TigerGraph Inc. announced at its Graph + AI World 2020 virtual conference today that it’s launching TigerGraph On Prem Free Tier, a new, free on-premises version of its platform for companies that want to try out the capabilities of its graph database offering.

TigerGraph’s graph database is a kind of NoSQL database that represents data as connected objects rather than rows and columns. Connections can be traversed quickly to find relationships that would be difficult or impossible to identify using conventional relational tables. The technology is particularly well-suited for applications that involve navigating complex interrelationships among elements, such as customer recommendation engines and fraud detection.

TigerGraph began life as an on-premises offering before the company announced a cloud version of the database that launched in September 2019.

TigerGraph On Prem Free Tier enables companies that want to test its platform to do exactly that. It provides all of the features of the paid for enterprise version, and supports databases of up to 50 gigabytes graph size. Users can also get access to community support. The idea is to give users a chance to about TigerGraph’s full capabilities while developing and testing new applications the company said.

The new offering complements the free tier of TigerGraph’s cloud platform, which runs on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the company said.

“While the Developer Edition earned high praise, customers asked for no feature restrictions, such as single-server only or no backup,” said TigerGraph founder and Chief Executive Yu Xu. “They want to experience the enterprise features including continuous availability and security like our customers can do with TigerGraph Cloud free tier to test and build an application.”

TigerGraph also used the Graph + AI World stage to highlight a couple of new partnerships that it says highlight the benefits of using graph technology with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The company said it’s working with Xilinx Inc., a computer chip maker that specializes in field-programmable gate arrays, which are integrated circuits that can be configured to accelerate specific computing tasks. TigerGraph said it’s partnering with Xilinx to create two hardware-accelerate machine learning solutions that combine Xilinx’s Alveo U50 FPGA with its database.

The first is designed to power recommendation engines that work by performing similarity calculations on customer’s behavioral and purchasing patterns, while the second is focused on fraud detection use cases. In both cases, the combination of using TigerGraph with Xilinx’s FPGAs speeds things up by around 20-times faster than regular CPU-based alternatives.

TigerGraph said its new Xilinx FPGA recommendation engine and fraud detection solutions are available now on AWS and Azure, and can be deployed in data centers on Xilinx’s Alveo U50 Data Center Accelerator Cards.

In addition, TigerGraph said it’s working with a company called Expero Inc. that develops customized software for domain-expert users such as scientists, healthcare professionals and government officials. It said Expero has built a business graphical user interface atop of TigerGraph Cloud that will enable business users to work with its fraud alert management and customer journey applications.

Image: TigerGraph