unstructured data.

Go beyond the data your enterprise has now and think about its plans. Do you anticipate any changes in the short to medium-term future that would cause the business to start having more or less of one of those data types? If so, consider basing your decision on what will be different to be proactive.

Intended Uses

Various things encourage people to advocate for using databases at their businesses. Perhaps you’re involved with a charitable organization that frequently applies for and receives grant funds. If so, grant reports show the success in meeting proposed objectives. They also usually have strict timeline submission requirements, meaning people at your company must know how to access the required data well before it’s time to provide the report.

Even if your business does not regularly use databases now, that could change before long. Numerous people familiar with the matter believe database adoption rates will only grow in the future, making these tools necessary.

Since Cassandra is a free product, you can start with it if your enterprise is in the early stages of database usage or has a minimal budget. On the other hand, you may feel money is well spent on a managed product because it doesn’t require extensive on-site setup or expertise.

Scalability

When people think about which databases to use, scalability will almost always be under consideration. Even if they don’t need to scale up immediately, most company leaders aim to grow their organizations.

Cassandra allows people to scale up on demand. It provides the computing power and storage capacity to support an organization’s changing needs.

DynamoDB facilitates scalability, too, but everything happens in the background on a serverless platform. Since it’s a managed service, customers don’t have to handle resource increases themselves, but the associated costs to use the tool may rise.

User Support

Whether your company is new to using databases or has been doing so for years, instances may arise where you need support to overcome challenges. Cassandra has extensive documentation to explore and a community you can rely on for more help.

Something to keep in mind is the database’s open-source nature may mean it takes longer to resolve bugs. However, that’s not always the case because problems often get found and fixed faster when an open-source product has an active and committed user base.

You’ll also find plenty of resources associated with DynamoDB, whether you want to read a blog post or attend a webinar. Something to consider is DynamoDB offers expert help for a fee, so think about whether your budget and use cases justify an extra expense.

Getting the Best Outcomes

Time and dedication are essential to determine the most appropriate database for your business. Whether you end up going with DynamoDB, Cassandra or another option, allow plenty of time to weigh the options, and think of each in the context of your company’s current situation and future needs.

Then, after selecting the database, provide all users ample time to learn it and get answers to any questions that arise. That learning period is vital for helping people get the most out of the tool.

About the Author

April Miller is a senior IT and cybersecurity writer for ReHack Magazine who specializes in AI, big data, and machine learning while writing on topics across the technology realm. You can find her work on ReHack.com and by following ReHack’s Twitter page.

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Revolutionizing Data Storage: The Emergence of AI NoSQL Databases

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Exploring the Future of Data Management: Revolutionizing Data Storage with AI NoSQL Databases

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, the demand for more efficient and effective data management systems is at an all-time high. Traditional databases, which have long been the cornerstone of data storage, are increasingly being challenged newer, more innovative technologies. One such technology that is making waves in the data management sector is the AI NoSQL database.

AI NoSQL databases are revolutionizing the way we store and manage data. Unlike traditional relational databases, which use a structured query language (SQL) for defining and manipulating the data, NoSQL databases do not require a fixed schema. This allows them to handle a wide variety of data types, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

In addition, AI NoSQL databases offer a high level of flexibility, scalability, and performance that is not possible with traditional SQL databases. They can easily scale out to accommodate large volumes of data and high traffic loads, making them an ideal choice for big data applications and real-time web applications.

But what truly sets AI NoSQL databases apart is their integration with artificial intelligence (AI). AI algorithms can be used to analyze the data stored in the NoSQL database, providing valuable insights and predictions that can help businesses make more informed decisions.

For instance, an e-commerce company can use an AI NoSQL database to analyze customer behavior data and predict future buying trends. This can help the company tailor its marketing strategies to better meet the needs and preferences of its customers, there increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

Moreover, AI NoSQL databases can also help improve data security. AI algorithms can be used to detect unusual patterns or anomalies in the data, which could indicate a potential security threat. This allows businesses to take proactive measures to protect their data and prevent data breaches.

However, despite their many advantages, AI NoSQL databases are not without their challenges. One of the main challenges is the lack of standardization. Unlike SQL databases, which have a standard language (SQL), NoSQL databases do not have a standard query language. This can make it difficult for developers to switch from one NoSQL database to another.

Another challenge is the complexity of managing a NoSQL database. Because NoSQL databases do not have a fixed schema, they can be more difficult to manage than SQL databases. This requires a higher level of expertise and can increase the cost of database management.

Nevertheless, the benefits of AI NoSQL databases far outweigh their challenges. As more and more businesses recognize the value of big data and AI, the demand for AI NoSQL databases is expected to grow.

