NoSQL distributed database provider MongoDB plans to start more aggressively targeting application modernisation opportunities, CEO Dev Ittycheria said on a Q4 earnings call: “Based on customer demand, we are specifically targeting Java apps running on Oracle, which often have thousands of complex stored procedures that need to be understood, converted, and tested to successfully monetize the application,” he said.
Many MongoDB customers have built out new applications on its flexible document model, but older application workloads (whether on Oracle or Sybase et al) have traditionally been harder to peel away, the CEO said: “Historically, this segment of the market was not widely available to us because of the effort, cost, and risk of modernizing old and complex custom applications. In fiscal '25, our pilots demonstrated that AI tooling combined with services can reduce the cycle time of modernization.”
He added: “...the complexity of this work is high, [but] the revenue obtained for modernizing those applications is significant…we successfully modernized financial applications for one of the largest ISVs in Europe, and we're now in talks to modernize the majority of the legacy estate.”
He made the comments after MongoDB smashed earnings estimates – ending its fiscal 2025 with over 54,500 customers, crossing the $2 billion revenue mark, and reporting earnings per share (EPS) of $1.28 compared to a forecasted $0.66. Its multicloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) Atlas revenue grew 24% year over year, representing a notable 71% of revenue.
Despite the robust results, shares slumped on the earnings on muted guidance. MongoDB is also seeing slower growth than it had hoped for in new applications using Atlas, interim CFO Srdjan Tanjga told analysts.
MongoDB: AI opportunities?
CEO Ittycheria added that AI is not yet a major tailwind for the company.
“In fiscal '26, we expect our customers will continue on their AI journey from experimenting with new technology stacks to building prototypes to deploying apps in production. We expect the progress to remain gradual as most enterprise customers are still developing in-house skills to leverage AI effectively. Consequently, we expect the benefits of AI to be only modestly incremental to revenue growth in fiscal '26,” he said.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a major opportunity here, he emphasised.
“AI is transforming software from a static tool into a dynamic decision-making partner... AI powered applications will continuously learn from real time data, but this software can only adapt as fast as the data infrastructure is built on, and legacy systems simply cannot keep up… Complex architectures, batch processing, and rigid data models create friction at every step, slowing development, limiting organization's ability to act quickly and making even small updates time consuming and risky. AI will only magnify these challenges." - MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria
See also: Bede Gaming's CTO on saving £££ with a mammoth CosmosDB to MongoDB migration
Execs added that MongoDB’s recent acquisition of Voyage AI will help it make AI applications “more trustworthy by pairing real time data and sophisticated embedding and retrieval models” for results with lower hallucination rates – an issue that continues to plague AI applications.
Ittycheria suggested that his company will continue offering Voyage AI’s models even to non-MongoDB customers: “We do want to make this available to all customers, including people who are not MongoDB customers today, and we think that's good for the business long term.
See also: UK’s spy agencies grapple with IT modernisation– as GCHQ ramps up hacking capabilities
Net income for Q4 was $15.8 million, versus a loss of $55.4 million for the Q4 last year. Annual losses were trimmed from $176 million to $129 million. MongoDB ended Q4 with $2.3 billion in cash and equivalents: “During Q4, we also completed the redemption of our 2026 convertible notes, and as a result, our balance sheet is debt free” said CFO Tanjga.
Disclosure: The Stack earlier partnered with MongoDB on the video and customer case study embedded in this news story.
