Nutanix .NEXT 2026 | Ashish Mohindroo, Nutanix & Olivier Zieleniecki, MongoDB

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Ashish Mohindroo, Nutanix & Olivier Zieleniecki, MongoDB

Ashish Mohindroo

GM & SVP Nutanix

Olivier Zieleniecki

Global VP MongoDB

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026, Ashish Mohindroo, general manager and senior vice president at Nutanix, joins Olivier Zieleniecki, global vice president of worldwide partners at MongoDB, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik about how the two companies are building a production-ready platform for AI-native applications across on-premises and hybrid environments. Mohindroo and Zieleniecki announce an expanded integration between Nutanix Database Service (NDB) and MongoDB, certifying MongoDB across replica set and sharded clust... Read more

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What does your partnership with MongoDB involve, and how will it help customers run enterprise‑scale MongoDB deployments (on‑premises or in the cloud) using your database‑as‑a‑service? add

How does Nutanix support the growing AI-native/agentic developer market, and how does Nutanix Database Service (NDB) enable quick provisioning and lifecycle management of databases for AI agents? add

How does your partnership with MongoDB and running MongoDB on the NDB platform improve performance, availability, scalability, and business continuity for enterprise customers? add

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Ashish Mohindroo, Nutanix & Olivier Zieleniecki, MongoDB

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Alison Kosik

>> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are in Chicago, streaming live at Nutanix .NEXT. I'm Alison Kosik. I'm hosting the show today alongside my copilot, John Furrier. He's the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE theCUBE. And with all of these discussions we've had, we've yet to really talk about the state of the database market.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. The thing about this AI market, whether you're looking at the AI infrastructure or the Nutanix part of this new AI stack, data is the key ingredient. If you look at all the innovation around large scale in production, the ones that can handle the data the best are the ones that are winning, they're creating value, enabling the AI-native developers. So this is a whole step function change, and again, this next segment should really unpack a lot of that.

Alison Kosik

>> Yeah, let's broaden the conversation and bring in our guests. We've got Ashish Mohindroo, he's the GM and SVP of Nutanix, and we've got Olivier Zieleniecki. I hope I'm not butchering your name too-

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> ....

Alison Kosik

>> but you are the GM and senior vice president... I'm sorry, you're the senior partner marketing manager of gen AI with MongoDB. Woo. So many things to say.

John Furrier

>> So how many titles do you have?

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I will tell you, I'm the global vice president of partners, and I lead the entire partners ecosystem here at MongoDB.

Alison Kosik

>> Thank you for clarifying. I really appreciate that. So glad to have you both on theCUBE.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Great to be here.

Alison Kosik

>> The first thing that comes to mind is the apps that we have are only as strong as the data behind them. Talk about the partnership and how that sort of lifts that thought up.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Absolutely. It's really great to be here, first of all, and thank you, Olivier, for joining us today and really making this announcement even more powerful with your presence over here. In general, if you look at the market and AI, just like you mentioned, it's all about the data. And where do they really store the data? They really are storing it in modern databases like MongoDB to power up these next generation of agents or applications. And in order for these databases to run effectively, they need a platform that can scale with it, that can make it secure, really highly performant on any environment that the customer chooses to run it on, whether it's on premises or in the cloud. And what we are really doing with this partnership with MongoDB is really solidifying or, I would say, hardening that platform to make sure that our customers can run enterprise scale systems without any disruption. So what we really do, the two companies work together to integrate their offerings. So we have NDB, which is our database as a service platform, and we certify that with MongoDB so that we can run MongoDB in any configuration, whether it's replica sets in for replica sets or shorted clusters. So now over to Olivier to talk about-

Alison Kosik

>> Yeah, Olivier, what are your thoughts?

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> Well, I mean, it's an amazing... So let me take a step back and say AI are dependent on a lot of things, whether it's models, frameworks, cloud or on-prem, environment, security, data, all have to work together. So as part of our next phase at MongoDB, we are accelerating our investment in the partner ecosystem, like the one that we've got with Nutanix. And the availability of this new solution, which is going to be a production-ready solution for our customer, for our joint customers, really fill a gap in what we had, which was to be able to manage MongoDB EA, the self-managed version, to be able to have a managed service for that for the on-prem or for the hybrid customers, right? And that's something that we already see a big demand in the market, and we're truly excited, and I'm honored to be here today to announce this launch.

John Furrier

>> Give some details to the announcement and what it means for customers specifically, because Mongo has been the staple of developers. You can go back to the LAMP stack days, I'm dating myself. Cloud, obviously crushing it there. AI here now is disaggregated, it's distributed computing. You still got data gravity, you still got now hybrid. What's the details of the announcement with Nutanix?