In conclusion, AI NoSQL databases are poised to revolutionize the future of data management. With their ability to handle a wide variety of data types, scale out to accommodate large volumes of data, and provide valuable insights through AI, they offer a powerful and flexible solution for data storage. As such, they represent a significant step forward in the evolution of data management technologies.

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CWDN series: DevEx – Couchbase: 1 size fits one, personalisation matters

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This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Perry Krug in his capacity as head of developer experience at Couchbase.

Krug describes himself as a ‘very’ technical systems engineer with expertise in networking, enterprise storage, Web 2.0 infrastructure and NoSQL databases. Now heading up the Developer Experience initiative at Couchbase, he is concentrating on growing the firm’s current developer community as well as making it easier to build modern, cloud-native applications on Couchbase.

Krug writes in full as follows…

Personalisation has long been a mantra for IT services and applications.

From directing consumers to the most appropriate Amazon purchase, Netflix series, or mortgage options; to ensuring employees have access to the exact tools and information they need to do their jobs effectively, the idea of one size fits all is largely in the past.

The same applies to the developers themselves.

At the most basic level, the development team is a resource and the key to getting the most out of any group of people is to treat them as individuals, so that each can reach their maximum potential.

A personal experience

There’s no single factor or secret sauce that determines the best developer experience – like so many other considerations it depends on the complex interaction of a whole range of variables, including the developer themselves.

For instance, one person’s streamlined interface is another’s over-simplification that removes the level of granularity they need. One person’s preferred programming language will be another’s poison. And one person’s flexible working that allows for more time with their family is another’s invitation to procrastination.

That said, there are still priorities. For instance, take time. Many developers are over-stretched and over-worked: in a recent survey we performed of 533 software developers, only 5% said they had the capacity to take on more projects.

Taking some ‘me’ time

Freeing up developers’ time will improve their effectiveness – but it will also allow for a better understanding of what their key role is and how personalisation can truly help them. And even at this relatively broad stage, taking the right approach for the individual is still imperative.

Krug: Personalisation requires focus or it can easily spiral out of control.

For example, automating repetitive, lower-value tasks is an obvious way to free up developers’ time – but knowing what those tasks are for each development team and even each developer, will help make the right decisions about what and how, to automate.

Similarly, developers should be given the tools that let them do their jobs easily. This often means that familiarity trumps novelty. For the individual developer, a tool using the SQL language they have grown up using will be more powerful than a tool that offers newer functions in an unfamiliar language.

Finally, there’s the question of whether developers still need to own their entire role.

Low- and no-code development and serverless computing make it easier for developers to create applications – but they also mean that individual business units have the power to purchase cloud applications themselves and even develop their own (simple) services. In this case, taking some responsibility from developers can speed up the business and improve the developer experience – as long as they don’t immediately have to take on the new responsibility of fixing the mistakes of teams who haven’t been educated or managed correctly.

Even these relatively broad decisions need to take a personalised view, but when developers are freed to concentrate on their key roles as much as possible is when personalisation can really shine.

Keeping up with the Joneses

Successfully personalising the Developer Experience relies on this streamlining.

If the business can’t automate, simplify and/or delegate tasks, the number of processes and tools in play will prove overwhelming: making successful personalisation too complex to even attempt, or at best only reaching a proportion of its potential.

Instead, with fewer moving parts to consider, organisations can focus on those factors that truly add to – or detract from – the developer experience. For instance, allowing for more granular detail in exactly what tools developers are using and how they are using them; or giving more time to dedicate to collaboration and individualised project management that will help reduce pressure even further – ideally creating a virtuous circle.

This should also mean developers have more time free to learn how to use new tools, instead of having to fight against innovations because learning how to safely and effectively use them would simply add to their workload. And the team as a whole will have the time to understand exactly which innovations – if any – will most benefit which members.

Fording ahead with focus

Ultimately, personalisation requires focus or it can easily spiral out of control.

Removing developer distractions will help create that focus and provide its own benefits. After all, three out of four developers say they’re taking on work outside their core job description.

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MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB) Price Target Increased to $425.00 by Analysts at JMP Securities

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MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDBFree Report) had its price target boosted by JMP Securities from $400.00 to $425.00 in a report published on Monday, MarketBeat Ratings reports. They currently have an outperform rating on the stock.

Other analysts have also issued reports about the company. Tigress Financial increased their price objective on MongoDB from $365.00 to $490.00 in a report on Wednesday, June 28th. Morgan Stanley lifted their target price on shares of MongoDB from $270.00 to $440.00 in a research note on Friday, June 23rd. Mizuho increased their price target on shares of MongoDB from $220.00 to $240.00 in a research note on Friday, June 23rd. VNET Group reissued a maintains rating on shares of MongoDB in a research report on Monday, June 26th. Finally, Needham & Company LLC increased their price objective on MongoDB from $250.00 to $430.00 in a report on Friday, June 2nd. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have assigned a hold rating and twenty have assigned a buy rating to the company’s stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $378.09.

