NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwire) -- 01/29/13 -- 10gen, the MongoDB company, and its board of directors today announced that Max Schireson has been promoted from President to Chief Executive Officer. Co-founder and former CEO Dwight Merriman will continue to serve as Chairman in a full-time capacity.

The transition to CEO is a natural progression for Schireson, who joined 10gen in February 2011 and has led all company functions since then with exceptional results. During this time period, 10gen has increased its global community, headcount and customer base dramatically, with significant progress in the enterprise market serving a large number of Fortune 500 companies.

"Max has been an ideal partner for growing the company over the past two years and has been instrumental in helping us become the leading NoSQL database and real challenger to the relational model," said Merriman. "I look forward to my new role as we further execute on our long-term vision of providing the best database for how applications are written, scaled and managed today."

Prior to 10gen, Schireson spent seven years at XML database company MarkLogic, where he served as Chief Operating Officer. Before MarkLogic, Schireson spent nine years at relational database company Oracle, where he served as Chief Applications Architect and Vice President, eCommerce and Self-Service Applications. He was also National Co-Chair of Technology for Obama.

"It has been a privilege to work with Dwight and the rest of the 10gen team as the database market experiences real change for the first time in decades," said Schireson. "As CEO, I will be focused on enabling our fast-growing community, customer base and partner ecosystem to improve developer productivity, user experience, operational efficiency and cost of ownership."

In 2007, Dwight Merriman initiated the MongoDB project with 10gen CTO Eliot Horowitz to address challenges they found in ease-of-use, flexibility, performance and scalability with existing database technologies during their work at DoubleClick, where Dwight was a co-founder and served as CTO for 10 years. DoubleClick was sold to Google for $3.1 billion.

MongoDB is one of the most popular new technologies with more than 3.8 million downloads, 47,000 Online Education registrations, 15,000 MongoDB User Group (MUG) members, 14,000 MongoDB Monitoring Service users and 10,000 attendees at MongoDB global events in 2012.

10gen has more than 500 commercial customers including many of the world's leading brands, such as Cisco, Craigslist, Disney, EA, eBay, Ericsson, Forbes, Foursquare, Intuit, LexisNexis, MTV, Salesforce.com, Shutterfly and Telefonica. 10gen partners include Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware. Common use cases include operational and analytical big data, content management and delivery, mobile and social infrastructure, user data management and data hub.

MongoDB is the open-source, document database popular among developers and IT professionals due to its agile and scalable approach. MongoDB provides a JSON data model with dynamic schemas, extensive driver support, auto-sharding, built-in replication and high availability, full and flexible index support, rich queries, aggregation, in-place updates and GridFS for large file storage.

10gen has raised more than $81 million in funding from investors Flybridge Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel, Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures.

About 10gen
10gen is the company behind MongoDB, the leading NoSQL database. MongoDB is the open-source, document-oriented database that is quickly reshaping the overall database and big data market due to the popularity of its agile and scalable approach among developers and IT professionals for new applications in the cloud and beyond. For more information, visit www.10gen.com.