Sustainable_Competitive_Advantage_with_neo4j

The World’s Leading Graph Database
neo4j.com
White Paper
Sustainable Competitive
Advantage: Creating
Business Value through
Data Relationships
Kamille Nixon
FEBRUARY 2015

neo4j.com1
White Paper
The World’s Leading Graph Database
What’s Inside, At-A-Glance
Achieve Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Harvest new market opportunities
by creating products and services
that leverage data relationships
Reimagine existing applications to
innovate with data relationships
First to market, up and running in days,
not weeks or months
Reduced churn, increasing
engagement and uncovering fraud
Kept the business running when data
growth threatened to stop it
Drastically reduced project complexity
and risk
Achieved new company vision centered
around Business Graph
Increased revenue and delighted
customers by improving user
experience
Leapfrogged the competition with a
360 degree view of the customer
Brought new offering to market to
compete with Amazon Prime & Fresh,
and Google Express
1
White Paper
Sustainable Competitive
Advantage: Creating Business
Value through Data Relationships
Kamille Nixon
FEBRUARY 2015
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What’s Inside,
At-A-Glance 1
Introduction 2
Compete by Creating New
Products and Services 4
Compete by Reimagining
Existing Products and
Services 8
Conclusion 12

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Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Creating Business Value through Data Relationships
Introduction
Where does sustainable competitive advantage come from? It’s not from data
volume or velocities, but from the knowledge of relationships in your data.
Even three years ago, you may not have given DBMS choice much thought, figuring you
could create the right applications if you had a crack team of database professionals
and developers. Today, however, while you still need great people, changes in
application, market, and user requirements also necessitate that you unlock business
value from data relationships.
Traditional databases were conceived to digitize paper forms and automate well-
structured business processes, and still have their uses. That said, RDBMSs cannot
model or store data and its relationships without complexity, and performance
degrades with the number and levels of data relationships and data size. What’s
more, adding new types of data and data relationships requires schema redesign
that increases time to market. For these reasons, RDBMSs are inappropriate when
data relationships are valuable in real time.
NoSQL databases are also inappropriate when data relationships are valuable in real
time; NoSQL databases have no data structures to model or store relationships, nor
query constructs to support data relationships.
When you choose a relationship-based (or “graph”) database, you naturally store,
manage, analyze, and use your data within the context of connections, like the circles
and lines drawn on whiteboards. Companies that use a graph database in conjunction
with (or in place of) relational and NoSQL database management systems, enjoy
sustainable competitive advantage.
Analysts Predict Graph Databases Will Reach
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 a quarter
of enterprises by 2017.2
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).3
“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 Research1
1. Gartner, ‘IT Market Clock for Database Management Systems, 2014,’ by Donald Feinberg and Nick Heudecker, September 22, 2014.
2. TechRadar™: Enterprise DBMS, Q1 2014. Forrester Research. February 13, 2014.
3. Gartner, ‘IT Market Clock for Database Management Systems, 2014,’ by Donald Feinberg and Nick Heudecker, September 22, 2014.

neo4j.com3
You can achieve sustainable competitive advantage in the following two ways:
1. Harvesting new market opportunities by creating products and services that
leverage data relationships
2. Reimagining existing applications to innovate with data relationships, and in the
process boost efficiency and performance, lower costs, and increase the value
of your existing data
The only enterprise-grade graph database on the market is Neo4j; Neo4j customers
consistently validate their ability to deliver faster performance, create new products
and services, and better adapt to changing business needs, as indicated in the chart
below.
“Neo4j has enabled
us to expand beyond
our initial limited use
cases to address a
much broader set of
problems.”4
Sven Junkergard
Chief Technology Officer
Zephyr Health Inc
Figure 1 - Results of Customer Survey
4. TechValidate, TVID: 179-D9D-483, January 7, 2015
5. http://neo4j.com/users/zephyr-health/