MongoDB Stock Performance

NASDAQ MDB opened at $403.58 on Monday. MongoDB has a 1 year low of $135.15 and a 1 year high of $439.00. The business’s fifty day moving average is $372.82 and its two-hundred day moving average is $273.58. The company has a quick ratio of 4.19, a current ratio of 4.19 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.44.

MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDBGet Free Report) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, June 1st. The company reported $0.56 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.18 by $0.38. MongoDB had a negative return on equity of 43.25% and a negative net margin of 23.58%. The business had revenue of $368.28 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $347.77 million. During the same period in the prior year, the business posted ($1.15) earnings per share. MongoDB’s revenue was up 29.0% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, analysts forecast that MongoDB will post -2.8 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Insider Buying and Selling

In other MongoDB news, Director Dwight A. Merriman sold 1,000 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, July 18th. The stock was sold at an average price of $420.00, for a total transaction of $420,000.00. Following the transaction, the director now owns 1,213,159 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $509,526,780. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. In other MongoDB news, Director Dwight A. Merriman sold 2,000 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Thursday, May 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $240.00, for a total value of $480,000.00. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 1,223,954 shares in the company, valued at $293,748,960. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. Also, Director Dwight A. Merriman sold 1,000 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, July 18th. The stock was sold at an average price of $420.00, for a total transaction of $420,000.00. Following the sale, the director now owns 1,213,159 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $509,526,780. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last quarter, insiders have sold 116,427 shares of company stock worth $41,304,961. Corporate insiders own 4.80% of the company’s stock.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On MongoDB

A number of institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in MDB. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD increased its holdings in shares of MongoDB by 13.4% during the first quarter. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD now owns 7,593,996 shares of the company’s stock worth $1,770,313,000 after purchasing an additional 897,911 shares during the period. Vanguard Group Inc. increased its stake in MongoDB by 2.1% during the 1st quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 5,970,224 shares of the company’s stock worth $2,648,332,000 after acquiring an additional 121,201 shares during the period. Franklin Resources Inc. raised its holdings in MongoDB by 6.4% in the 4th quarter. Franklin Resources Inc. now owns 1,962,574 shares of the company’s stock valued at $386,313,000 after acquiring an additional 118,055 shares in the last quarter. State Street Corp increased its position in shares of MongoDB by 1.8% in the first quarter. State Street Corp now owns 1,386,773 shares of the company’s stock worth $323,280,000 after purchasing an additional 24,595 shares during the period. Finally, 1832 Asset Management L.P. raised its stake in MongoDB by 3,283,771.0% in the fourth quarter. 1832 Asset Management L.P. now owns 1,018,000 shares of the company’s stock valued at $200,383,000 after purchasing an additional 1,017,969 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 89.22% of the company’s stock.

About MongoDB

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MongoDB, Inc provides general purpose database platform worldwide. The company offers MongoDB Atlas, a hosted multi-cloud database-as-a-service solution; MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a commercial database server for enterprise customers to run in the cloud, on-premise, or in a hybrid environment; and Community Server, a free-to-download version of its database, which includes the functionality that developers need to get started with MongoDB.

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New Strong Buy Stocks for July 28th – July 28, 2023 – Zacks.com

MMS Founder
MMS RSS

Posted on mongodb google news. Visit mongodb google news

Here are five stocks added to the Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) List today:

MongoDB (MDB Free Report) : This company which provides general purpose database platform, has seen the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings increasing 46.6% over the last 60 days.

Yext (YEXT Free Report) : This digital media technology services company which offers advertising, monetization, phone and directory services which includes business listings on search sites and real-time reputation management, has seen the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings increasing 40.0% over the last 60 days.

Integral Ad Science Holding (IAS Free Report) : This digital advertising verification company, has seen the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings increasing 8.3% over the last 60 days.

Medallion Financial (MFIN Free Report) : This specialty finance company that originates and services loans that finance taxicab medallions and various types of commercial loans, has seen the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earnings increasing 7.4% over the last 60 day.

SherwinWilliams (SHW Free Report) : This company which manufactures and sale paints, coatings and related products, primarily in the North and South America, has seen the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its current year earningsincreasing 5.9% over the last 60 days.

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Meta Open Sources New AI Model Llama 2

MMS Founder
MMS Andrew Hoblitzell

Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

Meta is open-sourcing its large language model, Llama 2. The model’s code and weights are being made available free of charge for both research and commercial use.

