by Angela Guess
Ingrid Lunden reports in TechCrunch, “Salesforce has made another acquisition to build out its technology in machine learning and big data analytics: the company has acquired PredictionIO, a startup based out of Palo Alto that had developed an open source-based machine learning server. Salesforce plans to use some of the tech to build out Salesforce’s own machine learning capabilities as part of SalesforceIQ, both in-house as well as in products for Salesforce customers, the startup’s CEO and co-founder Simon Chan said in a blog post announcing the acquisition. But the company will also continue to serve third-party developers, he added.”
Lunden goes on, “You can think of PredictionIO as MySQL for machine learning, as Steve described it when the startup announced a $2.5 million seed round in 2014. The company’s tech, as an open source and essentially free product, makes it more affordable and faster for developers to build machine learning-based products like recommendation or prediction engines.”
She continues, “Two things will be happening post-acquisition, Chan says. First, PredictionIO’s tech will remain open source and free to use, while the team works on ‘evolving the project into a self-sustaining community.’ As part of that the PredictionIO Cluster software on AWS Cloudformation will come down to $0. There is no word on whether Salesforce will plan to develop and support a paid enterprise edition of the product down the line. Second, PredictionIO will be put to work at a very large, specific company: Salesforce itself. Specifically, it will become a part of SalesforceIQ’s machine learning capabilities to ‘enhance intelligence across the Salesforce clouds’.”
photo credit: PredictionIO