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Zephyr Health5
, one of the survey respondents reflected in the above chart, experienced both : “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.
Zephyr runs a cloud-based big data analytics platform that, for example, helps pharmaceutical companies gain new
insights into clinical trials, managed care, and sales and marketing.
Data Relationships Provide Value for Many Use Cases
Global firms in healthcare, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, and government, leverage data relationships
in their existing data to improve efforts in the following use cases:
• Master Data Management
• Network and IT Operations
• Graph-Based Search
• Identity and Access Management
• Fraud Detection
• Recommendations
• Social Capability
Additionally, the momentum in the burgeoning Internet of Things — which is perhaps more aptly called the Internet of
(Connected) Things6
— space proves increasingly staggering. In fact, IoT use cases reveal that graph databases are best
suited for handling 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.
This paper explores how forward-thinking companies are adopting graph databases to extract maximum value from data
relationships, and highlights six companies that have used Neo4j to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
Compete by Creating New Products and Services
Your business must adapt quickly to changing market conditions and to tightening customer expectations. You may
have experienced a time when you simply couldn’t undertake certain projects that would benefit your business, because
doing so was prohibitively complicated or even impossible. It’s increasingly common for new products and services to be
grounded in related data, in which case the inability of relational and NoSQL technologies to handle data relationships well
becomes an obstacle.
Understanding data relationships is also key to understanding dependencies, uncovering cascading impacts, and
predicting behavior. Such insight allows businesses to execute opportunities for new services and products. To identify
these opportunities, businesses need tools that show complex connections quickly and easily.
Because of their design, graph databases have become an essential tool for discovering, capturing, and making sense
of complex interdependencies and relationships, both for running an IT organization and building next-generation
functionality for businesses. They easily model and navigate networks of data, with extremely high performance.
6. http://dataconomy.com/how-the-internet-of-things-can-be-best-explored-using-graph-databases/

neo4j.com5
The following image illustrates how performance holds steady in Neo4j, even as data size increases and becomes
increasingly connected. Note how the opposite is true for relational and other database management systems.
First to market, ‘up and running in days, not weeks or months’
Gamesys, the largest cash and social gaming operator in UK and Europe, created the world’s first cash gaming application
on Facebook. With games such as Jackpotjoy, Instant Slots, and Here Be Monsters, the company features online bingo,
slots, and casino games. The site handles about 5 Billion wagers (financial transactions) per year — more than the number
of stock trades that the London Stock Exchange completes per year) — and about 250,000 unique cash players per
month. That’s up to 70,000 active players on any given day.
They built a new social network around online bingo with Neo4j, wherein people chat inside the game. In the highly
competitive online gaming market, acquiring new players is expensive, and players acquired by referral are cheaper to
acquire and of higher value. So, Gamesys wanted to incentivize existing members to refer their friends, and to derive
business value from the project they needed to capture the social relationships between players in a new and reliable way.
Enter Neo4j.
Figure 2 - Real-time Query Performance

neo4j.com6
Reducing churn, increasing engagement, uncovering fraud
The chat in online bingo makes the experience “sticky” for gaming participants, helping
Gamesys to reduce churn and maximize time on site, according to Toby O’Rourke,
Head of Data Platform at Gamesys, who presented his team’s graph adoption at
GraphConnect London 2013.7
The Gamesys team realized that a graph database was essential for robust social
capability because all of their data was already connected in relationships. They
chose Neo4j as the leader in the space, and they found it easy to develop.
“You draw this data model up on the board, and you’ve got a player here, and he
refers him, and there’s another one there, and there,” O’Rourke explained. “So how
are you going to code that? Well, you code it like you just drew it. We had our core
stuff up and running in days, not weeks or maybe months.”
“There was great value for us in using a graph data store,” he said. Eighteen months
into the project, Neo4j is proving “really stable” and the mission-critical application
has experienced no unplanned downtime. Added bonus: The data relationship
information even provides fraud detection and prevention because possible referral
abuse is discovered.
Continuing to innovate, understanding dependencies
With the success of their first Neo4j project, the team realized they had experienced
“the graph infection.” They continued to innovate with their “Here Be Monsters”
game on Facebook. This game features a complex economy with thousands of items,
monsters, locations, and traps, and it is very difficult to understand the effect of
changing, for example, the scarcity of any given item. The graph gives the team a way
to model and calculate the value of things.
In a traditional business model, the game team would input changes and then do
loads of play testing to measure effects. The social team took everything in the game
(monsters, quests, resources, spells, traps, and potions) and those became the nodes
in Neo4j. The links between them became the relationships. The team could weigh
inputs and produce accurate predictive reports to reduce the amount of play testing.
With the measurable business value emerging from these two projects, the team of
Gamesys engineers is looking for other types of problems they can solve with graphs.
“That’s a really great place to be in,” O’Rourke explained. “It’s been very interesting to
see how something we brought in for a very specific problem has slowly mushroomed
and ballooned and become a cool technology in the company and something that
people want to work on.”
“It’s been very
interesting to see how
something we brought
in for a very specific
problem has slowly
mushroomed and
ballooned and become
a cool technology
in the company and
something that people
want to work on.”
Toby O’Rourke
Head of Data Platform
Gamesys
7. http://neo4j.com/users/gamesys/

