Tuesday 17 March 2015

Podcast Interview with Ryan Boyd, Neo Technology

Here's a really great chat with one of our latest wonderful colleagues at Neo Technology. Ryan Boyd joined Neo a couple of months ago from Google to work with people like Michael Hunger to help, serve and grow our awesome Neo4j community.

Here's the transcript of our conversation:
RVB: Hi everyone. My name is Rik and I'm here today to record another version of our podcast series around Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, and I'm here today with Ryan, Ryan Boyd, to talk about his view on graph database in the industry and where is it going and all that. So, Ryan, could you quickly introduce yourself. 
RB: Sure. My name is Ryan Boyd. I'm in the developer relations team here at Neo, trying to help developers use Neo and understand the power of graph databases. 
RVB: And how did you come to Neo? 
RB: Sure. I was at Google for a number of years working on the cloud platform technologies and I came to Neo after meeting with the exec team a number of times and realizing that graph databases is really where the future is at for a lot of different types of data. It's how you can effectively and quickly query large amounts of connected data - and I really thought that was exciting and wanted to make more people aware of that. 
RVB: Awesome. That's fantastic. I mean, there's so many people that are looking at graph databases for lots of different reasons, but what is the one thing that you think is so fascinating about it and what do you like most about graph databases? 
RB: The one thing that is really just about that performance factor. Graph databases can be a lot faster and a lot easier to understand when you have data that's highly connected. So, at first the obvious use case that gets you attracted to graph databases is how people are connected through social networks. But then you can see how the power of it in things like fraud detection or things like finding shorter paths and routes for trip-planning and all. I'm actually right now trying to plan a trip to fly out for our conference - GraphConnect in London - in a couple of months, and I wish my airline used graph databases, it would be much easier for me to plan my trip. 
RVB: [chuckles] Absolutely. You might be able to optimize your costs, as well. Shortest wait, shortest path kind of calculation. That's great.  Maybe, last question for you. Where do you think this is going? Where do you think graph databases will be in three, four, five years from now? What do you think the industry will be like and people will be using this for? 
RB: Sure. Although we have a large number of customers here at Neo, we also see a huge amount of interest in graph databases. Nearly every developer I've talked to has said, "Hey, I want to look into graph databases. I have this use case which I think it might be good for, but I haven't had time quite yet." I'm hoping if we travel a couple years down the road, that more developers have looked at it and understand the technology and where it could be useful. And pretty much every company and every application has at least a portion of their application powered by a graph database. Because I've met very few use cases, very few types of applications or types of companies where they can't be powerful. 
RVB: That's great. Thank you so much for spending the time, Ryan. I look forward to speaking to you again. 
RB: Absolutely. Thank you. 
RVB: All right. Bye.

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Hope you'll enjoy it!

Cheers

Rik

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