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> Well, you're right. I mean, MongoDB has been around for over 15 years. We truly transitioned from just a document database model to really unified data platform. And as maybe we'll talk later on, database have moved, have changed from just being a passive system of records to being an active memory layer for AI-native applications. And when you look at some of the requirements of the AI, you need to have the ability to charge, you need to have ability to scale, manage backups. This specific integration for our customer will help them clone production data into dev or test environment, will help manage the backups, also manage complex deployment that all shorted cluster, all requirements for the modern days and helping our customers build the next generation of applications.

John Furrier

>> And you have the new CEO, CJ Desai. CUBE alumni, by the way.

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And it's important to note... I'd love to get your thoughts on... I think this ties in. The enterprise growth has been significant with Mongo, again, in cloud and on prem. Bring us to the modern update. What is the current use cases? What are customers doing with AI in the enterprise? You have a large platform presence in the enterprise. How does this tie together for them?

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> Well, I mean, so that's a great question, right? I mean, as I mentioned, database platform change. One of the things is that customer didn't want any more fragmented type of environment. They wanted to simplify the entire data stacks. They want a unified data platform that enable customer to run, whether it's transactional workloads, whether it's stream processing, whether it's real-time analytics, right? MongoDB provide that to them. All of those large enterprise customer, like you've mentioned, that MongoDB is really... We've got 65,000 customer and we're very much present in the enterprise, and Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 customer of those want to modernize their application or wants to build on modern application that enable them to handle any kind of data, whether it's structure or unstructured, and obviously the document model luckily fit perfectly with the AI application use cases. And last, as I mentioned before, they want to be able to have the flexibility to run on any kind of environment. Today you've got some large enterprise customer that's only able to certain application to run on prem, which is why this integration is again great. Some of them have already moved towards the cloud or in process of moving towards a hybrid environment, or based on sovereignty requirements, they might go to a private cloud. MongoDB provide this capability to run also on anywhere. So we simplify life of our customers and helping them build the next generations of AI applications.

John Furrier

>> Actually, let's talk about Nutanix's piece here. Because one of the things we've been observing and I've written about, talked about on theCUBE all the time, is that the developer market's continuing to explode in AI, AI-native growth. CNCF did a lot of good work with Linux Foundation for the cloud-native. Now they have the Agentic AI Foundation. We're expecting that to be an agentic infrastructure layer that's going to have the same challenges at scale. But now you have massive growth in this community.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Absolutely. I think there's a couple of things. One is we look just at the database layer. What a customer is really doing is they want choice, so they want to pick the database of their choice. MongoDB is a leading database, but we also support the other four most popular databases, whether they're SQL databases or no-SQL databases. And what we really give with that choice to our customers is the ability to build different kinds of agents and applications. What they really want to do is be able to spin up a new database really quickly. So what NDB, or Nutanix Database Service, does is it enables them to automate that process, so you can within minutes have a database of your choice, and then manage the entire life cycle completely, from provisioning, to cloning, to backup, recovery, scaling, security, and so on and so forth, which is a very critical element of making sure your AI agents are working effectively and your applications are running as planned.

John Furrier

>> One of the things I was talking with a friend the other day, and I was doing my thing, "Oh, the holy trinity of computing has been storage, compute, and networking." He goes, "No, no, no. There's a fourth database."

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> And if you think about that, it's databases; there's a lot of data. And the other thing we were talking about was the old, go back three years, the data layer. Now it's not a data layer. It's a control plane. This is with the agentic infrastructure, whether you call it a shim layer, I call it collapsing in with cloud-native, but there's a lot of technologists working at this agentic infrastructure operational piece. So they got to think about, okay, governance, compliance, data, which databases, which workload taps this database? How do I fuse data together? What's the system architecture of that?

Ashish Mohindroo

>> So you kind of hit the nail on the head there, John. It's very complex today, right? So every database provider has their own set of APIs. What we're doing is we're simplifying that, so we're simplifying it into one set of APIs. So you just call in the NDB API, and you can actually now pull in data from any of the databases of your liking, right? So any application now has to be written to one API identity. That makes life a lot simpler. Now think about writing an agent. Instead of worrying about my rate set of APIs for different databases, all you got to focus on one API, and that API, not only in one environment. You can do that on premises or any public cloud of your choice. So it doesn't matter. So if you change your workflows from one side to another, you're still writing to this one single API for your workloads.

John Furrier

>> It's interesting, Olivier, the MCP, rise of model context protocol has been an organic, community-driven thing. Then you got A to A on the agentic. These are standard, or now I'd say defacto standards now, but the momentum it has for agents, so you got to start thinking about, "Okay, I want to access MongoDB system..." It's a system. I didn't want to call it a database. Sure, it's a database, but it's actually a software all around it, so it's kind of like a system. "I got Mongo over here. I got to go through an API and delegate authority to talk to another agent." So you have a lot of intelligence that's needed to move around this layer. This is a really big opportunity for the data holders, Mongo. Database has become that fourth pillar. How is this going to get faster, low latency, smarter?

