Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Enterprises Unlock Business Value in their Data Relationships

2014 was the “Year of the Enterprise” at Neo Technology, which saw huge momentum in the number and size of new customers, increasingly large deployments, and ever-expanding global reach.

2015 is shaping up to be the “Year of the Use Case,” as we find ongoing delight in the different ways our customers unlock value in their data relationships by using the graph database.

Harvard Business Review states that sustainable business advantage can be gained when network effects of business graphs kick in. And we’re finding exactly that. Enterprise customers such as Walmart, eBay and many others have added the graph database to their technology stack because they realize they can gain sustainable competitive advantage in the following two ways:

1. Harvest new market opportunities by creating products and services that leverage data relationships
2. Reimagine existing applications to innovate with data relationships, and in the process improve efficiency and performance, lower costs, and increase the value of your existing data

White Paper

Where does sustainable competitive advantage come from? It’s not from data volume or velocities, but from the knowledge of relationships in your data.
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Analysts Predict Graph Databases Will Reach Some 25 percent of Enterprises by 2017

Forrester Research analysts recently reported that graph databases—the fastest-growing category in database management systems—will reach more than 25 percent of enterprises by 2017.

Additionally, Gartner Inc. named Neo Technology a Cool Vendor in DBMS, 2014, listed Neo4j among the ‘Who’s Who in NoSQL DBMSs’, and included Neo4j in the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (DBMS).

“Graph analysis is possibly the single most effective competitive differentiator for organizations pursuing data-driven operations and decisions after the design of data capture”

— Gartner

Data Relationships Provide Value to Varied Use Cases

Our customers, which include global firms in industries such as Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Telecommunications, and Government, leverage data relationships to improve efforts in the following use cases:

• Master Data Management
• IT Configuration Management
• Graph-based search
• Fraud Detection
• Recommendations
• Social capabilities

Additionally, the momentum in the burgeoning Internet of Things (more aptly described as the Internet of (Connected) Things) space proves increasingly staggering. In fact, IoT use cases reveal that only graph databases handle effectively the data relationships that arise when connected devices communicate with each other and incorporate external data, such as weather statistics, geo-spatial information, and maintenance records.

A Database Built Like A Whiteboard Sketch

Here’s how it works: the graph database stores and processes any kind of data by bringing relationships to the fore. A “graph” can be thought of like a whiteboard sketch: when you draw on a whiteboard with circles and lines, sketching out data, what you are drawing is a graph. Graph databases store and process data within the structure you’ve drawn, providing significant performance and ease-of-use advantages, plus unparalleled ease in evolving the data model. No other type of database does this. Because they are designed to do so, graph databases are becoming an essential tool in discovering, capturing, and making sense of intricate relationships and interdependencies. This not only provides significant IT efficiencies, but enables a next generation of functionality for businesses.

Customers Leapfrog Competition with Neo4j

With this new capability in hand, Zephyr Health Inc. built a cloud-based analytics platform that, for example, provides pharmaceutical companies the right doctors for clinical trials by leveraging data relationships among public and private information, such as specialty, geography and clinical trial history.

“Neo4j has enabled us to expand beyond our initial limited use cases to address a much broader set of problems,” said Sven Junkergard, Chief Technology Officer, Zephyr Health Inc. (Source: TechValidate)

Many other examples of new and revamped applications are in the making, supported by the value of data relationships that Neo4j offers. Throughout 2015, we will highlight the most interesting use cases to help you determine when your projects need a database that brings data relationships to the fore.

To learn more about Sustainable Competitive Advantage, read our new white paper.

Want to learn more about graph databases? Click below to get your free copy of O’Reilly’s Graph Databases ebook and discover how to use graph technologies for your application today.

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