Llama 2 is the result of the expanded partnership between Meta and Microsoft, with the latter being the preferred partner for the new model. The model is available in the Azure AI model catalog, allowing developers using Microsoft Azure to integrate it into their projects and leverage cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features. Llama 2 is also optimized to run locally on Windows, creating a less difficult workflow for developers.

According to Meta, Llama 2 has been trained on over 40% more data compared to the previous Llama version and outperforms other language models on reasoning and knowledge tests. Percy Liang, director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Foundation Models, commented “LLaMA 2 isn’t GPT-4. but for many use cases, you don’t need GPT-4.”

Yann Lecun, chief AI scientist at Meta, said developers interested in leveraging the power of Llama 2 can access the model through Microsoft’s Azure platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hugging Face, and other providers.

Meta says the launch of Llama 2 is accompanied by a number of resources to ensure responsible use. These include red-teaming exercises, a transparency schematic, a responsible use guide, and an acceptable use policy.

Nvidia AI scientist Jim Fan noted “there is a significant gap on coding benchmarks. It’s on par or better than PaLM-540B on most benchmarks, but still far behind GPT-4 and PaLM-2-L.”

MIT Technology Review noted Meta is not releasing information about the data set that it used to train Llama 2 and the model “has the same problems that plague all large language models: a propensity to produce falsehoods and offensive language.”

Developers can refer to the model card for more information or to begin writing their own code. The model card notes among the limitations the model is intended for use in English only.

The move comes after two U.S. senators had previously questioned Meta’s CEO about such releases, writing its “chief AI scientist has stated that open models are key to its commercial success” and asserting the prior open release’s “unrestrained and permissive manner raises important and complicated questions.”

Meta has also initiated new programs to gather feedback on the performance and potential improvements of the models. “We believe an open approach is the right one for the development of today’s AI models, especially those in the generative space where the technology is rapidly advancing,” Meta said.

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Podcast: Four Pillars of Digital Transformation

MMS Founder
MMS Asif Iqbal

Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

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Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture podcast. Today, I am sitting down across the miles with Asif Iqbal. Asif, welcome. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Asif Iqbal: Thank you, Shane. Good to be here.

Shane Hastie: We met at QCon San Francisco last year and you gave a talk on modeling patterns for digital transformation. But before we get into that, I suppose a good starting point is who’s Asif?

Introductions [00:32]

Asif Iqbal: Oh, absolutely. My name is Asif Iqbal. I currently work for a company called Couche-Tard as a global director for digital and experience design. I know it’s a long title. What does that mean in plain English?

My teams are responsible for a website for North America, Canada, and Europe. And then my teams are also responsible for all the different native apps that we have in North America, Canada, and Europe. And trust me, we have quite a few native apps. And as part of the digital transformation that I’m doing right now at this company is to help build a global mobile app program, so we don’t have that many apps in the market.

And lastly, where the experience design comes in, my teams are responsible for to making sure that all the experience on the digital channel look and feel the same across the channels, across the geography, et cetera, et cetera. That’s what the title is, global director of digital and experience design. So mobile app, website and experience design, UX, UI.

A little bit about myself. I have been doing this technology/product engineering work for almost 19 plus years now and have successfully led large digital transformation in wireless, retail, mobile and e-commerce domains. Of course, excited to be here to talk to you about similar topic about modeling patterns for digital transformation. I’m ready to go.

And if you want to know a little bit about my experience, happy to touch where I came from. Obviously from professional perspective, like I said, I’ve worked for some great organization, learned from great team members, mentors and bosses at those organization. And some of those organizations are the likes of Nordstrom, which is a big fashion retailer in US. Walgreens, which is also known as Walgreen Boots now because they’re based in England.

And then obviously, T-Mobile, which is based in Bellevue, Washington. Sony, PlayStation. Yes, my team did work on PlayStation 5. And obviously, currently working for a company called Couche-Tard. It’s a Montreal based company. It has different C stores around the globe. In Canada it’s called Couche-Tard. In North America it’s called Circle K, and in Europe it’s Circle K, Extra, Ingo, that kind of stuff.

In between, I took a couple of years off from a corporate world and did some consulting. And actually enjoyed that piece because it was more of the strategy work, corporate strategy, that kind of work. Was not executing, but it was more of a strategy work. That’s a little bit about me, who I am, where I come from and what I have done so far.

Shane Hastie: Thank you. Possibly a first principles question. When we say digital transformation, what do we mean?

Defining digital transformation [03:23]

Asif Iqbal: Yeah, it means differently for different people. To me, digital transformation is a mind shift change. And if you do the transformation correctly, it creates an opportunity for business by changing how we operate and delivers value to your customers and to your shareholders faster.

