Thursday 5 July 2018

Podcast Interview with Matt Casters, Neo4j & Kettle

A couple of years ago, I got to know another Belgian data aficionado that was doing quite a bit of work in the open source community, called Bart Maertens. For a while, we actually met at Antwerp Airport when we were both "commuting" to London City Airport for business - and we got a conversation going. Bart was organising a Pentaho Community Meeting in Antwerp, less than 500m from my home, and invited me to come along and talk a bit about my favourite subjects: beer and graphs :) ... 
So one thing lead to another, and Bart started to do some interesting work integrating his data integration tools with Neo4j. He wrote the code, and blogged about it in some detail

Fast forward to early 2018. Neo4j is more and more in the Enterprise market, with very large organisations seeing the value of graph databases and the platform around it. But most of these environments are NOT greenfield environments - they almost always require some kind of data integration work to make the tools work effectively. So it became very natural for us to start look for architects and experts that could help us... and that's effectively what brought my next Podcast guest to the Graph: Matt Casters has worked together with many other Neo4j people in a previous life, and is now the Chief Solutions Architect in our professional services organisation. 

Here's my chat with Matt: