Australia's large enterprises knuckle down on optimisation

Australian enterprises are squeezing their existing technology investments, but still spending on digital transformation projects seen as “strategic”, according to MongoDB’s chief product officer Sahir Azam.

Sahir Azam.

Azam visited Australia in the middle of this month, meeting with large enterprise customers like Macquarie Group and ANZ Banking Group, as well as with scale-ups like Canva.

Enterprise customers globally, he said, were looking to drive more efficient use of technology and higher returns on existing investment, as a priority this year.

“That can involve technical best practices, or it could be just making sure they’re provisioned properly and not oversized,” Azam said.

“Those conversations are happening everywhere - everyone’s trying to tighten down and make sure there’s no wasted spend.

“We’re partnering a lot with customers on that, and certainly that came up a bit in conversations here.”

However, the optimisation focus wasn’t necessarily resulting in reduced spend, with money still in the market for “strategic” digital transformation projects.

“The interesting thing for us is we’re ofte times at the centre of pretty strategic digital transformation initiatives, and I haven’t really felt like those are being paused,” he said.

“If you’re a bank and building a digital banking platform to remain competitive, I dont think there’s an appetite to pause those types of projects because they’re quite strategic. 

“We haven’t seen any real slowdown there.”

Azam said multicloud, privacy and security also dominated discussions at enterprise events it held.

MongoDB has a “pretty sizable” regional presence - “somewhere north of 150 people”, Azam said.

Part of the reason for that is that Australia hosts a long-term software engineering and product development presence.

The company’s WiredTiger core storage engine, Atlas Charts visualisation and BI product, and newer Relational Migrator tool are all built and maintained out of Australia.