Fraud detection, gaming and supply chain management are some key areas where they are witnessing a lot of traction.
Over the year, we saw graphs being used to optimize networks, provide personalization and ease manufacturing operations and in the coming year we wish to explore more of these and also discover opportunities with our cloud hyper-scalers
Rahul Tenglikar, Regional Director, India at Neo4j
As a company – how has Neo4j performed in 2022 in the Indian Customer Industry?
Neo4j has seen a very strong growth in India across verticals – especially in manufacturing, gaming and BFSI – by bringing on board some of the biggest names in the sectors. Additionally, we’ve managed to forge stronger ties with our OEM customers, who have further integrated Neo4j’s graph technology into their products.
Going into specifics, we have also demonstrated strong use cases like our latest offering of digital twins for manufacturing companies and fraud detection for gaming companies. We’ve also worked back with companies for their supply chain optimization using digital twins.
Over the course of 2022, we’ve also worked back with governments through the adoption and application of Neo4j’s graph technology. This can be a game changer for them since our graph technology allows for increased efficiency while also being easily scalable. Additionally, there has also been interest from other sectors including financial services, travel, retail, and healthcare, that have a strong desire to explore the adoption of graph technologies to solve complex problems plaguing their industries.
Customers seeking solutions to complex problems affecting their operations, innovations, and bottom line have driven our business’s growth not only in India but in the entire Asia Pacific region. We are the category creators in this space, and currently lead the entire graph platform category. By being the first to market, we have a significant advantage in terms of more mature technology as well as our increasingly evolving customer base.
What are the major technologies opportunities you have participated in while coming to solving challenges in the user market?
Discovering, capturing, and making sense of complex interdependencies is central to running a business in the digital age. Whether it’s optimizing a network or an application infrastructure, managing change, or providing solutions – these problems frequently involve a complex set of physical and human interdependencies that can be difficult to manage. An organization must harness the power to effectively manage all these changing factors. Graph databases, as opposed to relational databases, are designed to store interconnected data that is not purely hierarchical, making it easier than ever to understand networked data.
At Neo4j, we help customers in solving challenges like fraud detection, monitoring for IT operations, product recommendation, master data management, social media and social network graphs, identity, and access management, data privacy, supply chain management among many other things. We have seen increased awareness about our business and company and now organizations are curious to learn what more can be done with Neo4j and the potential that it can have. Over the year, we saw graphs being used to optimize networks, provide personalization and ease manufacturing operations and in the coming year we wish to explore more of these and also discover opportunities with our cloud hyper-scalers.
Graph techniques are also being utilized to drive digital transformation in the enterprise, improving data management and decision-making. Neo4j was the first and is the most comprehensive graph data platform in the graph market. We’re dedicated to bringing graph technology into the mainstream by connecting the community, customers, partners, and even competitors as they adopt graph best practices globally.
Which industries have adopted your technologies?
Our technology has been adopted by industries such as insurance, banking, aircraft manufacturers, retailers, automakers, telecom, healthcare, travel, financial services, startups, and education. By allowing businesses to make decisions based on relationships and connections, graph databases enable disruptive innovation. Neo4j is trusted for its performance, reliability, and scalability by a growing number of people all over the world who use it to address a wide range of problems.
Easy accessibility has been a key driver of our adoption. For instance, our community edition, Aura free, is a free version that small businesses and start-ups can use for small development projects, learning, experimenting, and prototyping. We also have Aura professional which can be used by mid-tier businesses looking to get started with Neo4j and explore its offerings. It is beneficial for medium-sized applications in advanced development or production environments. AuraDB professional is used for large-scale, mission-critical applications that require advanced security and 24×7 support.
There is also Neo4j Graph Data Science, which is a comprehensive graph analytics workspace built for data scientists with new and enhanced capabilities. Also, AuraDS, a fully managed cloud service, is available. We recently announced a new feature – Neo4j 5 – which extends native graphs’ performance lead over traditional databases. It makes scaling out and scaling up easier across any deployment, whether on-premise, in the cloud, a hybrid setup, or a multi-cloud model. These varied offerings make our offering not only lucrative, but also economical. This has therefore drawn interest from across industries, this seeing very quick adoption of Neo4j’s graph technology.
What are other milestones you have achieved last year? – customer meets, any hires, new offices, marquee customers etc
2022 has been a significant year for us in many aspects. We saw accelerated demand from across industries with organizations seeking to solve the most complex problems using advanced analytics. We launched Graph Data Science as a service in April, our comprehensive graph analytics workspace with new and enhanced capabilities built for data scientists, which is also available as a fully managed cloud service.
We hosted India’s first ever GraphSummit in Bangalore with over 450 attendees including technology leaders, key decision makers, technical professionals, CIOs, and graph data science experts. We also hosted multiple community events to touch base with our growing community in India. This is on the back of an increasing interest that they have expressed for our platform. In fact, users of our community edition increased multifold in 2022.
Recently, we also announced the general availability of Neo4j 5, the next-generation cloud-ready graph database. Neo4j 5 provides easier scale-out and scale-up across any deployment, whether on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid, or multi cloud. The result empowers organizations to create and deploy intelligent applications at large scale and discover greater value from their data.
We also announced the 2022 Neo4j Connected Data Fellowship in partnership with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The fellowship is inspired by how graph databases strengthen reporting and help journalists understand large datasets.
All in all, we have seen increasing engagement with our community, partners and customers and we shall continue to raise the bar for advanced analytics and the value that it can add to businesses.
What is your road map for 2023?
Neo4j has always been true to its open-source roots. We hold our community, of over a quarter million developers, at the core of all our plans and strategies. When we raised funds in 2021, our plan was to direct it towards global expansion with special focus on India. Consequently, India has become one of the largest communities for us. In fact, the Asia- Pacific region entirely has been a major growth area, with our business almost doubling up over time.
Going forward, we expect this momentum to continue. There is still a lot of potential for graphs that is yet to be unlocked. While graphs today are being used for multiple use cases across sectors, there are still many more yet to be explored. Developers are still discovering these gradually and realizing the value that graphs can add to their business. This curiosity and increasing interest towards graphs will help Neo4j scale faster. We also hope to continue on our hiring plans in line with this expected growth trajectory.
