Presto Foundation Announces IBM Membership and Community Momentum as Annual PrestoCon Day Approaches

On the heels of two Presto-related announcements from IBM ? its watsonx.data datalake and its acquisition of Ahana ? the Presto Foundation community will gather at the upcoming free virtual PrestoCon Day to discuss the growing use of Presto at internet-scale companies and for the Open Data Lakehouse. At the event, IBM will share more about their decision to join the Presto Foundation and demo its new watsonx.data lakehouse architecture, which includes Presto as one of its key open source query engines.

Presto Foundation, hosted at the Linux Foundation, is the non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the open source Presto SQL engine for data analytics and the open lakehouse. IBM recently joined the Presto Foundation through its acquisition of Ahana.

"PrestoCon Day provides an ideal forum for highlighting the role that the Presto query engine plays in IBM's watsonx.data lakehouse offering, as well as its data lakehouse and open source strategies," said Ali LeClerc, chairperson of the Presto Foundation Outreach Committee. "IBM's recent embrace of Presto for use with watsonx.data is a testament to Presto's power as an open source data engine."

IBM "has a sizable investment in Presto," reports a May 10, 2023, article in Datanami. "With its capability to read data from multiple data stores and serve up fast ad-hoc queries, Presto has emerged as one of the leading processing engines for the modern data stack," according to the article.

Presto already has been powering the industry trend toward data lakehouses, which bring together the best of data lakes and data warehouses, to provide a single, unified view of data, especially for complex, large-scale data queries.

"IBM's choice of Presto for the watsonx.data lakehouse is further validation that Presto is the best SQL engine for the Data Lakehouse," said Girish Baliga, Governing Board chairperson of Presto Foundation and director of engineering at Uber. "That, coupled with the open and neutral governance model of the Presto Foundation, is why companies like Intel, HPE, Uber, Meta and now IBM have chosen to join the Presto Foundation. It allows for collaboration and innovation at scale that proprietary options can't match."

The annual PrestoCon Day on Wednesday, June 7, 2023, will bring together Presto users and developers from organizations around the globe. Participants will share their Presto innovations and talk about how Presto is used to solve real-world data challenges at companies, including Adobe, Alibaba, Bolt and TikTok. A panel titled "Presto at Scale" will bring Intuit, Meta, and Uber together to discuss their usage of Presto and share performance metrics at their respective companies.

PrestoCon Day Free and Virtual

Attendees can register for the free, virtual event and access the schedule at: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/prestocon-day/

About the Presto Foundation

A member of the Linux Foundation, the Presto Foundation is a non-profit that supports Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine initially developed at Facebook (now Meta) and known for its performance and scalability. The Presto Foundation operates under an open governance model that promotes transparency, collaboration and community-driven decision-making. Dozens of companies use Presto, including Adobe, Bytedance, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, Meta, Tencent and Uber.