Congratulations to Aurelius, Välkommen to DataStax!

Congratulations to Aurelius on the news of your recent acquisition! The Aurelius team has always been our companions in promoting the value of relationships in data, and I wish you all the best as you embark upon the journey of building a new graph database.

To our friends at DataStax, not only Congratulations on your first-ever acquisition, but a hearty Välkommen! to the graph database ecosystem!

As the creator of the first modern graph database, Neo4j, we have always obsessed over the value of data relationships, and the market is now providing incredibly strong validation of graph databases. This trend is led by some of the world’s best-known companies, such as Walmart, eBay, Earthlink, UBS, CenturyLink, National Geographic, HP, and Cisco, plus innovative startups like Medium, CrunchBase, Polyvore, Zephyr Health and Elementum, all of whom have built highly scalable, mission critical applications on top of the Neo4j graph database.

Over the years, we have built a rich and rapidly growing graph community boasting some 20,000 meetup members across 77 cities in 25 countries. Last year, this community organized and attended more than 500 events: more than one per day throughout the entire year and continuing in 2015! More than one per day! That blows my mind.

It’s been equally exciting to see the incredible recognition from the analyst community, which predicts that the graph market is poised to explode. Says Gartner: Graph analysis is possibly the single most effective competitive differentiator for organizations pursuing data-driven operations and decisions after the design of data capture.

Forrester Research predicts that graph databases will be used by more than 25 percent of all enterprises by 2017 and that the graph database market will reach $400 million in annual spend by 2018. This is absolutely explosive growth and Neo4j is thrilled to be at the center of it as the leading graph database (twice as popular as all other graph databases combined, according to DB-Engines).

Neo4j is the dominant graph database.

For me personally, it’s interesting to reflect on how recognition of graph databases has grown over the years. When we started thinking about graphs in data back in 2000, we strongly sensed that there was a lot of value in data relationships and a graph database optimized for that.

Fast-forward to 2015, and we see DataStax stating in their blog post about their Aurelius acquisition: the request for graph database support in DSE has been the single biggest customer ask, outpacing every other product/feature request.

Why is this happening? Momentum is gaining because companies recognize the massive transformative power that data relationships can bring to a business. The result has been a flurry of activity across every industry, and an increasing number of use cases. Graph databases are the only way to leverage these well, and are a natural fit in the ongoing quest for competitive advantage. Think real-time recommendations that combine historical with current behavior, fraud detection with access to social data, supply chain management that includes real-time route information, and Master Dara Management that visualizes the different channels customers use to communicate.

For someone who has persistently evangelized the value of graphs, these developments provide a deep sense of optimism. I wish the Aurelius team luck on their new journey, and look forward to an even more dynamic graph ecosystem as DataStax joins the graph community.