Neo4j announces new partner ecosystem in Indonesia

Demand for graph database in Indonesia has been increasing, prompting Neo4j to launch a new partner ecosystem to support customers.

Neo4j has established a new partner ecosystem to meet growing demand for graph technology in the AI era. The announcement follows a series of milestones by Neo4j including the launch of the industry’s first graph analytics offering for any data platform.

The new partners in Indonesia are Datalabs, PT Digital Data Integrasi (DDI), ICS Compute, Infracom Technology, Pratama and Mitra Intergrasi Informatika (MII). These partners will collaborate under a combined go-to-market strategy reflecting Neo4j’s deepening commitment to the Indonesian market, capitalizing on the region’s immense technical talent to deliver transformative AI and data results for customers.

According to Kristen ‘KP’ Pimpini, Vice President & General Manager, APAC at Neo4j, the deep knowledge and market expertise the local partners bring to Indonesia sets them as a growing global hub for AI and data innovation.

“As graph technology powers decision-making with actionable insights, there’s no better time than now for businesses to turn their data into knowledge and ground their AI models in knowledge graphs for more accurate, transparent, and explainable results,” said Pimpini.

Graph technology adoption continues to surge across ASEAN as organizations seek to break down data silos and solve complex business challenges at scale. Predictions by Gartner reveal that graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations by 2026, up from 10% in 2021.

Neo4j also leads the graph database management systems (DBMS) category with a 44% market share, according to Cupole Consulting Group, which estimates the 2024 DBMS market at US$110 billion.

Knowledge graph demand

In an interview with CRN Asia after the launch of the new Indonesian partner ecosystem, Xander Smart, ASEAN General Manager, Neo4j said as customers start investing in more AI use cases, they are also beginning to understand the importance of having knowledge graphs.

“The amount of companies coming to us now and asking for help to build out their knowledge graph has really accelerated. Neo4j has been around for a while now and we've always helped organizations understand the relationships between their data points. But with knowledge graphs, we're seeing a huge explosion there because what every organization is coming to realize is connected data is what powers their Gen AI applications or the agents that they're trying to build,” said Smart.

Smart pointed out that knowledge graphs are sort of the bedrock for GenAI applications. As companies move data from disparate silos, whether it's in an existing SaaS application or unstructured data for financial filing reports, they're bringing that into the graph where all that data is getting connected up.

“So what customers are seeing in the GenAI results is the massive reduction in hallucination, much more context in their answers, and also getting that traceability. So if they see an answer, they can actually go and look at the graph and understand what node relationships are traversed to generate that answer. And this allows them to iterate very quickly on their graph model, but also their Gen AI application,” explained Smart.

He added that it is crucial as companies look to build trust with their end users. It’s moved beyond the ChatGPT experiment to delivering something more specific. And this is where Smart believes Neo4j comes in.

The channel ecosystem

For Smart, launching a new partner ecosystem in Indonesia is crucial especially since partners are a massive part of Neo4j’s ecosystem and how they're looking to scale the business across Asia.

“We've obviously got our technology partners like Microsoft, Google, AWS, where customers can host our software. We've also got the SaaS version that runs there. So, we sort of play nicely in that ecosystem. Because the graph database, even before GenAI, is never running in isolation. It's always connected to a broader technology stack. So, we've done a lot of work around the connectors there to make it easy to get data in, but also then connect into the LLMs or dashboarding tools, for example, to then interrogate the data,” said Smart.

Smart also mentioned that GraphAware, a UK-based partner that they work with has built a very unique dashboarding capability specifically for like government use cases, around investigations and such.

“We're seeing huge success with our partners across APAC. And then from a local market customers’ perspective, obviously we have SIs that we work with across Asia,” added Smart.

Partner program in Indonesia

On the new partner program in Indonesia, Smart said Neo4j trained their partners on the local market as well as how they can speak to customers on the value of graph and how it fits into the GenAI stack.

“We are doing a bit of education there and then supporting the local partners on the opportunities because they're having their customers coming to them and wanting to build a knowledge graph. And partners also want to see results quickly. They don't want to wait two years to see a result. They want to see iterative results quickly. So, the customers are a bit more mature now when they're coming to us and our partners, which is good to see. And then the partners put together a strategy for them,” said Smart.

While Neo4j works with channels, Smart also mentioned they do have some customers that deal directly with them as well. These are normally customers that literally are ready to get going on their knowledge graphs and work with Neo4j.

At the same time, Smart also highlighted that Neo4j is seeing an uptake on its SaaS offering as well.

“The SaaS version comes with all the good things the SaaS version does. It's got 99.95% uptime, has built-in security controls and we take care of all of that for the customers, and they can just focus on building their graph and their application. It's also where some of our new features are landing first. We have a lot more control over those SaaS environments. So, we can turn on an LLM, for example, to do that natural language querying in the UI. What we're also seeing is customers wanting to stay sort of agnostic as well. They don't necessarily want to increase cloud lock-in to any one particular provider. So, I think the fact we're cloud agnostic also helps,” said Smart.

Going back to the partner ecosystem, Smart said that the end goal is all about helping customers get into production. Singapore and Indonesia are a big focus for Neo4j for this year with Thailand also showing interest.

“Our partners are here to help our customers do that because they're the ones that are doing a lot of the coding and the development and building the data pipelines at the end of the day. And that's the goal for this year, get as many of our customers into production as we can and our partners are crucial to do that,” concluded Smart.