IBM Corp. has acquired Ahana Cloud Inc., a startup that offers managed and commercial versions of the Presto open-source distributed query engine, for an undisclosed price.

In doing so, IBM becomes a member of the Presto Foundation, which curates the project that in 2013 was spun out of Facebook Inc., now Meta Platforms Inc. The companies made the joint announcement quietly Wednesday.

Ahana positions Presto as a core element of a “lakehouse,” which is a repository for data analytics that includes both structured and unstructured data types. The software was originally built to run on the Hadoop framework for storing and processing large data sets but has since been extended to a variety of other relational and nonrelational sources.

Known for speed

Presto takes a massively parallel processing approach to data management, designating one coordinator node to work in sync with multiple worker notes. As an in-memory query engine, it’s known for its speed and value in cloud data management scenarios. Among the more prominent users of Presto are Twitter Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.

The deal continues the significant investments IBM has made in open-source projects over the past few years, highlighted by its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Inc. in 2018. “We believe in the open source governance of the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation,” Vikram Murali, IBM’s vice president of hybrid data management, wrote in a blog post co-authored with Ahana co-founder and Chief Executive Steven Mih (pictured). “One example is our role as a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which fostered the growth of Kubernetes. We see our involvement with Presto Foundation as a similar relationship.”

Ahana is one of two founding members of the Presto Foundation and a major contributor to the project with four “committers” — people who are ultimately responsible for the quality of a project’s code base — and two technical steering committee members. In a statement, IBM said the acquisition was intended to :further our long-standing commitment to open source and continue building sustainable, thriving communities and ecosystems around open source projects that matter to our clients.”

Founded three years ago, Ahana has raised $32 million in funding from investors that include Google LLC’s GV Management Co LLC, Leslie Ventures Inc. and Lux Capital Management LLC.

Competitors include Starburst Data Inc., which has raised more than $400 million for its cloud-based service based on a Presto fork called Trino. Amazon Web Services Inc. also sells a serverless distributed query service called Athena that uses both Presto and Trino.

“More companies are moving away from legacy data warehousing models to storing their data in lower-cost object-storage, and putting flexible analytics solutions on top to analyze the data in and around their lake,” Starburst CEO Justin Borgman said in an emailed statement. “This is further validation of this more modern data lakehouse approach.”

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