neo4j.com7
Achieved new company vision centered
around Business Graph
Another successful company in a different industry also “sped to market” with a game-
changing product. CrunchBase is a database of startup companies, venture firms,
and venture fundings. Over several years, the database has captured the people,
products, patents, companies, and investors that exist (mostly) in the technology
vertical. It has grown organically over time as “a public good” to which people voluntarily
contributed. It lived more or less happily in MySQL for a time, said Crunchbase Head
of Product Kurt Freytag, during GraphConnect San Francisco 2014.8
The CrunchBase team realized, though, that it needed to leverage relationships
between the data they’d been storing, and with that realization came a new vision: to
build the world’s most powerful startup community, adding the component of time
to look at the connections with the lens of history, getting at the lifecycle of business
within markets and geographies, including acquisitions, IPOs, job changes, product
launches, and even successes and failures. The team rebuilt the entire CrunchBase
on Neo4j, and then also added a new events calendar in three weeks.
“To iterate that quickly and produce something as robust as a global events calendar
is a mammoth step up for us. In CrunchBase 1, that probably would have taken us
two months,” explained Freytag.
Adapting to changes with ease
The value doesn’t stop at time-to-market.
“As our requirements change and we think about other things that need to exist in
our data model because of either evolving product requirements or other ways we
want to enhance the user experience, doing this in an older manner in a relational
database would require some histrionics that are horrible,” Freytag said.
“We can do it in code
and reflect it almost
instantaneously in
the graph. Doing
the same thing in a
relational database
or even in a NoSQL
database would cost
us a heck of a lot
more time… Neo4j
lends itself to the
kinds of questions
that businesses want
to ask, but don’t yet
know that we want to
ask. Graph databases
are terribly, terribly
valuable for that.”
Kurt Freytag
Head of Product
CrunchBase
8. http://graphconnect.com/gc2014-sf/

neo4j.com8
Leapfrogged the competition
with a 360-degree view of the customer
Pitney Bowes, an established leader in direct marketing, is also a major player in
digital marketing communications and is helping clients provide an omni-channel
experience by delivering contextually relevant information. Pitney Bowes, a name
synonymous with mailing systems worldwide, successfully diversified to sell a variety
of digital tools and services its clients need. As a result, digital revenues are the fastest
growing part of the business, up 23 percent in 2013 and comprising 19 percent of
the business.
They leapfrogged their competition by building a leading-edge Master Data
Management (MDM) system with Neo4j. Pitney Bowes deals with different customers
who have portfolios of applications that incorporate newer, less predictable data
sources such as mobile, social networks, customer experience measurements, and
governance requirements. Pitney Bowes also manages multiple channels over which
customers and companies communicate. With this complexity, the team realized that
only a graph database could naturally store and process complex data relationships.
They selected Neo4j over other graph databases because it was the most established
and mature product, it had demonstrated scale at major clients, and the learning
curve was flat enough that the team got up and running quickly. Soon after the new
MDM system was announced, a 3rd-party equity research firm affirmed Pitney Bowes
as a “Buy.”
Compete by Reimagining Existing
Products and Services
As evidenced in the examples above, savvy innovation resulting in new applications is
almost always integral to beating your competition. But it’s also important to reimagine
existing mission-critical applications based on the value in data relationships.
Processes are getting more related and it’s possible to learn more about customers
through various channels, once again providing the opportunity to relate things and
derive more value. Existing applications were not written to take advantage of these
things. This makes it necessary to reimagine them, as in the following examples:
Fraud Detection with access to social data; Supply Chain with access to real-time
route information; and MDM with access to the different channels that customers
use to communicate.
“Neo4j gives a
competitive edge to
this Zacks Rank #2
(Buy) company as its
graph-based model
provides fast and
reliable information
to the businesses.
Further, ease of
comprehension of
the information is an
additional perk for
customers.”9
Zacks Investment Research
9. http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/157741/pitney-bowes-selects-neo4j-to-develop-graphbased-mdm

