Neo4j Aura Enterprise is now available in all AWS regions. Customers can select the graph database as a service from the AWS Marketplace. Pricing is capacity-based and there are no extras for IO, storage, backups or network.
Importantly, money spent on Neo4j Aura goes towards the Amazon financial commitment. Pricing starts at $70,080 for a 32GB of memory instance for 12 months. If usage exceeds the contract, the price increases by $1/unit. There is no indication of how this is calculated on the Marketplace entry. The service also includes premium support. Enterprise Times spoke to Ramanan Balakrishnan, Senior Director Product Marketing, Cloud at Neo4j about the announcement.
Balakrishnan commented, “The mission is really about simplification, making graphs available for everyone. This release itself is bringing Neo4j, a leading graph platform to the leader in the cloud, at least from a market share perspective, and making it globally available anywhere where the data is.
“It’s a progression in our journey to be truly multi-cloud. Today, we are on a Google Cloud and AWS extending to Azure over the next several months. This really brings flexibility for the user to pick any cloud of they want, any region they want, with consistency and portability.”
Worldwide availability
Neo4j is now available in any Amazon region where there are three availability zones according to Balakrishnan. This means that Neo4j is available in all Amazon Regions, but not most of the edge locations. It is a testament to the way in which Neo4j Aura was designed that the company can make it available quickly across every region.
Balakrishnan explained that the solution is built on Kubernetes which minimises deployment and maintenance hurdles. He added, “Spinning up a region and getting it up and running is literally a question of hours for us. It’s very consistent as well. So we don’t really need to go and develop anything to open up a new region.”
Growing customer base
Neo4j also took the opportunity to give an update on the success of Neo4j Aura. The platform now has more than 800 customers worldwide. The graph native platform connects to more than 8,000 applications enabling companies to leverage massive data sets and derive insights from them.
Customers include Levi Strauss & Co which is leveraging Neo4j Aura Enterprise. Debdulal Mahanty, Director, Digital Technologies of Levi Strauss & Co. commented, “Neo4j has been our partner in digital transformation for almost three years, during which we have deployed six impactful applications to streamline our go-to-market processes.
“At Levi Strauss & Co, we have a passion for solving challenging business problems and increasing our agility across our operations. With Neo4j Aura Enterprise, we’re able to reduce application build time and take advantage of the power of self-service databases with none of the database management overhead.”
As the world evolves, Levi Strauss has leveraged Neo4j Aura to provide support for its values around agility and sustainability while enhancing product development efficiencies.
Where is Neo4j seeing the most demand for its graph database as a service solution? Balakrishnan answered, “It’s all three regions, actually, in fact, our largest deal is in the Asia Pacific region, it was something that we closed recently as well. Historically, we’ve been, balanced between Europe and North America, almost equally balanced. With Aura, we are seeing tremendous momentum even in the APAC region.”
Balakrishnan then called out Singapore and Australia as having strong interest with China an upcoming market. In Europe traction is in the UK and Germany.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Neo4j Aura Enterprise was only launched at the beginning of this year on GCP. Neo4j has wasted little time in bringing it to a wider market with availability across AWS worldwide. Balakrishnan also explained why customers prefer Neo4j Aura.
He commented: “AWS has their own (graph database) service. We have seen tremendous demand from our customers because they really want a trusted leader on AWS as a service. We are being confident about being on AWS and being the leader there as well.”
For AWS it is a win-win situation. Some customers might use Amazon Neptune, however, Neo4j is in the latest Forrester Wave for Graph Data Platforms. Additionally, it is already used by more than 75% of the Fortune 100.
Matt Asay, Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing, AWS commented, “We are thrilled to continue building on our work with Neo4j to make it even easier for customers to get up and running with graph databases. With Neo4j Aura Enterprise available in AWS Marketplace, customers have a great option for building and deploying cost-effective, highly available connected data applications and can easily integrate them with their existing workflows.”
For Neo4j this is a stepping stone for further growth. In making itself available in any Amazon Region, it should help it to accelerate growth. The next stop is Azure. While that is still several months away, according to Balakrishnan, once available Neo4j should be able to accelerate its growth even faster.
Making its solution readily available across the major cloud platforms is a strategy that may pay off in its search for market dominance. The question is whether a larger organisation will look to buy the company. After its most recent $2 billion valuation following its funding round, they will need to have deep pockets.
