With enterprise customers adding more users as graph technology gains popularity, the vendor added features to make wide use of its SaaS platform easier and more secure.
TigerGraph unveiled an updated version of its cloud-native platform featuring enhancements aimed at enabling easier adoption, deployment and management of its capabilities.
TigerGraph, a graph database vendor founded in 2012 and based in Redwood City, Calif., emerged from stealth in 2016 with an enterprise version of its platform. Three years later, it launched TigerGraph Cloud, a graph-database-as-a-service version of its tools.
The vendor's platform is based on graph technology, which enables data points within databases to connect to multiple other data points at the same time rather than to just one other data point at a time, as with a relational database. The advantage is that by simultaneously connecting to multiple data points, users can more quickly and easily discover relationships between data.
In 2021, Gartner predicted that 80% of data and analytics innovations will be made using graph technology by 2025.
Meanwhile, TigerGraph has found that as enterprises use graph technology more while also migrating more of their analytics workloads to the cloud, they want to expand how they use TigerGraph Cloud, according to Jay Yu, the vendor's vice president of product innovation.
In response, TigerGraph, after introducing a cloud version of its platform in 2019, on June 29 added new features designed to enable more users in organizations to securely use the SaaS version of the vendor's platform.
"Initially, we moved really fast to move our on-premises product to the cloud, and in terms of large enterprise support, it was missing a little bit," Yu said.
A sample TigerGraph Cloud starter kit dashboard shows the data interaction within a graph database.
New capabilities
To address that support for large enterprise deployment, TigerGraph added Enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM), a feature that enables a single enterprise account to handle multiple users, thus reducing the prospect of data duplication. At the same time, the feature gives administrators the ability to put role-based access measures in place to ensure the security of their organization's sensitive data.
In addition, to address the adoption, deployment and management of TigerGraph Cloud, the update includes Single Login to simplify the login process and better enable collaboration, and Secure Enterprise Connectivity to improve the security of the platform's connectivity in the cloud.
"Now, it's much easier to manage the user access and to create different database use cases within organizations," Yu said. "We had customers provide feedback and tell us that initially, when they were just exploring, they didn't mind [some of the limitations], but now that they're going for real, they want enterprise-level support."
[These] are all good signs that TigerGraph is landing larger customers that are expanding usage among more users and more data sources. These very much sound like customer-requested upgrades, and they all signal expanding use of the product.
Doug HenschenAnalyst, Constellation Research
The addition of Enterprise Identity and Access Management, Single Login and Enterprise Connectivity are clear signals that TigerGraph's customers are indeed expanding how they use the vendor's platform, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
"[These] are all good signs that TigerGraph is landing larger customers that are expanding usage among more users and more data sources," he said. "These very much sound like customer-requested upgrades, and they all signal expanding use of the product."
Beyond the three features aimed at improving the adoption, deployment and management of TigerGraph Cloud, the update includes new regional access on AWS in in Australia, Brazil and Singapore; Google Cloud in Australia and Singapore; and Microsoft Azure in Australia.
With TigerGraph already firmly established throughout the United States and Europe, future plans include further expansion in both the Asia-Pacific and South America regions, according to Yu.
The update also includes a new freemium version on Azure so potential customers can explore TigerGraph Cloud and determine whether they want to upgrade (the vendor does not publicize its pricing).
"It's an incremental, routine update, but [there are] good signs of expanding use," Henschen said. "The new cloud regions also signal growing use by existing customers and new market opportunities for TigerGraph."
And though the new version of TigerGraph Cloud includes incremental improvements to the platform rather than revolutionary new capabilities, TigerGraph itself is an innovative vendor among competitors that include fellow graph database vendor Neo4j along with tech giants that offer graph databases such as AWS and Oracle, he continued.
For example, the recent launch of TigerGraph ML Workbench, a tool designed to make data science models more accurate and easier to deploy, is evidence of the vendor's creativity.
"TigerGraph burst onto the scenes pretty aggressively in recent years," Henschen said. "The company has been early to the cloud, to adding ML capabilities and to adding industry-specific use cases and capabilities. I'd say it's among the graph database and graph database service providers that are setting the agenda."
Roadmap
While the most recent enhancements to TigerGraph Cloud were designed to add enterprise scale to the platform, the next update -- targeted for the end of August -- will feature tools aimed at end users.
ML Workbench, which the vendor unveiled in preview in May during Graph + AI Summit, a conference hosted twice annually by TigerGraph, is currently available only with the vendor's on-premises platform. In August, however, it will be included in TigerGraph Cloud, according to Yu.
In addition, the next update will include data visualization capabilities so TigerGraph users can build dashboards and do rudimentary data analysis on top of their graph database, Yu continued. The data visualization capabilities aren't being designed to compete with or replace sophisticated BI platforms such as Tableau, Qlik and Power BI -- which TigerGraph customers can use through connectors -- but will enable users to quickly understand their graph exploration.
"Being a startup, we have a lot of things we want to do, but customer requests play a huge role in how we prioritize things," Yu said. "This [June] release was more focused on the infrastructure. The next release is even more exciting."