neo4j.com9
Kept the business running when data growth threatened to stop it
Telenor Norway, the largest supplier of that country’s telecommunications and data services, had such a problem with
provisioning resulting from growing customer bases and subscriptions that their older system couldn’t handle it. They
projected that unless they re-thought the existing solution, they would have to stop accepting new customers within one
year. Behind Telenor’s online self-service management portal lies the middleware responsible for managing customer
organizational structures, agreements, subscriptions, and user access to business mobile subscriptions.
Their customers had to wait 20 minutes to gain access to new resources. Over time, mobile subscriptions greatly increased
and customer portfolios grew dramatically — at the same time that users expected near-real-time response from online
systems.
To deal with this mushrooming problem, the team tried a batch pre-compute process, but the batch window kept growing,
data was as stale as 24 hours old at the time of retrieval, and the problems of adding new users or changing rights
remained unsolved.
With Neo4j, they reimagined the authorization process that covers corporate and residential customers, their corporate
structure, subscriptions containing phone number, price plan and owner/payer/user, billing accounts, and agreements
including discounts.
A simplified rendering of Telenor’s resource access data structure
10. http://graphconnect.com/gc2013/
Figure 3 - Presented at GraphConnect 201310

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When the team built an authorization engine using Neo4j integrated into the platform
framework, Telenor’s 3M+ customers enjoyed millisecond speed when they accessed
resources, thanks to dramatically simplified business traversal rules. For example,
a traversal that once took 1500 lines of SQL needed just 10s of lines of native Java
code to query Neo4j. Modeling the resource graph in Neo4j was natural because the
data domain is a graph; so Telenor could get fast and secure answers to important
questions, such as:
• Which subscriptions can a user access?
• Does the user have access to the given resource, and which agreements is a
customer party to?
The speed and accuracy of these operations is critical, because system users cannot
access data until authorization calculation is performed.
“As a premium Telco provider in Norway, we need a reliable system to cater to our
large user base,” explains Sebastian Verheughe, architect and developer of the
Telenor Mobile Middleware Services. “The Neo4j database delivers high performance
services for our value chain.”12
By overcoming both performance and data currency limitations, Neo4j enabled high
performance and reliable execution of authorization rules. The transition to Neo4j
resulted not just in faster performance, but in more maintainable code, because
access rules could be expressed much more easily.
Increased revenue and delighted customers
by improving user experience
In its drive to provide the best customer web experience, Walmart, the world’s largest
corporation (more than 2 million employees and $470 billion in annual revenues)
knew it needed to optimize online recommendations. After all, shoppers expect finely
tuned, highly personalized recommendations and react coolly to one-size-fits-all
suggestions. This new user experience requires data products that connect masses
of complex buyer and product data to gain super-fast insight into customer needs
and product trends.
Walmart’s team substituted a complex batch process with Neo4j, the perfect tool for
real-time product recommendations.
“A relational database wasn’t satisfying our requirements about performance and
simplicity,duetothecomplexityofourqueries,”explainedWalmartSoftwareDeveloper
Marcos Walda, of the eCommerce-Brazil group.13
“Neo4j helps us understand our
“With complex
dependencies
between accounts,
products and
companies, Neo4j’s
high performance
engine provides
flexibility of data
representations along
with features that go
beyond traditional
relational databases.”11
Sebastian Verheughe,
Architekt Developer,
Mobile Middleware Services, Telenor
11. http://dev.assets.neo4j.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/Neo4j_CS_Telenor.pdf
12. Ibid.
13. http://neo4j.com/users/walmart/