To me, that’s what digital transformation is. To me. You may have a different understanding of digital transformation. That’s what is digital transformation. Why we do digital transformation? And again, if done correctly, it can increase the development velocity, business agility, and delivers value to customer and your shareholders faster.

What does that mean? Means you can do digital transformation and say, “I’m going to use Waterfall SDLC. And it’s going to take me nine months to do a simple website.” That’s not digital transformation. You’re not creating any values for your business or your stakeholders. To me, that’s what the digital transformation is and why companies do it.

Shane Hastie: Transformation is always a scary word in organizations. How do we bring people on our transformation journey with us?

Four principles key to digital transformation [04:33]

Asif Iqbal: Yeah, great question. I think it’s all about keeping those four principles that I talked about in my talk during QCon. I’m going to forget what I said. The four principle was understanding your customers and your customer segments. that’s number one.

Second is aligning with your customers and your functional teams. Because you cannot do anything digital transformation in a silo. You can say, “Oh, Asif and Shane wants to digital transform this company and forget about what people A and people B are thinking. Shane and I are going to go and make that happen.” We will fail. Not going to happen. That’s where the cross-functional team alignment comes in.

The third is influencing and understanding what the change is, why we want to do it, how we are going to do it. And what’s in it, not for Shane, not for Asif. What’s in it for you as a customer or as an organization? Again, showing the empathy and explaining the why behind it.

And finally, communicating, communicating, communicating, over-communicating and celebrating success. To me, those are the big four pillars that we use to sell the idea of what the digital transformation is to at any level from a C-level, all the way to people at the store level. Can I explain them what’s in it for them?

To me, that’s what the digital transformation, that’s how when it becomes what the word did you use? Scary word. You split it into four small pieces saying, “The reason I want to do this is because point one, point two, point three.” And then go work with your team and say, “The reason we want to do this is A, B, C, D.” And then go to your C-level and say, “If we do this correctly, we are going to create more shareholder value. Your EBITDA will improve.” It’s all about selling what each individual wants and selling it in their own words.

Shane Hastie: You mentioned the four pillars. Let’s dig deep into each of these four pillars that you mentioned. The first one, understand your customers, but don’t we already know that.

Pillar # 1: Understand you customers [06:35]

Asif Iqbal: You will be surprised how many people don’t. You’ll be surprised how people will go and say, “Oh, in order to digital transform, we just move your website because customer use your website. Move it from .net or legacy environment to the cloud.” They can say they are digital transformed.

Well, that maybe that’s not what customer wants. Maybe a customer wants to know how fast. For example, take any e-commerce site. What is a big thing e-commerce site wants to do? They want to make sure that you can log in, your pages are loaded fast, it’s performant, and they can find what they’re looking for in easy steps. Keep your customer journeys or steps less than three.

To me, in order for you to know what customer wants you do some research and figure it out. What is not a good digital transformation is moving from an old legacy website and literally moving into a cloud and said, “We have digitally transformed.” That never works.

I’ll give you one quote from one of the CEO that I used to work with at T-Mobile, John Legere. He used to say, “Listen and do whatever your customers tells you to do. They’re always right.” Again, do some research. Figure out what your customers are using on your website. Maybe there are certain features on the website that they don’t even do anything with.

If that’s a case, then if you want to transform into the cloud, build those features from scratch using the cloud native tools means. And only build the features that’s being used. Don’t worry about stuff that they have never touched or only touched once in a while. To me, that’s what the customer segment and needs comes in. That’s a first pillar.

And again, like I said, there are multiple ways you can do it to get the segment or customer needs. You can do some research, you can do moderated testing. You can literally put a simple survey on your website or on your mobile app or any product, say, “Hey, what do you like about our product? What don’t you like about the product? How can we improve?” And then you iterate, take that and iterate it. To me, that’s the one way of saying the first pillar, customer needs.

Shane Hastie: The second pillar, align with your cross-functional teams. Cross-functional teams can be difficult anyway.

Pillar #2: Align with cross-functional teams [08:48]

Asif Iqbal: Yes, but as a leader, if you want to digitally transform, those are the things that you have to, I don’t want to say deal with, but work with. And again, this is the example that I gave you. No one person or team can do anything by themselves or in a silo.

It’s very important to build those relationship with your cross-functional team and with your own team. And then again, learn about why they may be hesitant to say, “Why should I do digital transformation?” This is where the empathy comes in. To me, for example, think about this. I hire Shane and I want Shane to do a digital transform my company.