Ashish Mohindroo

>> I think it's a great point. So in general, what you really want to do is you want to bring data closer to compute. That's the whole idea behind it. Now, partnering with MongoDB, making sure the platform that they're running on top of with NDB, that is the control plane along with their ops manager, we are really expediting that process. We're making sure that that competition layer is now performing at optimal level. What we also notice is when you run MongoDB with us or other databases on top of NDB, you see a significant performance gain, not only in just running your databases, but also in the terms of availability and scalability. So when we worked together to certify the platform, one of the biggest benefits was business continuity. So what does enterprise customers want? We know systems go down from time to time, but how quickly can you bring them up? Can you recover from that? The combination of the two platforms gives our customers that peace of mind that even if disasters happen, you can bring the system back up with minimal disruptions to their applications in any environment of their choice again.

John Furrier

>> Olivier, talk about the partnership from an ecosystem standpoint. Because when you look at platforms and systems, the software business has been, "Oh, yeah, software SaaS is going to get imploded by AI." Well, bad software always gets replaced. That's my position. But SaaS products will change to be AI product. You guys are doing that, have done it. What's it like to be a partner in the modern era of this ecosystem? What are some of the key things that you have to think about, that Nutanix has to ? Is it co-design? Is it go to market together? What are some of the playbook recipes around partnering? Because it wasn't your yesterday's partnership. Before, hey, partner with the cloud. Now they've got the marketplace. It's at scale. There's co-integration. We're seeing this discussion. What's your thoughts on that?

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> I mean, the partnerships landscape has completely changed. I mean, we've, I think, evolved from competing with other ISVs to realizing that we actually need two partners because the choices out there for customer is becoming overwhelming. AI is changing at rapid pace. It's very hard for executive, for CTOs to make decisions. And what we want is to help come with production-ready solutions instead of having the customer glue on their own everything and coming in silos. So we have to well ahead of time figure it out, what are the customer going to be couple of years from now, two, three years from now, what are they missing, listen to the customers, and leave the ego on the side to really partner with companies that really help fill a gap. Like it was NDB plus MongoDB solves an issue, that customer were coming to us, and we're explaining, right? And obviously, the go-to-market is very important. We moved away from competitive to trying to co-sell together. So you're going to need to make sure that you build a go-to-market. That doesn't mean swarming. I think it's more strategic. We have to make sure that we're going after the right customers, always thinking about the customer first, and building a joint value proposition and messaging that makes sense. And maybe it's more than just two partners. Maybe where we're going from there is trying to have this solution on the marketplace, partnering with the GSIs and others, right? But at least then our field, whether it's the CSM, whether it's the field reps, partner together to really identify, hey, what workloads, what customer does that make sense to help provide this solution and will make a differentiator?

John Furrier

>> I think you're right about that, and I think if you look at all the keynotes and the major players in the industry over the past, say, two years, the role of things like storage, database, GPUs, horizontal systems, they're primary. They're not throwaways. Now ecosystem casting the idea of, this is not just a partner, they're a solution of something, and that's different. I haven't seen that before. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's a benchmark... It's a high bar, by the way. Not everyone can be a super partner.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> No, I totally agree with you. I think to us the fundamental thing is choice. We want to offer that to our customers. So our customers are demanding that, right? So if you look in the market, what is one of the most popular databases? MongoDB. They want us to support that and work closer with MongoDB. We have joint customers which are dictating that. Customers have existing investments that they made in storage, compute, networking layers, and additional platform layers as well, and they want to support that. They want us to work with it versus having to rip and replace the entire environment. So we want to give them as much choice as possible, and that's why we do strategic partnerships, to make sure we're making that process really easy for our customers to consume, or the solution very easy for them to consume overall.

John Furrier

>> I mean, data is really either an opportunity or a challenge, so you've got data gravity no matter what.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Exactly. Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Do you leverage it with AI intelligently so it becomes not a problem, becomes a benefit?

Ashish Mohindroo

>> I mean, there's one thing about data is like if you feed a system bad data, you're going to get bad outcomes. You feed system good data, reliable data, you're going to have really good outcomes coming through, right?

John Furrier

>> Well, you know the old expression, AI is only as good as what it can see.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And if it's not being fed data... You don't feed the beast, as I say.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> And if you can't have the systems up and running that's feeding that data, then you have a bigger problem. And that's where the two of our companies come together to make sure you have a very reliable environment underneath that.

John Furrier

>> All right. Awesome.

Alison Kosik

>> All right, Ashish, Olivier, thanks so much for your insights. Great conversation.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Thank you so much, Alison.

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> Thank you very much. Thank you, Alison.

Ashish Mohindroo

>> Thanks, John.

Olivier Zieleniecki

>> Thank you, John.

Alison Kosik

>> Thanks. And more conversations to come on theCUBE. We'll be back right after this break.