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February 9, 2021

Starburst Galaxy Manages Presto in the Cloud

The beta release of high-flying Starburst’s first managed analytics service targets the enterprise migration to multi-cloud deployments that bring with them new data access challenges.

Starburst, a backer of the open source Presto query engine, is following last month’s close of a $100 million funding round with the release of its cloud-native Galaxy distributed analytics platform. Galaxy is built around the Trino SQL query engine, formerly known as Presto SQL. The federated SQL query engine was developed as a follow up to Apache Hive by Facebook engineers who went on to found Starburst.

The managed service “will help Starburst expand into a broader market to serve organizations without the internal resources, technical skills or bandwidth to quickly and easily take control of their data analytics,” the analytics vendor said Tuesday (Feb. 9).

Boston-based Starburst said it is targeting Galaxy at data analytic users requiring quick access to data scattered across multiple clouds. Hence, the managed service is promoted as reducing infrastructure oversight that includes easier cluster management along with tools used to finetune queries.

Meanwhile, data movement between cloud databases is reduced, thereby speeding analysis, by paring down requirements for shifting and copying data stored across multi-cloud and on-premise deployments.

Starburst’s multi-cloud strategy reflects the inexorable enterprise shift of databases and analytics tools to the cloud. The federated query engine on which Galaxy is based allows users to analyze data stored across databases, data lakes, distributed file systems and streaming data platforms.

Starburst goal is “helping companies move from the expensive ‘single source of truth’ ideology made famous by decades-old data warehouses, to a ‘single point of access’, which enables organizations to access all data across multiple cloud providers and even on premises without having to understand and manage the complicated underlying infrastructure,” said Matt Fuller, a co-founder and Starburst’s vice president of product.

The release of Galaxy follows the closing of a Series B round in January that pushed Starburst’s venture funding total to $164 million. The three-year-old company claims a market valuation of $1.2 billion, perhaps making the analytics startup another candidate for a future stock offering.

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