Voltron Data Releases Enterprise Subscription for Arrow

Voltron Data has announced its first commercial offering, the Voltron Enterprise Subscription for Arrow. With support for new and existing Apache Arrow users, the subscription offers exclusive access to features for enhancing the experience of building and deploying enterprise applications with the platform. The news follows a February announcement that the company raised $110 million in seed and Series A funding.

Apache Arrow is an open source computing framework that accelerates data interchange and in-memory computing. According to the press release, Arrow “has become the de facto standard for seamless interoperability between computing engines, modern computing hardware and programming languages” and companies like Dremio, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks have adopted it to expedite data analytics processes. Voltron Data claims Arrow is installed more than 51 million times per month.

There are three tiers of the company’s enterprise subscription: a free edition for companies just beginning to experiment with Arrow, a developer edition meant for those who are developing software with the platform, and a pro edition for enterprises running production applications with Arrow-developed software.

Depending on the chosen tier, benefits of the new subscription include on-demand assistance from Arrow developers, issue reporting and fixes, security notices and custom upgrade guidance, hotfixes after detection of critical vulnerabilities, and “direct access to leaders within the Arrow project and services only available to Voltron Data customers.”

In a blog post, the company explains it is offering the tiered subscription levels to appeal to different users. Engineers who are experimenting with Arrow for a project’s exploration phase may not have the budget or support of those who use it for business-critical applications. Voltron Data says the latter users see the most value in this service because keeping Arrow-dependent projects running smoothly is highly important to them, and they do not mind budgeting more for this service. However, by including a free subscription for exploratory use of Arrow, the company hopes it can “help to incubate valuable new applications of Arrow.”

Voltron Data was founded last year by CTO Wes McKinney and CEO Josh Patterson, tech industry veterans with strong ties to Arrow. According to a blog post released for the founding, McKinney was a co-creator of Arrow in 2015 and has worked to build a developer community aimed at realizing Arrow’s goals: “to be an efficient, language-independent open standard for columnar data interchange, […and] to be a portable, high-performance computing foundation for doing analytics on that columnar data.” McKinney was also creator of the Python pandas project which made Python so ubiquitous for data science, machine learning and AI. Additionally, he founded Ursa Computing and Ursa Labs, which he folded into Voltron Data at its launch.

Patterson is a senior director of Nvdia’s RAPIDS, a GPU-executed library of data analytics software based on Arrow. By unifying their experience into one company, the duo and their team are committed to strengthening and developing standards for the open source ecosystem built around Arrow. Through empowering Arrow’s users with multiple benefits designed to accelerate its successful use, The Voltron Enterprise Subscription for Arrow is a major boost for these goals.

“After years of growth, Arrow is not only an open source standard but an enterprise standard as well. We are excited to launch this product focused on enabling enterprises—and the data platform companies that serve them—to take full advantage of the benefits of Arrow,” said Patterson.

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