IBM joins the Presto Foundation through acquisition of Ahana
Today we’re thrilled to share that IBM has acquired Ahana, the venture-backed SaaS for Presto startup company, and we want to write more about our belief in Open Source and why IBM and Ahana are joining forces for the benefit of Presto.
We believe that this is an exciting time for the Presto project. We’re seeing demonstrated growth in the open source community around Presto. The project has 14.6K Github stars, saw a 110% growth of members in the community over the past year, and an engagement rate of close to 50% across all of the Presto community channels. There’s some really serious innovation that we’re excited about, including the Velox engine for Presto, optimizer improvements, and much more.
In Meta’s SIGMOD paper on Presto: A Decade of SQL Analytics at Meta, we can see the sheer growth and scale of Presto over the past ten years, as well as all of the innovation that has poured into the project around scalability, latency, performance, efficiency, and richer analytics. Some examples include Presto on Spark, History-Based Optimizer, user-defined functions, and performance work that has enabled Meta to grow their interactive and ad-hoc workload data by 600% with no impact on performance.
The scale of Presto at Uber is just as impressive. With 20 clusters that process 100M+ queries each day, Uber depends on Presto to run ad-hoc analytics for its 7K weekly active users. The bottom line is that some of the largest companies are using Presto for their ad-hoc and interactive analytics today.
More importantly, at IBM we believe in the open source governance of the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation. IBM’s long-standing commitment to open source became widely known with its acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, but it has partnered with the foremost open source organizations – Linux, Apache and Eclipse – since the late 1990s. IBM is now a prominent contributor to open source communities – working across the cloud native ecosystem, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and quantum computing. One example is our role as a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which fostered the growth of Kubernetes. We see our involvement with Presto Foundation as a similar relationship.
We chose to join forces with Ahana because of their contributions and commitment to Presto. Ahana is a major contributor to Presto with four project committers and two Technical Steering Committee members. Further, they’ve actively helped grow the community for the last three years through their leadership of the Presto Foundation Outreach Committee.
From an Ahana perspective, IBM is the perfect partner with whom to join forces. With similar goals of making Presto the best open source project for analytics, a deep history in open source contributions, and the market reach of IBM’s global presence, it is an ideal match for Ahana and for the Presto community. Ahana will benefit from IBM’s strengths as we continue to be actively involved in the Presto community, helping to drive the technical roadmap and community programs like PrestoCon.
Together we believe in open source and the governance that surrounds open source projects like Presto. In particular, how the Presto Foundation is structured as an open and neutral governing body that is open to all strikes us as the right balance when it comes to governing an open source project.
With that in mind, at IBM we are thrilled to be a member of the Presto Foundation through the acquisition of Ahana. We believe that Presto is an incredible engine for analytics, and we look forward to helping drive continued innovation in the project. We believe we’re entering an exciting next chapter of Presto, and we look forward to sharing more with the community as we move forward.