neo4j.com11
online shoppers’ behavior and the relationship between our customers and products,
providing a perfect tool for real-time product recommendations.”
By design, graph databases can quickly query customers’ past purchases, as well
as instantly capture any new interests shown in the customers’ current online visit
— essential for making real-time recommendations. Matching historical and session
data in this way is trivial for graph databases like Neo4j, enabling them easily to
outperform relational and NoSQL database management systems.
Brought new offering to market to compete
with Amazon Prime and Fresh, and Google Express
When eBay looked to build an entirely new same-day delivery service, they turned to
Neo4j because they knew the project would be impossible with any other database.
The reimagined platform behind “eBay Now,” delivered on time within one year from
inception, provides ultra-fast transactions with consistently reliable performance.
The platform, with its easy and fast queries, seamlessly supports future expansion of
the business so eBay can continue to innovate and achieve sustainable competitive
advantage.
“Our Neo4j solution is literally thousands of times faster than the prior MySQL
solution, with queries that require 10-100 times less code. At the same time,
Neo4j allowed us to add functionality that was previously not possible.”15
Volker Pacher,Senior Developer, eBay
Neo4j unlocks business value
in many use cases and industries
We’ve demonstrated the business value that can be leveraged with Neo4j and you
may be wondering what kinds of solutions can benefit from a graph-based approach.
As you can see in the figure on the following page, a wide range of firms use Neo4j
for surprisingly varying use cases.
“With Neo4j, we could
substitute a heavy
batch process that we
used to prepare our
relational database
with a simple and real-
time graph database.
We could build a
simple and real-time
recommendation
system with low
latency queries. As the
current market leader
in graph databases,
and with enterprise
features for scalability
and availability, Neo4j
is the right choice to
meet our demands.”14
Marcos Walda
Software Developer
Walmart
14. http://neo4j.com/users/walmart/
15. http://neo4j.com/users/ebay/

© 2015 neo4j. All rights reserved. neo4j.com
Neo Technology is the creator of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, that brings data relationships to the fore.
From companies offering personalized product and service recommendations; to websites adding social capabilities;
to telcos diagnosing network issues; to enterprises reimagining master data, identity, and access models; organizations
adopt graph databases as the best way to model, store and query both data and its relationships. Neo Technology
researchers pioneered the modern graph database and have been instrumental in bringing the power of the graph
to numerous organizations worldwide. Large enterprises like Walmart, eBay, UBS, Nomura, The InterContinental
Exchange, Cisco, CenturyLink, HP, Pitney Bowes, Telenor, TomTom, Lufthansa, and The National Geographic Society,
as well as startups like CrunchBase, Medium, Polyvore, Zephyr Health, and Elementum use Neo4j to unlock business
value from data relationships.
Neo Technology is a privately-held company funded by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, Sunstone Capital, Conor
Venture Partners, Creandum and Dawn Capital, and is headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices in Sweden, UK,
Germany, France, and Malaysia. For more information, please visit Neo4j.com.
For more information on Neo4j,
contact us via email or phone:
1-855-636-4532
info@neotechnology.com
Conclusions
As data sizes and customer expectations grow at lightning speed, how can your business, whether in banking, energy,
health care, media, government, or gaming, achieve sustainable competitive advantage? By unlocking the value of data
relationships, in new online products and services and in reimagined applications, so you can easily improve performance,
simplify development cycles, and innovate in surprising ways.
Choosing a graph database can help you in a variety of use cases, including: Master Data Management, Network and
IT Operations, Graph-Based Search, Identity and Access Management, Fraud Detection, Recommendations and Social
Capability.
Companies with varying use cases in numerous industries enjoy the flexibility and performance possible with Neo4j, the
only enterprise-grade graph database, that brings data relationships to the fore.
Figure 4 - Matrix of Neo4j Adoption, as of January 2015

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