Neo4j outlines 4 pillars to graph adoption
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
EITN talks to Neo4j’s VP in APAC, Nik Vora, about what the company does.
EITN: Please explain what Neo4j does. What is your flagship product?
Nik: Every single day, Neo4j helps millions of people fulfil their daily needs to keep them healthy, safe, fed, entertained, and educated. Our graph data platform also plays a pivotal role in travel, transport, and banking. So if you’ve ever scoured the web for flight tickets or shopped on Amazon, you would have touched a system powered by Neo4j.
Each and every application is powered by a database – relational or SQL databases are the most widely deployed. Relational databases and associated relational data platforms are great at collecting and processing data but they miss the relationships between the data points.
Neo4j delivers strategic outcomes by enabling organisations to create a Connected Data platform using the Neo4j Graph Data Platform, which includes Neo4j Graph Database, Neo4j Graph Data Science Library, Bloom Visualisation, and Knowledge Graphs. Our technology is used in myriad areas including fraud detection, anti-money laundering, real-time recommendation engines, and more, etc
Relational databases and associated relational data platforms are great at collecting and processing data but they miss the relationships between the data points.
Neo4j is the leader and creator of the Graph Data Platform Category. In addition to the enterprise business, Neo4j is the global leader in the Graph Developer Community.
EITN: What is your unique advantage versus others in the market?
Nik: As the creator of the Graph Data Platform category, we understand and innovate in this space more than anyone else. We have the pleasure of serving over 600+ enterprise customers globally, over 50,000 people on LinkedIn alone with Neo4j skills and background, many more thousands of developers as part of the community support, a diverse global partner ecosystem and teams in every timezone.
From a technology leadership perspective, Neo4j is the only platform that provides rich Graph Data Science capabilities integrated with core Graph Database along with visualisation and management tools.
EITN: Do you only hope to grow beyond the ASEAN region? Why? How?
Nik: ASEAN is a very important focus area for us. As a Swedish company, we have had tremendous enterprise adoption in the US and in Europe. We have a very strong developer adoption across APAC and have made significant inroads with APAC enterprise customers over the past five years. We have marquee customers in Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of ASEAN and we remain committed to governments, enterprises and developers globally. This includes AirAsia, Standard Chartered, and Starhub.
EITN: What is your observation about the take up of graph technologies?
Nik: Analysts across the board project that over 50% of all AI conversations include using Graph technologies and estimate the Graph market to grow rapidly in the coming years. We have been seeing great interest although graph technologies are still at their infancy to many.
Companies with large amounts of data need to make sense of what they have collected. Connected Data is the foundation of intelligence and knowledge that is etched deep in the mountain of data they have collected. Once we build connections and relationships between the data points, a whole new perspective opens up which leads to a whole new way to solve challenges as well as discover a whole new aspect of business which may not be obvious.
Analysts across the board project that over 50% of all AI conversations include using Graph technologies and estimate the Graph market to grow rapidly in the coming years.
Neo4j’s technology is also behind in unravelling the largest financial leaks in history exposed in ‘The Panama Papers‘, which has recouped more than US$1.2 billion of tax revenue across the world; and in uncovering how five global banks – JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon – moved more than US$2 trillion in illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks in the FinCEN files.
EITN: In what industries are you seeing the most take up for graph technologies?
Nik: Finance, Securities and Insurance, Government, Telecommunications, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Healthcare, Digital natives and any organisation who wants to make sense of the connections in their data.
EITN: What are your product roadmap and business plans for the next 3 years?
Nik: Our CEO Emil Eifrem predicts that by 2030, every machine learning model will use relationships via graphs as a signal – a strong predictor of behaviour.
Organisations that use better models will simply outperform the competition.
There will be four pillars to graph adoption:
- the move to the cloud: Neo4j is one of the first graph data platform companies to offer a database-as-a-service solution, thanks to a partnership with Google in 2019. Neo4j is pursuing agreements with similar cloud providers.
- emphasis on developers: we have never lost sight of our mission – as the leader in graph data platforms – to give back to the community. Being able to offer free versions of our software in an open source setting results in frictionless adoption
- graph data science: Neo4j’s graph data platforms make it easy for data scientists to perform at optimum levels. Imagine if Covid-19 contact tracers had to use a whiteboard to chart all the connections to a positive case. Our graph data platform is the answer to making sense of connected data.
- evolution of the graph model: as commercial adoption grows, more organisations will come to realise the benefits of graph data platforms and what it can deliver in terms of performance, scalability, intuitiveness, flexibility, and agility