SAN MATEO, Calif., Jan. 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Neo4j, the leader in graph technology, concluded a record year of customer and partner excellence, product growth and community engagement.

During the course of 2019, Neo4j continued to lead the graph database category it created through initiatives including partnerships with Google Cloud and Digitate, integrations with Confluent for Apache Kafka and championing its open source developer community.

Neo4j continued to grow in popularity throughout 2019 as the world's most widely-deployed graph database. A major driver of this growth is Neo4's ability to provide connected context that improves the accuracy of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. The company advocates for responsible AI systems and shared learnings from enterprise customer AI deployments as part of The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal AI Standards Engagement Plan.

As graph technology becomes central to data infrastructure, Neo4j customers have been innovating with the company's leading solutions and products, rating Neo4j highly on Gartner Peer insights. The company was featured in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems, received recognition in Gartner's Critical Capabilities for Operational Database Management Systems report and was included in The Forrester Wave™Big Data NoSQL, Q1 2019.

Staying true to its mission to help the world make sense of data, Neo4j welcomed new customers in key verticals such as financial services and retail, and emerging areas such as manufacturing and life sciences. Ensuring broad access to Neo4j has been of utmost importance to the company and this year was no exception. In March, the company expanded its Startup Program to help early-stage companies harness the power of Neo4j, and in October, launched its Educator Program that allows for both new and experienced graph educators to provide hands-on use of Neo4j to students and nonprofits across the globe.

Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j, reflected back on 2019.

"As the world becomes more connected through technology and as global business operations integrate, data not only informs our decisions but leads us on paths of discovery," Eifrem said. "We've seen graph databases deployed across a variety of industries and use cases from fighting financial crimes and powering real-time recommendation engines, to tackling the opioid crisis and furthering cancer and diabetes research. We are only scratching the surface of what we can do with graph technology. Neo4j is poised for strong, continued growth and for propelling our unrivaled capabilities further in 2020."

Neo4j plans to extend its lead and expand the boundaries of graph technology, continuing to build the largest graph technology ecosystem and stewarding its vibrant community of developers, data scientists and graph practitioners.

Neo4j 2019 highlights and milestones include:

Technology Leadership

• Neo4j Aura™- In November, the company launched Neo4j Aura, the first fully managed native graph database as a service. Aura makes Neo4j accessible for small and mid-sized businesses via the cloud. Read more about how Aura advances Neo4j's mission and product offerings in the press release.
• Machine Learning and AI - Neo4j customers have been using the company's graph technology as a basis for learning applications. In May of 2019, Neo4j shared the best practices amassed from graph-based AI and machine learning deployments with the U.S. Government, contributing to the Federal AI Standards Engagement Plan.

Corporate Momentum

• Graph Query Language - In an effort championed by Neo4j, the international committees that developed the SQL standard voted in September 2019 to make Graph Query Language (GQL) the first ISO/IEC international standard database languages project since SQL. This move toward an international standard for graph database queries is indicative of the rapid adoption of graph technology and is great news for graph users and buyers.
• Fast Company Honors Graphs4Good - In April, Neo4j's Graphs4Good program received an honorable mention in Fast Company's 2019 World Changing Ideas. The award illustrates Neo4j's graph-powered projects that affect positive social change and take on some of the world's toughest challenges.
• Startup Program Expansion - The Neo4j Startup Program supports growing businesses as they build applications on Neo4j. Notable program alumni include Medium, Shutl (Acquired by eBay), SOUQ (acquired by Amazon), OneFineStay (acquired by AccorHotels) and Lending Club. In 2019 more than 1,000 startups enrolled in the program bringing the total number of participants to more than 2,500.
• Educator Program Launch - In October, the company launched its Educator Program allowing for both new and experienced graph educators to provide hands-on use of Neo4j to their students in accredited, non-profit institutions, as well as K-12, college and university programs across the globe. In just three months more than 250 educators have taken advantage of the program.
• Applying Graphs in Data Science - This year, O'Reilly Media published Graph Algorithms: Practical Examples in Apache Spark & Neo4j, co-authored by Neo4j's graph technology experts Mark Needham and Amy E. Hodler. The book delivers helpful examples for application developers and illustrates the value delivered from graph algorithms. It has been downloaded more than 45,000 times.