Shane can come in two ways. Shane can come in and say, “Oh, I just got hired. I am the director of A, B, C, D, and I want digitally transform. I have a support from CEO, CIO, CDO.” Shane comes with that mindset and says, “Okay, fellows, Asif and team, we are going to go from .net to cloud. Get ready.” You know what? Asif will look at you and say, “Hmm, I don’t think that’s going to work very well for Shane because Shane is not showing me empathy.”

That’s one way of doing it. But aligning with your cross-functional team and your own team. If Shane comes and says, “Guys, I appreciate all the wonderful work that you guys have done in the last 10, 15 years. But you know what? How about we want to do this? And the reason we want to do it because we want to become a, I don’t know, multi-billion dollar company. And we cannot keep using this old legacy system. We want to get to the new system. And I know you guys are worried that you know guys don’t know this tool or you guys don’t know this new environment. We will help each other to train and get you help to learn about this new environment.”

Again, see the mindsets changes? That’s number one we are doing is for your own team. And the cross-functional team could be you have a business partner. And this is a true example. I’m not going to give you a company name, but true example. We went there, I was hired. And I went to one of my buyers and I said, “Hey, we are thinking about going to this new retail tool that will do your ordering systems.” And this individual looked at me and said, “I’ve been using a Microsoft macro Excel for the last 15 years and I’ve been very successful. Why do I want to do this?”

And the way you do that is, “You are right, you are. But if this company wants to become a multi-billion dollar company, can you imagine doing the same thing in Excel macro for this many more vendors, this many more customers, et cetera?” He looked at me and said, “Okay, okay, how about we tried with a small department?” We literally tried with a very small department and waited for the quarter. And we figured out the velocity and the error rate of the ordering came down drastically.

Again, it’s like digital transformation as a leader, half the time you spend on selling your idea. Influencing your idea. And to me, that’s why it’s important to align with your cross-functional and inter-functional team, showing empathy and explaining them what’s in it for them.

And then again, you have to build some credibility chops for yourself. And the way you do it is you cannot do what Shane’s first approach. You go with Shane’s second approach and it’s like, “Okay, he may be trying to help me get to the next level.” To me, that’s where aligning with your customer and cross-function team becomes very important. And that’s where this empathy comes in, using your influencing tactics helps you, et cetera, et cetera.

Shane Hastie: The third pillar was influencing coaching, mentoring. How do we bring that into play?

Pillar #3: Listen, influence and coach [12:23]

Asif Iqbal: I think I touch on it in my previous pillar comment, but I think this is a good topic to talk about it. Again, this is where you try to influence and say again, “Why behind the reason? Why do we want to do this?” For example, I’ll give you one example. There’s a buzzword few years ago called DevOps. I’m sure you heard about the word DevOps.

And what a lot of companies did is, “Oh, DevOps. Let’s make development team and operation team, put them together. And voila, my company is DevOps enabled.” That’s not what DevOps says. You know it, I know it. What the real DevOps is, is creating one team where you can build it and you own it. What that means is there’s no separate production support team. There is no separate feature development team, there is no separate UX, UI, prod all those teams.

You bring all those folks together and say you are responsible end-to-end for this product vision and product delivery and product support. Certainly if you change that mindset and you influence that mindset, what happens is developers, when they’re building something, they will build it with how they’re going to support at the end in mind. Because they are the one who’s going to get called at 2:00 AM not a separate production support team. Again, accountability changes.

Same thing with product organization. When a product is part of that organization DevOps team, he or she is not going to say, “Oh, I’m just going to build a product and I don’t have to support it. Going forward, somebody else will take care of it.” No, you own the product end-to-end. You create it with customer in mind. And again, you influence, listen and you say, “This is how we’re going to do it.”

To me, that’s from a product vision perspective. From a technology vision perspective, you influence a culture of what I call it like a DevOps culture of CI/CD, CT. What does that mean? You build features in small chunks with a continuous integration built in, continuous deployment, pipeline built in and continuous testing built in. Why? Because then you can make these small changes quickly, that velocity improves.

And again, back to listen, influence and coach, the pillar. The way this is these two things are important is because what does business at the end or executive wants? They want to do things quickly, safely and do it better and make it accountable for our team.

Again, to use these three things, listen, influence culture is you influence these tactics to them. And then now you build it. And you build a DevOps mindset with the end-to-end accountability. There is no, “I’m going to build this new wonder feature. I’m going to move or throw it over the wall to Shane. And Shane will take care of all the support problem and I’m going to move on to a new feature.” No, you own the whole thing. This is your baby.

Shane Hastie: And your fourth pillar is celebrate success.

Pillar #4: Communicate and celebrate success [15:15]

Asif Iqbal: This is where I say… And we all are busy. I totally get it. Sometime what happens is we are so busy that even though we made, for example, let’s enable CI/CD in a small one of the sign-in feature. Okay. After that, celebrate it. I mean when I say celebrate it, go take your team out for a dinner. Or not dinner, a drink, whatever they drink.

