Story Time with Jason

I was in the audience at the Globant Open House at San Francisco Developer Week last night, and heard a lot of stories from Jason Hunter. Pet peeves, work experiences, things his mother once told him… oh boy. Our brilliant Chief Architect turned the event into what I’m calling, “Jason’s Story Time.”

Luckily these were good stories. Luckily he’s good on the spot. And luckily he’s generally pretty funny. Because he also decided he didn’t want to use slides, he just really wanted to tell stories. That Jason!

So let’s back up a little. What is Globant? They are an IT and Software Development company with offices all over the world. Their office in San Francisco, where this event took place, is small but very cool. It’s got that fresh start-up feel. You know, no walls, colored doors, bean bag chairs. It took a lot for me to not plop myself down in the fluffy white bean bag chair in the corner to listen to the presentation. Globant divides their business up by “studios” in different technology areas, rather than by vertical. Their eight studios are: Mobile, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Creative & Social, Quality Engineering, Gaming & Entertainment, Enterprise Consumerization, and Consumer Experience. They invited MarkLogic to present while they hosted a free developer event with pizza and beer.

Jason told his story starting all the way back 10 or so years ago, when he began working at MarkLogic as “random coder guy,” and he basically went through our company’s history. Here are a few of the stories that stuck out to me:

“Bowling Pins.” The first version of MarkLogic he sold had XML storage, transactions, and instant search. The first field of interest? Publishing! So the publishing industry was MarkLogic’s first bowling pin. They thought we were fantastic for searching and transforming content. The next bowling pin was Government, specifically Intelligence Agencies. But in order to hit that one, MarkLogic needed to add more scaling abilities. So we kept adding what they needed and hired in the government field to satisfy requirements. Next bowling pin? Financial Services. Now these organizations really don’t like it if you lose data. So MarkLogic needed to be very transactional. The more pins you hit the more energy you get and the more MarkLogic began to evolve into what it is today.

“Naming NoSQL.” This one I like because I love saying that we were “NoSQL before NoSQL was cool.” Jason (and team at the time) asked themselves, what exactly is it that MarkLogic holds? It truly is not relational. But they didn’t want to define their category as not something. Not SQL? How negative is that? But then soon enough, the market came up with NoSQL (for Not Only SQL). Close enough!

He also went through a “Competition” story, and an “Enterprise: Your Problem Is My Problem” story, to name a few, but you’ll have to ask him about those yourself. To bring it all together, Jason fast forwarded to MarkLogic right now, and why MarkLogic has such a big place in the marketplace. We have four main capabilities, or product pillars, if you will:

1. Flexible data model: load without the ability of knowing in advance, index like a search engine 2. Massive Scalability: petabytes, elastic scaling 3. Modern Indexing: real-time, re-inverted indexes 4. Enterprise Grade: ACID Transactions, HA/DR, monitoring and management, SQL/BI Tools, “Common Criteria” Security

Nobody else has all four of these. So there was a point to story time. It brought us to understand the beauty of where MarkLogic started and what it has become. Well done Jason. You’re forgiven for not using slides.