IBM has purchased Ahana, a SaaS company that offers PrestoDB, a distributed SQL query engine designed for ad hoc analytics on data of any size. PrestoDB is an open-source project that was originally developed by Facebook (now Meta). The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Ahana believes that IBM is an excellent partner to collaborate with since they share the same objectives of making Presto the premier open-source project for analytics. IBM’s extensive experience in contributing to open-source and global market reach makes it an ideal match for Ahana and the Presto community. While continuing to actively participate in the Presto community, Ahana looks forward to taking advantage of IBM’s strengths to drive the technical roadmap and community programs like PrestoCon.
IBM has been committed to open-source for a long time, having partnered with top open-source organizations such as Linux, Apache, and Eclipse since the late 1990s. Its acquisition of Red Hat in 2018 further demonstrated its commitment to open-source.
What is PrestoDB?
PrestoDB is a distributed SQL query engine designed to run on a cluster of machines, which enables users to conduct interactive, ad-hoc analytics on large volumes of data. With PrestoDB, users can utilize SQL to query data regardless of its location, including in Hive, AWS S3, Hadoop, Cassandra, relational databases, NoSQL databases, or even proprietary data stores. The open-source engine of PrestoDB provides users with the capability to access data from multiple sources, facilitating analytics across an entire organization.
Presto SQL is an implementation of the standard SQL language and enables efficient querying of data in databases or data lakes in a distributed manner.
Ahana is the only SaaS provider for Presto and offers a managed service for Presto on AWS to simplify open data lake analytics. Ahana Cloud provides the easiest Presto SaaS and enables data platform teams to deliver high-performance SQL analytics on their S3 data lakes and other data sources.
Ahana has played a significant role in the development of Presto, boasting four committers to the project and two members on the Technical Steering Committee.
IBM becomes a member of the Presto Foundation
IBM is excited to become a member of the Presto Foundation through its acquisition of Ahana, as it believes in the power of Presto as an analytics engine and aims to drive further innovation in the project.
Together, IBM and Ahana believe in the governance and principles surrounding open-source projects such as Presto. They consider the Presto Foundation’s open and neutral structure, which welcomes all contributors, to be the ideal approach to govern an open-source project.
As a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), IBM helped promote the growth of Kubernetes. IBM views its involvement with the Presto Foundation as a similar partnership in which it can contribute to the development of the project and the open-source community.
IBM sees this as the start of an exciting new chapter for Presto and plans to keep the community informed as they move forward.
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