MongoLab has long been the de facto service for deploying and managing MongoDB databases, but now that the company has cornered this market, it’s looking to expand into new areas. Before launching any new products, though, the company decided to change its name from MongoLab to mLab.
MongoLab/mLab CEO and co-founder Will Shulman tells me that he always saw MongoLab as the first part of a two-step plan.
The original idea was to build a service that could take advantage of both the NoSQL movement and its focus on the JSON service. That clearly worked, because MongoLab/mLab just wrapped up its fourth profitable quarter, according to Shulman, and currently manages about 250,000 database deployments on AWS, Azure and Google (with the vast majority opting for AWS, by the way).
“More people are paying us for MongoDB hosting than any other provider,” Shulman said. “Even more than are paying MongoDB itself.”
The vast majority of these services now use mLab as the backend for their JSON-based applications. “Back in the day, everything was server-side,” Shulman said. “Now we are in a poly-client world and server-side development is mostly about APIs and data services.”
Currently, about 70 percent of mLab users take Mongo and then build out by hand the data services they need.
While Shulman didn’t quite want to go into the details of his company’s plans, it’s clear that mLab plans to build a service that will make it easier for developers to build APIs on top of their databases.