Analytics firm Neo4j appoints former Google exec Sudhir Hasbe as its chief product officer

US-based graph database and analytics firm Neo4j has appointed Sudhir Hasbe, a former Google executive, as its chief product officer (CPO).  

In his new role, Hasbe will oversee Neo4j's software portfolio across its native graph database and data science offerings, and will report to the chief operating officer (CEO) and Co-Founder Emil Eifrem.  

At Google, Hasbe led product management for Google Cloud’s data analytics platform which includes industry-leading products like BigQuery.  

Prior to Google, Hasbe led software engineering at Zulilly, and spent seven years at Microsoft where he led product management for Xbox entertainment services, Azure Data Marketplace SQL Azure, and BizTalk Server. 

At Neo4j, Hasbe succeeds former head of product Philip Rathle, who assumes a new executive leadership role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to help expand Neo4j's relationships across a broader group of stakeholders. 

“Sudhir’s track record and innovation with cloud hyperscalers comes to us at a time when graph technology is reshaping the database market and accelerating advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning in ways that are helping enterprises solve their biggest data challenges,” said Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j. 

“As the world becomes more connected, so does our data, making the relationships between both data and metadata matter more than ever,” said Hasbe. “Graph enables organisations to find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of data connections. That’s why I’ve come to Neo4j, and why graph will one day be foundational for every modern enterprise,” he added. 

Neo4j, founded in 2007, is based in San Mateo, California. The company has around 800 employees listed on LinkedIn. Besides Neo4j, other companies leading this space include, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Tiger Graph.  

Industry analyst firm Forrester has identified graph data platforms as a new and emerging technology that allows enterprises to generate the insights from their existing data to solve complex problems quickly. It is used for fraud detection in banking, e-commerce and other industries that allow real-time results like retail, logistics, recruitment, media, sentiment analysis, search and knowledge management.   

Last month, the Neo4j reportedly hired a team of 11 full-time specialists from Distributed Technology Associates (DTA), a Massachusetts startup with expertise in database, Oracle, SQL Server and consulting, and Remote-DBA to expand its global cloud managed services (CMS) capability.  

Neo4j’s next-generation cloud-ready graph database became generally available last November. The graph database offering, along with the company’s graph data science analytics and machine learning platform, helped the company achieve double-digit growth in 2022 after crossing $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2021, the company said in a statement.  

In May last year, the company hired another Google executive Chandra Rangan as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Rangan ran Google Cloud Platform product marketing and more recently, product-led growth, strategy, and operations for Google Maps Platform.