The reason that’s important is that will show two things. That will show that Shane actually cared what I just did. It doesn’t matter how small it was, Shane cared what I did. Shane knows that I exist, my team exists. That’s number one. Number two is this is where the team culture comes in. you meet with your team, you celebrate their success, you celebrate their failures with them.

And then, all about communicating. When you are doing a digital transformation or anything in life over-communicating is much better than not communicating at all. And not even over-communicating, communicating and communicating often. And there are multiple ways we all can do that. I know what I have done.

Whenever you do any kind of transformation or digital transformation or any transformation in life, what do you do? You have lots of meetings, you do town halls, you do roadshow, and you do a sprint demo. I don’t know why some people miss doing the sprint demos with executives for small things. They think, “Oh, in order for me to do a demo, I need to have a beautiful UX, UI and all that kind of stuff before I can bring executive in.”

No, you can do a demo off a script, off something that’s backend getting updated. Because you will have no idea how many times somebody will ask you, “Hey, how often does this data get updated into a table?” Guess what? Bring your executives and say, “I’m going to run a script. This is how the data is going to get updated. This is literally a near real time process.” They will appreciate it because you have no idea how many times they don’t understand how the data works, number one.

And then finally to me, this whole about communicating often and celebrating success, one of the, I will say success thing that lot of engineering organization and product organization miss out is it’s not about just celebrating a success with taking your team out for dinner, lunch or giving them ticket to baseball game or basketball or, in our world, cricket game.

Give all teams time to innovate rather than establishing separate innovation teams [17:34]

It’s not about that. It’s also about giving them time, what I call it, to innovate. What really doesn’t work is lot of team build this innovation team and there are few people who are the only one who can go and innovate. That never works. Smaller teams, giving them a time on maybe every sprint or once a quarter saying, “This is the time, these three days for you to guys to go and do innovate.” I think those small things goes much further and long way than buying them a lunch or buying them a ticket to a cricket game. Lot of engineers and product, they want to do this small innovation thing, which we don’t give time for them to do.

In my previous companies, we have used the method of every other sprint. We will give, I don’t know, X number of story points for just innovation. Or maybe do something what we call it kaizen events. Every quarter, take a week away from their regular work and say, “Go work with your cross-functional team or with somebody else and come up with an idea.” Idea could be as small as me talking to Shane, it took me three clicks to log into Zoom. What can I do to create a one click? Things like that. It could be anything.

To me, that’s what I will say communicating and celebrating success. Celebrating success is not just about giving them a pat on a back or giving them a ticket or taking out to lunch. It’s also learning from them as to what they want, what’s make them happy. And it could be innovating. And then, as far as communicating, the more you communicate, the better it is because then people cannot say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were working on it.” Over- communicate my friend. Hopefully that helps.

Shane Hastie: It does. How can this go wrong?

There are pitfalls and antipatterns to avoid [19:16]

Asif Iqbal: We talked about what is digital transformation. Let me talk about what is not digital transformation also because that’s where things can go wrong. Remember my example? And this is a true example in one of our CIO wanted to tell the board that they are digitally transformed, the company. This person’s comment was, “Hey, just move our legacy website into the cloud, just move it.” Literally the idea was lift and shift.

We did. Guess what happened after that? We digitally transformed, right? We were in the cloud, but it took us more time. It was more expensive for us to maintain it because we did not understand what features made sense to move it to cloud. By doing that lift and shift approach, it cost us more in a long run because at the end, literally a year later, what did we do? We did it the right way.

Means we literally took, said, “Okay, we moved the entire website into the cloud, but we are not optimizing the cloud tools. We are paying more on the cloud cost. We have no data DR places built in. And we built some of the features that customers aren’t even using it.” What did we do? We went back and we evaluated and said, “Okay, so sign in. People do use every day. Let’s build it in a cloud, using the right way. Product page, let’s build that in the cloud the right way. But account management, it’s hardly being used. Keep it in the old system. Who cares?”

To me, that’s one way that things can go wrong. The other way I’ll say is not having your own team support and your leadership support, that can go digital transformation to the you know where. Bad, bad places. And the way that works is, again, if you get your team onboarded with explaining the why behind why you want to do it, and they bought the idea and they are in it with you, then your team is with you.

And from a leadership perspective, I will say, executives, this is where you over-communicate and communicate with them and get to their level. It’s like, okay, because some of the C-levels may not care about that it’s going to make my website go fast. Who the heck cares? But if you tell them, if you create this feature in a brand new mobile app, it’s going to help with your EBITDA. It’s going to save some opex dollars. Guess what? Now they’re going to listen to you.

