This year, we were invited by Neo4j, one of our key development partners, to attend GraphConnect, their annual global gathering. This was the first year Neo4J held GraphConnect in New York, so NexJ was especially grateful to not only participate in this inaugural event, but to be one of the partner exhibitors as well. The gathering extended the reach of Neo4j, offering something for everyone, including developers, data scientists, big data architects, and business analysts looking to reveal new connections in their analysis.
For those of you that have never attended GraphConnect, well, you missed out on a truly awesome opportunity to learn, interact, and network with some of the finest in the industry. NexJ was delighted to present our latest demonstration that graphically visualizes commercial relationships as the user desires. This powerful feature allows users to group clients as they require to define, pursue, or close opportunities. Applying end user hierarchies to complex aggregation and rollup operations is where NexJ Customer Data Analytics and Intelligence (CDAi), powered by Neo4j, truly shines!
Many new features were announced by Neo4J that we are keen to integrate into NexJ CDAi. Two are of particular interest: Graph Analytics and Scalability Improvements. Neo4j Graph Analytics allows for a more free-format data introspection, revealing otherwise unknown or undetected relationships. Algorithms to detect clustering or partitioning, pathfinding for shortest path, and centrality to evaluate node importance mean that NexJ CDAi can detect even more complex relationships than before, without complex programming or data provisioning activities.
Functionality improves as does scalability, often a concern shared both by business and technical resources. Usually when new features are added, performance suffers, but this is not the case with Neo4J 3.3. Performance gains for import and bulk write activities are both notable, but improvements in query, index, and caching are also quite large. An overall gain of 55% is claimed comparing 3.3 to 3.2 and an eye-popping 654% faster than 2.2. As more and more of our customer base establishes enterprise grade products, the need for continuous gains in scalability becomes critical; so seeing these results from Neo4j is quite satisfying.
GRAPHCONNECT
GraphConnect is a global gathering of the graph technology community. Drawing experts and enthusiasts alike, the conference focuses on Neo4j, the world's leading graph database and the number oneplatform for connected data.
GraphConnect New York was this year’s premier graph technology conference in the United States.
Speakers from around the world presented their impact stories on how Neo4j made a difference in terms of innovation, technology and the bottom line — from the scale of small startups all the way up to global enterprises. These impact stories detailed everything from reduced costs, increased revenue, improved performance, expanded scale, and game-changing innovations.
Watch the Keynote
Yours truly was staffing the NexJ booth demonstrating our latest NexJ CDAi product. The Neo4J GraphConnect event was well attended this year with over 1,300 registered participants. I had the pleasure of connecting with Financial Services, Health Care, Manufacturing, and Retail industry representatives and was surprised at the degree of commonality that they expressed in describing their data and analytics challenges. Provisioning data for analytics projects, especially to the level of a feature catalog store, is in an enormous challenge, and this is what NexJ CDAi is designed to address. Our demo highlighted the importance of a centralized attribute store, removing the need for manual or self-selecting data preparation tools. The built-in computed values remove many of the manual errors attributed to coding data transformation for processing as well. And the graph visualization illustrated interactively not only the benefits gained from relationship insights, but from the end user experience as well. Powerful yet flexible. Many thanks to everyone who dropped by the booth and the new connections that we made; for those of you yet to connect, please ping me on LinkedIn or Twitter!
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