Graph Ecosystem

• Google Cloud - In April, Neo4j and Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership to offer Neo4j as a seamless experience integrated with the GCP console, billing and support services. Through this partnership, Google Cloud is making Neo4j accessible for developers and businesses in a simple, friction-free way. Read more on this partnership from CEO Emil Eifrem's blog.
• Digitate - Digitate's flagship product ignio™ uses Neo4j to map context and accuracy for its Blueprint feature, and in its first quarter of availability, ignio acquired more than a dozen enterprise customers.
• Confluent for Apache Kafka - In October, Neo4j announced a new integration with Apache Kafka® and Confluent® Platform to connect Kafka event streams. Neo4j, Kafka and Confluent users and customers now have a seamless, supported integration thanks to the new connector. Neo4j Streams is easily applied to a variety of real-time use cases including financial fraud analysis, knowledge graphs and customer 360.
• Thales Integration - A comprehensive integration between Neo4j Enterprise Edition and Thales Vormetric Transparent Encryption launched in July 2019 to deliver data-at-rest encryption. The integration provides industrial-strength encryption-at-rest for the Neo4j graph database and helps Neo4j users meet more stringent security and compliance requirements, while maintaining hardware and software performance.

Customer Excellence

• Lyft Amundsen - Spun out ofLyft by software engineers Tao Feng and Mark Grover, Amundsen is a tool using Neo4j for finding and discovering data sets within the company. In September, Mark Grover of Lyft sat down with Neo4j for a webinar, accompanied by comprehensive media coverage in ZDNet.
• Strata Data Award - In March, the Strata Data Awards honored the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) and Neo4j as a top-three finalist for its 2019 awards. The DZD's graph database implementation combines research data sources from genetics, epigenetics and metabolic pathways with data from clinical studies to find new ways to fight diabetes.
• Unmatched Customer Success - Neo4j added more than 100 new customers during 2019. Organizations like UBS, Caterpillar, Comcast, Dun & Bradstreet, Vanguard and others shared their success at conferences, on video and in case studies. Find out more about Neo4j's customers here.
• Graphie Awards - The Graphie Awards celebrate the world's most innovative graph technology applications, recognizing success in connected data across multiple categories. The winners of the 2019 Neo4j Graphie Awards included Dun & Bradstreet, EY, Lockheed Martin Space, Omnia AI and Volvo Cars.

Community Engagement

• World's Largest Graph Practitioner Conference - This year marked the first NODES (Neo4j Online Developer Expo and Summit) online event that brought together more than 1,600 developers and graph enthusiasts. The conference featured 53 talks on topics ranging from AI and machine learning to social media monitoring with graph technology.
• GraphTour - In 2019, Neo4j GraphTour touched down in major cities across the globe from Tel Aviv to New York, bringing together thousands attendees and graph technology experts from customers including Volvo, Lyft and ING for a day of learning, exploration and advice.
• Community Momentum - Neo4j delivers graph technology built by developers for developers. This practitioner-centric approach has resulted in a highly engaged developer community that is now more than 200,000 strong. In 2019, more than 4,500 new developers attained certification or training, and more than 40,000 professionals now list Neo4j as a skill on their LinkedIn profile.

About Neo4j
Neo4j is the leading graph database technology that drives innovation and competitive advantage at Airbus, Comcast, eBay, NASA, UBS, Walmart and more. Thousands of community deployments and more than 400 customers harness connected data with Neo4j to reveal how people, processes, locations and systems are interrelated. Using this relationships-first approach, applications built using Neo4j tackle connected data challenges including artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations and master data. Find out more at neo4j.com.

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