It’s you just have to know your audience and make sure you explain it what’s in it for them. And you do this often. Do it over and over again so that it’s not like, “Oh, what is Shane working on? Why are you working on this? Well, how much money did I spend?” Things like that.

Again, it’s all goes back to my second pillar. The better you do the second pillar by empathy, learning from your team, influencing the right ideas and working with the C-suite, explaining them what’s in it for them, how that improves the customer lives. And by you making things easier for your customer, how that customer is going to come back to shop at your store, thing like that, that will help. To me, I will say those two things, if not done correctly, can go wrong.

Shane Hastie: What haven’t I asked you that our audience should hear?

Tips and techniques [22:18]

Asif Iqbal: Digital transformation is a journey. It’s not perfect. You are not looking for perfection. If you don’t roll out certain things because it’s not perfect. I always use 80/20 rule. If you wait for perfection, my friend, you will never be able to release anything in production or anywhere.

The way you do that is you use a 80/20 rule to implement any new features. That’s number one. And then I can guarantee you there’s times that we wanted to do all 100% and we were able to go back and talk to our executive saying, “I think 80% good enough to go live with this product. And let’s go live with it and get customer feedback. Iterate on it.”

And I can tell you in my last six digital transformation, there were five of them that the other 20% feature that we thought was important, we never went back and implemented it because customer told us something different. To me, if you would’ve waited to make it perfect, people will not have used that other 20% feature.

To me, that’s number one thing I will say, that I know we have not asked about it that always used that 80/20 rule. Number one, always have what I call a good frameworks around digital transformation. Some of the framework that I have used is having a good design system. Remember I talked about experience design team? You cannot have different colors of icons on website versus mobile app.

And how do you fix that? You create a design system where you have a code snippet. A developer, the only thing they have to do is, “Oh, I want to create a button. I’m going to go grab a code snippet.” There’s no chance there’s a different color of red versus whatever. The things like that. Design system is important.

Most important thing after that comes the prioritization. How do you prioritize? Because everybody’s things are priority number one. You know it, I know it. We have used what I call it, this shift model. Can I figure it out and say, “Okay, this is what the value of this shift looks like at the end. And then, we are going to prioritize using this model.”

And then finally, I will say is creating a flexible architecture where you can do these widgets, where you can do these small things, like make code changes on the fly in the middle of a day. The way you do it is you want to get away from building monolithic application and build it in a small chunks, small pieces, small segments. I will say those are the two big things that I will say.

And finally I’ll talk about, and I think I mentioned this earlier, you don’t have to know all, you don’t have to be expert in everything. Use the partnerships that you have built in relationship that you have built to go and get the help from others. For example, I have a philosophy on buy versus build. And that’s where the partnership comes in.

I am a personal believer is if you are building something, if you want a competitive advantage, you build it in-house. But if there’s something that you are not going to get a competitive advantage around, go buy it off the shelf. And hopefully don’t customize it too much, but use it as is. That’s where the partnership comes in.

For example, let’s say you want to enable CI/CD and continuous integration environment. Go find a partner who has done CI/CD before. It’s the same thing. Now by design, I didn’t use the word CT for it. Why didn’t I use the word CT? Because CT is test scripts. That’s specific to your product, your culture, your environment, your system. You cannot buy that off the shelf. For that, you build it. But CI/CD, you know it, I know it. There are platforms out there, you can literally go and use it. That’s where the partnership comes in. Partnerships is, to me, very important when you’re doing what I call it, a digital transformation. No one person can do all. I mean it just as simple as that.

The finally, I will say is this is my favorite thing that I always say to my team, digital transformation, it’s not about fancy tool, it’s about the mindshift change. There’s no one fancy tool that we can use and say, “Oh, I have digitally transformed my organization. Or I bought X number of tools, blah, blah, blah.” No, if you cannot change your team and your business partner, this mindset shift, you can never… I don’t see never. Never is a bad word. It’s hard to digitally transform. Digital transformation is not about fancy tool. It’s about the mindset change.

Shane Hastie: Asif, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Really interesting ideas, some good advice in there. If people want to continue the conversation, where do they find you?

Asif Iqbal: You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Twitter. I think LinkedIn is the easy way. And you have my email, so if somebody wants to get hold of me through email, I’m available to answer any question. I’m a big user of Slack, but I think LinkedIn is the fastest way to get hold of me.

And thank you for time, Shane. I had wonderful time talking to you. Hopefully this helps someone. And like I said, if there’s anything I can do to help or have anybody have a question how to digitally transform or anything about digital or product engineering, happy to talk to them.

Shane Hastie: Asif, thank you so much.

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