Graphs Are Eating Telco: World's Leading Telcos Turn to Neo4j as Graph Databases Become an Essential Tool for Telecommunications Giants


SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 16, 2014) -

  • Industry leaders 3, CenturyLink, and StarHub join the largest Telecommunications Service & Equipment Providers, including Telenor, HP, and Cisco, to advance their businesses using the Neo4j graph database
  • Register for an April 17th webinar on the '5 Graphs of Telecommunications' to learn how Telcos are using graph databases to derive competitive advantage

Neo Technology, creators of Neo4j, the world's leading graph database, today announced a wave of growing adoption among leading telecommunications companies worldwide. Adding to a roster of customers including Telenor, HP, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and Maaii, Neo now also counts 3, CenturyLink, and StarHub as Neo4j customers.

Forrester Research estimates that over 25 percent of enterprises will use graph databases by
20171, and Telcos are no exception. Telecommunications is all about connections, making graph databases a natural fit. From the network graph (for optimizing and securing the network) to the customer graph (for new social and collaboration features), to the call graph (for churn reduction and network optimization), to corporate hierarchy (for improved business services), to product line management and master data management, graph databases enable businesses to become more agile and bring new capabilities to market faster by helping businesses leverage their connected data.

Graph databases have become an important part of Telecommunications companies' strategies for handling the spectacular growth the industry is experiencing. According to Cisco, 2013 saw the addition of more than half a billion new connected mobile devices, and an 81 percent global increase in mobile data traffic2. And Gartner predicts that there will be nearly 26 billion devices comprising the Internet of Things by 20203. Says Prem Malhotra, Director Enterprise Architecture for Cisco4, in explaining why Cisco adopted Neo4j: "Relational databases have a hard time dealing with the complexities of connected data."

As the technology leaders who created the world's first graph database, Neo Technology continues to innovate and dominate the graph database category. The company is now a trusted technology supplier for Telcos, helping solve some of their most critical data challenges. Neo4j customers include:

  • 3, one of the world's largest operators with over 25 million customers, and part of the Hutchison Whampoa Group, has selected Neo4j to deliver its next generation self-service billing portal, paving the way for new capabilities and a growing customer base in the Scandinavian area.
  • StarHub, Singapore's first fully integrated info-communications company, provides every person, every home and every business in Singapore with world-class information, communication and entertainment services. A seven billion dollar company, StarHub chose Neo4j to support its product line management projects. The graph database has made it easier for StarHub to manage its commercial product line hierarchy.
  • Telenor Group, one of the top 10 global Telcos, currently uses Neo4j for identity management and access control across the customer organizational hierarchy. The ability to model and query complex data such as customer and account structures with high performance has proven critical to Telenor's ongoing success.

Neo4j Global Customers Speak Out
"We chose Neo4j for our next-generation online and mobile customer services platform, which will help customers better manage and understand their bill. So far we have been very impressed with the time-to-market advantages that we are experiencing from developing with a graph model, and the very fast performance that we are seeing with Neo4j."
--Fredrik Appelberg, Manager Online Services, 3

"Managing product line data in Telco is a significant and important challenge. At StarHub, we needed the agility to support a fast-moving set of product lines across an ever-growing range of offerings: mobile services, wireless broadband, Pay TV, residential broadband Internet (Fiber & Cable), residential voice services, and so on. By mapping our commercial product line hierarchy in a Neo4j graph, we've been able to greatly improve our business agility and IT responsiveness."
--Dharmapalan Sampath, Sr. Principal Solutions Architect, StarHub

"As the leading Telco provider in the Nordics, we need a reliable system to cater to our large user base. With complex dependencies between accounts, products and companies, Neo4j's high performance engine provides flexibility of data representation along with features that extend beyond traditional relational databases."
--Sebastian Verheughe, Telenor

Graphs Are Eating the World (and so is Neo4j)
As graph databases are becoming increasingly recognized5 for their ability to solve a great deal of seemingly intractable problems, adoption of Neo4j has been rapidly expanding across a broad range of industries, for a wide variety of use cases. In fact, Neo4j is ranked as the world's leading graph database by database monitoring site DB-Engines, who also observe that graph databases are also growing in popularity faster than any other segment in the database space. According to the firm, "When we look at how much various categories of database management systems increased their popularity last year, Graph DBMSs are the clear winner with more than 250 percent increase."

Webinar Alert
Neo will hold a complimentary webinar on Thursday, April 17 at 10 a.m. PT. The webinar, titled the '5 Graphs of Telecommunications', will summarize the ways in which Telcos are using graph databases today to derive competitive advantage. To register, please visit: http://info.neotechnology.com/0417-register.html

For more on Neo4j and Telcos, visit neotechnology.com

Other Useful Links

About Neo Technology
Graphs are everywhere. From websites adding social capabilities to Telcos providing personalized customer services, to innovative bioinformatics research, organizations are adopting graph databases as the best way to model and query connected data. Neo Technology researchers pioneered the first graph database back in 2000, and have been instrumental in bringing the power of the graph to numerous organizations worldwide, including more than 40 Global 2000 customers, such as Cisco, Accenture, Telenor, eBay and Walmart. Serving customers in production for over a decade, Neo4j is the world's leading graph database with the largest ecosystem of partners and tens of thousands of successful deployments.

According to DB-Engines, Neo4j dominates the fastest growing category in all data management. Neo Technology is a privately held company funded by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners, and is headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices in Sweden, UK, Germany, France, and Malaysia. For more information, please visit www.neotechnology.com.

1 TechRadar™: Enterprise DBMS, Q1 2014. Forrester Research. 2-13-14.
2 Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013-2018. Cisco. 2-5-14.
3 "Gartner Says the Internet of Things Installed Base Will Grow to 26 Billion Units By 2020". Gartner. 12-12-13.
4 GraphConnect 2012 Enterprise Panel. Neo Technology. 12-5-12.
5 "No NoSQL: Neo's GraphConnect shows graph databases coming into their own." 451 Research, 12-4-13.

Contact Information:

Contact:
Tanya Carlsson
Kulesa Faul for Neo Technology
(707) 529-6139