Today I am thrilled to finally share more about Ahana joining forces with IBM. A few weeks ago, we shared with the Linux Foundation Presto open source community that IBM would be joining the Presto Foundation through the acquisition of Ahana. This acquisition is a significant milestone for us and marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter in Ahana’s journey.

Three years ago I co-founded this company with the belief that Presto was the best engine for SQL-based data lake analytics. And I couldn’t be prouder of what we accomplished over those three years. We’ve built an incredible product in Ahana Cloud, the managed service for Presto, hired an extraordinary team that continues to drive on our vision of Presto as the SQL engine for the open data lakehouse, and helped grow the community and drive the technical roadmap for the open source Presto project. 

Over the last few months, I spent a lot of time with the IBM team. As a market leader in data and AI (see The Forrester Wave: Data Management for Analytics), IBM is at the forefront of the data and analytics market and helps many customers build out their data & analytics platforms. I learned we shared a vision on the future of data and analytics and why the Open Data Lakehouse will play a crucial role. 

And perhaps most importantly, we also both firmly believe in the open governance model of the Presto open source project. IBM has a rich history of open source contributions, which became widely known with its acquisition of Red Hat in 2018. But even before that, IBM has worked closely with Linux, Apache and Eclipse since the late 90s and is now a prominent contributor to many open source communities like Spark, Docker, CloudFoundry, Kubernetes, OpenJS, and more. They were a founding member of Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which fostered the growth of Kubernetes. 

In fact, one of the big reasons IBM chose to support Presto was because it’s a Linux Foundation project, neutrally governed across a consortium of industry leaders like Meta, Uber, Intel, HPE and more, unlike other projects that are vendor-led and not as open and transparent. We invite everyone to join, as we know that openly governed, community-driven OSS projects will continue to be on the right side of history. 

Together we believe it’s 1 + 1 = 3. Meaning that together, we will make Presto better than it’s ever been before. Bringing our technical expertise together based on the common vision of Open Data Lakehouses enables us to contribute innovations faster than it’s ever been in the open source Presto project. And we believe this is good for the developer and user community!

Today, IBM announced a new AI and data platform called watsonx to help organizations build and scale AI. Part of that platform is a data store built on an open data lakehouse architecture called watsonx.data that enables enterprises to easily unify and govern their structured and unstructured data, wherever it resides, for high performance AI and analytics. At the heart of watsonx.data is Presto, and I couldn’t be more excited. 

As an IBM company, our mission remains to make Presto the best engine for the Open Data Lakehouse. We’ll continue to be heavily involved in the Presto Foundation to help drive the Presto open source technical roadmap as well as community programs like PrestoCon. 

And now, we can accelerate our data lakehouse go-to-market to enterprise customers and focus on building out hybrid cloud and multi cloud deployments. The opportunity is massive, and we are so excited to grow Presto bigger to what it’s ever been!

I want to assure you that our commitment to our vision remains unchanged. We are excited to now be a part of IBM to create even more value for customers and community members.

Thank you to all of our customers, partners, and community stakeholders. Thank you to the Meta team Victoria Dudin, Sara Narayan, and all of Meta’s Presto and Velox technical members including Tim Meehan, James Sun, Wenlei Xie, Orri Erling, Pedro Pedreira, Rebecca Schlussel, Masha Basmanova, and Biswapesh Chattopadhya; community developers Zhenxiao Luo, Rongrong Zhong, Beinan Wang, Bin Fan, Chunxu Tang, and James Petty; Arijit Bandyopadhyay, Susan Marquez, and Dave Cohen at Intel and their Intel ISV Disrupter/Accelerator Program; Girish Baliga at Uber; Michael Dolan, Chris Aniszczyk, and Michelle Martineau at Linux Foundation; and Vinoth Chandar and the Apache HUDI team at Onehouse. We could not have achieved this level of success without you. We are excited to continue working with you and to provide you with even more value in the future. 

Thank you to our investors, starting with Dave Munichiello at GV for the first check and being instrumental in guiding the early days. Mark Leslie of Leslie Ventures for providing timely, invaluable board guidance. A seed+ lead check and advice from Brandon Reeves of Lux Capital. Rob Schwartz and Dan Moskowitz of Third Point for being the Series A lead and providing insightful board guidance as well. Ankur Prakash of Liberty Global Ventures for believing in me again, leading an extension. And investor and advisor, Bob Wiederhold, whose open source and startup expertise has been incredibly helpful. 

And finally, thank you to all of the Ahana team, including my co-founders Dave Simmen, Dipti Borkar, Ashish Tadose, Vivek Bharathan, and George Wang. We accomplished a lot over the last three years, and I’m incredibly humbled and proud to have worked with each and every one of you.

We are confident that this acquisition will be a positive step forward for Presto. We look forward to sharing more with you as we embark on this exciting new chapter. 

Thank you for being a part of this journey with us. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to join the Presto community, the best place to meet others is in the Presto community Slack. 

We can’t wait to see what the future holds!

Steven
CEO & Co-Founder, Ahana