Neo4j announces winners of 2023 Graphie Awards in ANZ

Neo4j, the graph database and analytics company, has announced the winners of the 2023 Graphie Awards in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) in recognition of organisations and individuals for their outstanding innovation in implementing Neo4js graph technology.

The successful entrants were selected based on their exemplary use of graph technology to address the most significant enterprise challenges.

Graph databases and graph data science are gaining momentum in ANZ as businesses race to find hidden relationships and patterns over billions of data connections to solve modern data problems. According to Gartner, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations by 2025, up from 10% in 2021, to facilitate rapid decision-making in organisations.

The latest Graphie Award winners in ANZ are:

• DXC Technology (Australia) Excellence in Data Driven Career Development
• Healius (ASX: HLS, Australia) Advanced Leader: Real-time Diagnostics with Graph Technology
• Michela Ledwidge, Mod CEO and co-founder (Australia) Community Excellence Award for Extended Reality
• WorkSafe New Zealand (New Zealand) Emerging Leader: Public Sector Ontology & Transformation

"We are excited to celebrate these exceptional organisations who are successfully tackling the complexities of digital ecosystems with graph technology. It was a challenge to select the winners from an impressive list of finalists we can't wait to see them further excel with Neo4j playing a pivotal role," says Peter Philipp, General Manager, ANZ at Neo4j.

The Graphie Awards ceremony was held during the 2023 GraphSummit Australia in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne from 3 to 9 May. With more than 250 attendees, GraphSummit saw technology leaders, key decision makers, technical professionals, CIOs, and graph data science experts coming together from several industries, including banking, HR, and healthcare, to discuss the best and latest developments in graph data technology.

GraphSummit featured key Neo4j community leaders and local customers showcasing the most promising applications of graph technology in their respective fields, including:

• Dan Newland, General Manager ANZ, GraphAware
• Jin Foo, Staff Data Scientist, and Nasrin Shabani, Data Science Research Fellow at Online Business Lender Prospa
• Karthick Thanigaimani, Engineering Chapter Lead, Payments Reliability Engineering and Support Services at one of Australia's big four banks ANZ Bank
• Matthew Campbell, Manager, Bioinformatics at clinical technology company InterVenn Biosciences (co-founded by a Nobel Prize winner)
• Michele Howard, Human Experience Management and Workforce Management Data Analytics at one of the largest IT services providers in the world, DXC Technology
• Puneet Nagi, Executive and General Manager at Australias second-largest pathology provider Healius (ASX: HLS, Australia)
• Stuart Horsman, EM Data Science at Australias largest banking institution Commonwealth Bank
• Susan Gibson, Head of Data, Analytics and AI, and Carl Young, Data Analytics and AI Architect at the University of Technology Sydney

In addition to GraphSummit, Neo4j also conducted Graph Workshop, a hands-on session which allowed attendees to learn how Neo4j can help address their data challenges while providing deeper business insights, and Graph Meetup- for participants to connect with graph database and graph data science experts and discover the latest trends in graph innovation and applications.

Gibson says, "We are really excited about where graph technology could go. We see real potential in its applications to students as we look at how to guide them in their courses. We are also building up our corporate relations to really understand internships, enterprise learning, and different student engagements. Graph technology is a great tool for our corporate relations department to really build on those relationships and understand them better."

Foo says, "We are using graphs to combine tabular data with unstructured data to identify patterns that help us segment customers, evaluate risk, and recommend next actions. Graphs are intuitively easier to understand, and allows us to collaborate with stakeholders and present meaningfully to the leadership and improve decision making."

The awards ceremony follows a series of milestones at Neo4j, including:

• The recent appointments of Sudhir Hasbe as Chief Product Officer and Alyson Welch as Chief Revenue Officer
• The extension of its strategic partnership with Google Cloud with the introduction of a new native integration with Google Cloud's BigQuery cloud data warehouse
• Strategic acqui-hire of 11 full-time specialists from Distributed Technology Associates(DTA), which was a major expansion of Neo4j's global cloud managed services (CMS) capability
• Neo4j Graph Data Science analytics and machine learning platforms continued double-digit growth in 2022 after the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2021