Andrew Erlichson, the vice president of education and general manager of cloud at 10gen, is very enthusiastic about his job. He told us all about it in a chat with theCube co-hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly at last week’s MongoDB Days conference.

Erlichson views the event as a golden opportunity to engage partners and customers. He says that the majority of practitioners at the event have worked with relational systems before, but most are new to MongoDB. This statistic indicates that 10gen’s database is gaining a lot of traction in the developer community.

The rapid adoption of MongoDB is due in no small part to Erlichson’s efforts. The executive approached 10gen’s founders after Stanford, the university from which he graduated, “cracked the code” of online education. Management was hesitant at first, but changed their minds after developers started signing up en masse.

That was one year ago. According to Erlichson, 10gen has recorded over 70,000 registrations since.

What do online courses have to do with database adoption? The executive explains that his education initiative is making MongoDB more accessible for developers in the U.S. and abroad. A larger user base translates to more paying customers.

Erlichson credits the success of 10gen’s online courses to the fact that they take after university lectures. This does not mean that they are one and the same, however: in the traditional format speakers have to address the entire class in order to keep students engaged, but when giving online courses, lecturers have to “talk to the camera” in order to achieve the same effect.

The second topic that Erlichson addresses is 10gen’s cloud lineup, his other responsibility. The company offers a free monitoring service and a premium backup tool, both designed specifically for MongoDB. The latter offering allows this native integration to deliver continuous backup, a feature that reduces both data loss and human error.

Check out the video below for the full highlights from the interview.