MongoDB said it has appointed CJ Desai, an alum of Cloudflare and ServiceNow, as CEO effective Nov. 10.

In a statement, the company said current CEO Dev Ittycheria will retire from a full-time role but will stay on MongoDB's board.

It was evident that Desai was going to land a CEO gig when Cloudflare reported its earnings. Cloudflare said Desai was resigning as president of product and engineering to take a CEO role at a visible publicly traded company.

Desai has held technology leadership roles at Cloudflare, ServiceNow and held roles at EMC and Symantec over the last 25 years. Desai's highest profile role was at ServiceNow where the company's annual revenue went from $1.5 billion to $10 billion. Desai resigned from ServiceNow in 2024 after violating company policy.

In a statement, Desai said:

"MongoDB has long been the partner of choice for building applications that transform businesses, and now it is uniquely positioned to power the next wave of AI-driven applications. My directive is clear: by staying relentlessly close to customers, delivering category-defining products, and executing at scale, we can seize the enormous opportunities ahead."

Desai takes over for Ittycheria as MongoDB is performing well. MongoDB reported a strong second quarter and raised its outlook.

MongoDB said its third quarter results will be at the high end of its earnings and revenue guidance. MongoDB said it will report earnings on Dec. 1.

Scale and strategy

Wall Street analysts asked Desai about strategy, go-to-market scale and the architecture behind AI workloads. 

Desai said MongoDB can further scale. A few key takeaways include:

  • "MongoDB has long been the partner of choice for applications that transform businesses, and I believe the company is exceptionally positioned to power the next wave of AI applications."
  • Desai said his experience in scaling companies will be useful to MongoDB. Desai said MongoDB’s market motion will be to expand from developers to the C-suite.
  • "MongoDB participates in a very large growing market, and it has also a very clear architectural advantage to become part of the architecture for modern workloads. There are so many workloads being changed to leverage AI. We have reached this inflection moment where Mongo can truly become the heart of this next phase of architecture. MongoDB architecture was not force fitted for AI workloads. It existed for AI workloads."

  • Desai said that AI workloads are rewiring database decisions. “I think the rearchitecture is happening right now, and it is our job as MongoDB to ensure that customers understand the why and how we are ideally suited for those applications,” he said.

Desai, who started his career at Oracle, was asked about MongoDB's positioning given he oversaw the ServiceNow acquisition of RaptorDB. He was also asked about the limitations of Postgres. He said:

"When I truly look at the technology of MongoDB, and I spend some time truly evaluating the recent innovations from MongoDB on 8.0 and post 8.0 releases, what I would say is that this is the right database to build or modernize an application for. Relational databases tend to be very rigid and do not handle the unstructured data really well. When you think about AI applications of the future, it will still be both structured and unstructured data. And as the business changes, MongoDB would still be on the right side of that equation. Many of our customers want to scale that application for AI workloads."

Regarding Postgres, Desai said ServiceNow wanted to maintain the SQL functionality and structured data approach. "Our job with the team is to continue to make sure that MongoDB is top of mind, understand the advantages of MongoDB and to be flexible for scale out," he said.

Desai was also asked about competition from cloud providers. He said MongoDB's launch of Atlas nailed the cloud transition and ability to be agnostic. He said that MongoDB's multicloud approach is a moat. "Multicloud is here to stay," said Desai, who noted recent cloud outages. "MongoDB with a cloud agnostic architecture and how seamlessly it can work in a multi cloud environment is a competitive moat for MongoDB."

He added that MongoDB has tailwinds in database migrations to the cloud as well as AI workloads. Desai said international, notably India, also remains a growth area for the company. Desai will talk more about MongoDB strategy on the December 1 earnings call.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"This brings Desai's career to a full circle -- 30 years ago he and his team built databases at Oracle and now he is at the helm at one of the few Oracle competitors left standing. This is good news for MongoDB customers and the overall database market that has atrophied. Data remains critical in the AI era and the most coveted data is in documents."

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