Congratulations to the 2021 Innovation Award Winners!

The MongoDB Innovation Awards honor projects and people who dream big. They celebrate the groundbreaking use of data to build compelling applications and the creativity of professionals expanding the limits of technology with MongoDB. This year the company received entries across dozens of industries, ranging from disruptive, emerging start-ups to industry-leading global enterprises.

We are thrilled to announce the 12 winners who are being honored this year during MongoDB.live.

William Zola Award: Michael Höller - An independent software architect, system integrator, and backend developer, Michael is the first MongoDB Champion to earn the rare Evergreen forum badge for his unwavering support of the MongoDB Community. Dual-certified as both a MongoDB Developer and DBA, Michael generously shares his expertise with community members of all levels in the MongoDB forums. He also organizes the DACH Virtual Community User Group, and even finds time to #BuildTogether with MongoDB employees on presentations and in chats during online streams. Michael is one of the first-timers, consulting on MongoDB projects since 2014.

Customer-first Award: Luma Health - As COVID-19 took the world by storm, Luma Health jumped into action to partner with health systems and providers to leverage their platform to run some of the largest mass vaccination sites and help clinics scale from hundreds to thousands of appointments, ultimately leading to nearly 2 million vaccination appointments.

Data for Good Award: Journey Foods - This company solves food science and supply chain inefficiencies with software in order to help companies feed 8 billion people better. To date, Journey Foods has established a database of over 11 billion ingredient insights.

From Batch to Real Time Award: CSX - A leading provider of transportation and supply chain solutions, CSX is redefining freight rail. Embracing event-driven architecture, the company has improved engagement with safety information produced by Positive Train Control (PTC) systems by putting PTC data on MongoDB. Leveraging MongoDB, CSX receives the data real-time – enabling smarter and faster decision making and better ensuring safety regulations are met for the company’s around-the-clock operations.

Front Line Heroes Award: Ahmad Awais for The “CORONA CLI” Project - Awais built a CLI command-line tool to track COVID-19 in March 2020. As COVID-19 spread, the project termed “corona-cli” became the number one trending repository on GitHub. To date, this project has served several billions of API requests making COVID stats accessible throughout the world with 53 different releases and extensive functionality built/contributed by 15+ developers.

Going Global Award: Riot Games - Founded in 2009 to change the ways games were developed, Riot has created the most-played PC game in the world and expanded to 20+ offices worldwide in only 12 years. A game platform developer and his team migrated their data to MongoDB Atlas to manage B2B billing and player IP validation data for all of their games globally.

Industry Transformation Award: American Airlines - As a network air carrier, American’s purpose is to care for people on life’s journey. During COVID-19, American Airlines passionately pursued efficiencies, particularly those enabled by technology. American Airlines created an operational data layer on MongoDB in the cloud for critical flight information, which enabled other services to move to the cloud and consume data from the modern cloud-based data fabric.

Jackpot Award: Cisco Systems - Cisco is the worldwide leader in technology that powers the Internet. This global brand completed the Cloud native migration of its highly critical Commerce Quoting platform, which serves more than 225K users and 4M application hits daily worldwide. The result has been no application downtime for releases, improved performance, lower TCO, and significantly better developer productivity.

Savvy Start-Up Award: Blerp - The audio expression platform that makes it easy to enhance any moment with sound clips. Millions of Blerps are being shared on their two largest integrations on Twitch and Discord.

Unbound Award: Yodel - Yodel is an independently owned parcel carrier, delivering around 190 million parcels each year for many of the UK’s leading retailers and businesses. An early adopter of Realm Sync following its GA release in February 2021, Yodel uses MongoDB to sync parcel-scanning data from employee devices up to Atlas - and in the opposite direction, pushing down large data volumes to devices via the MongoDB Kafka Connector. By streamlining the process of scanning parcels and reducing the time drivers need to spend in service centers, Yodel expects to achieve increased productivity and cost savings.

Certified Professional of the Year Award: Sydney Herrera - After becoming certified and while assisting a large governmental organization in a mainframe modernization effort - which involved transforming multiple massive, disparate mainframe datastores into a cohesive and application-focused MongoDB data warehouse, Sydney was faced with the challenge of assisting developers with building efficient applications. He created a tool called proactive query analyzer (PQA) that was rolled out into the organization. PQA is an automated tool that analyzes queries sent to MongoDB and provides feedback and suggestions before queries are implemented to aid developer teams.

For the People Award & Innovator of the Year Award: The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is the UK’s biggest public service department responsible for distributing over £190 billion annually in welfare, pensions and child maintenance to over 20 million citizens. With an unprecedented spike in demand due to the COVID-19 crisis, the Universal Credit platform was able to scale seamlessly, underpinned by MongoDB databases, to meet the tenfold spikes in claims from people who needed DWP’s support.

The information contained in the above descriptions was provided by the relevant award winners or obtained from publicly available information.