DataWeek Conference + Expo

Recent years have seen an explosion of technologies for managing, processing and analyzing graphs. While the most well known users of graph technologies have been social web properties such as Facebook and LinkedIn, a quiet revolution has been steadily spreading across other industries. In this last 18 months, more than 30 of the Global 2000, and many times as many startups, have quietly been working to apply graphs to a wide array of business-critical use cases.

For example: one of the world’s top parcel delivery carriers wasn’t going to be able to handle Christmas volumes last year because of numerous challenges stemming from online ordering. The solution? Replace the legacy routing system with a graph database, which now routes 5M packages per day in real time: faster and more efficiently than its relational cousins ever could. One of the top investment banks now onboards traders using an identity & access management system based on graphs. Media metadata turns out to be best represented as a graph; and consumers respond well to the opportunity to visually navigate the graph (such as is done by the app Discovr Music). Similar trends are developing in telecommunications, healthcare, human resources, gaming, and many more.

We are entering an era of connected data: where those companies that can master the connections between their data – the lines and patterns linking the dots, and not just the dots – will outperform the companies that fail to recognize connectedness.

This session will discuss two major topics: the emergence of graphs and graph databases outside of the “classic” social use cases, and the factors driving this trend. We will draw from both open source community projects, and real-world early commercial adopters in verticals like finance, telecom, healthcare, life sciences, and more. You will leave this session with an appreciation for and understanding of how one can reap the benefits of applying graph technologies outside of managing the social graph.