A few years ago, I started PredictionIO, an open source machine learning platform, with the mission to scale and simplify the development of machine learning technology. PredictionIO quickly grew in prominence and was even ranked on Github as the most popular Apache Spark-based machine learning product in the world. When Salesforce acquired PredictionIO in February, I was excited to have the amazing opportunity to continue to build our platform on a much larger scale.

Today, I am thrilled to announce that Salesforce will donate the PredictionIO trademark to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and by unanimous vote the platform has been accepted into the ASF incubator program. This demonstrates the open source community's recognition of the importance of the PredictionIO project. ASF is an independent non-profit organization governing industry-leading open source projects such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra and Apache Lucene. The community will be able to use Salesforce PredictionIO’s innovative platform to build and deploy predictive, intelligent apps at scale.

Through the Apache Software Foundation, we will be able to bring the Salesforce PredictionIO open-source project to a whole new level. In addition to the community building on it, Salesforce will continue to allocate resources to the project. Reception from the community has been extremely positive.

"I have been following the PredictionIO project very closely since I first heard about the project in Spring 2015 and liked the idea of Machine Learning/ Predictive Analytics as a Service,” said Suneel Marthi, Senior Principal Engineer, Office of Technology, Red Hat. “When Salesforce was looking into submitting PredictionIO to the Apache incubator, I jumped onto the opportunity to become a mentor and be more actively and closely engaged with the project. I look forward to seeing PredictionIO as a Top-Level Apache project soon."

We are proud to have the stamp of Apache on Salesforce PredictionIO, and we are looking forward to seeing the project thrive as Salesforce continues to deepen its support of the open source community.

About the Author

Simon Chan is a product innovator and a serial entrepreneur, with 13 years of tech management experience in various cities including London, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Beijing and the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently, Simon joined Salesforce through the acquisition of PredictionIO. He was the founding CEO of PredictionIO - an open source Machine Learning Server that empowers programmers and data engineers to build smart applications. Following a successful launch in 2012, PredictionIO has become the most popular Spark-based machine learning project on Github. Simon holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a PhD in Machine Learning from University College London.