Announcing Preset Cloud GA

Today I’m proud to announce the general availability of Preset Cloud, the cloud analytics platform powered by the popular open-source project Apache Superset.

Preset’s mission is to make every team a data team - we’re all about building an open platform that accelerates the democratization of data, uplevels data literacy, and makes teams of all skill sets productive with data.

When I started Superset at Airbnb in 2015, we needed data exploration and visualization tooling that would keep up with the modern, fast evolving, increasingly open source, data stack. I had just spent the previous year getting the Apache Airflow project off the ground. I knew that open source was the only way to build a solid, modern data exploration solution. At that time, none of the vendors played well with our infrastructure, and the tools were rigid, not extensible, offered very few API integrations, and either felt like they had been built for the desktop era or on obsolete web technology.

Since then, fueled by its accelerating community, Superset has established itself as the leading open source Business Intelligence (BI) platform, and delivers on the vision of an extremely competitive open source alternative that enables anyone to bypass the proprietary, built-on-the-wrong-foundation established incumbents in the BI space.

More recently, when I started Preset in 2019, I wanted to bring the power of Superset to every team through a powerful, yet super easy to use managed cloud service. Looking at the opaquely yet steeply priced aging offerings in BI, we decided that we wanted to bring a solid freemium, transparently priced solution to this market.

Today, after baking Preset Cloud in a closed Beta over the past six months, we’re fully ready to deliver on this vision as I announce the general availability of Preset Cloud! But what exactly are we launching!?

• A straightforward solution that covers your traditional BI needs: no-code data exploration, easily build and share interactive dashboards, a SQL-IDE and much more. All this while enabling enterprises to define their authentication scheme and data access policies. That is essentially a “hosted Superset” with a nice set of bells and whistles.
• A freemium distribution model that enables you to test drive and prove value upfront. For teams of 5 users and less that don’t need the more advanced features, this is free forever. No rush to conduct a trial or to upgrade. On the premium side we offer transparent pricing and you pay as you go.
• A solution built on the right foundation: open source, a cloud native stack, and modern web technologies. No lock-in! If you care about data sovereignty and interplay with the modern data stack, this is the right solution for you.

The data visualization platform for the modern team

Let’s face it, the way software is developed, discovered, adopted and deployed has changed tremendously over the past decade. Open source and the SaaS distribution model have been huge tidal waves changing the software landscape. Modern buyers love the freedom guarantees of open source, the convenience of SaaS, and want to experience value for free and at their own pace.

More importantly, the way people work with data is going through a metamorphosis, with data literacy exploding, specialization around data-specific roles, the rise of data products, and a general democratization of not just “access to data” but also of the whole “analytics process”. Increasingly, modern teams use data everyday to power their work and inform their decisions, and partake in instrumenting, curating, enriching and visualizing this data. Our solutions are built with that in mind, powering the visualization layer and integrating directly with the modern data stack.

It’s also clear that teams need to collaborate with data, and that having a single pane of glass into your organization’s data that’s social and collaborative is key. Modern information workers and data professionals need this productive place where they can see through their data effectively. At Preset, we’re committed to building social, highly collaborative tools that help make sense and create structure around all this tribal knowledge.

The visualization layer for modern data infrastructure

We’re still in the middle of the Cambrian explosion of the data stack, and we’re seeing new database engines, stream processors, computation frameworks, message queues and orchestrators, just to name some of the areas that are rapidly evolving. It’s no secret that traditional vendors have had trouble keeping up with this change, skipping beats, falling behind, and too often they’re widening their focus too wide and distilling their offerings.

Preset is focused on offering solutions on the data consumption and visualization layer, and on integrating well with the best in breed solutions in the modern data stack that teams are using and migrating towards today. We believe that the data stack of the future is a complex ecosystem of products and services that are specialized on different verticals, that integrate seamlessly together. In that world, Superset is the data consumption layer, and Preset is the fully integrated, managed service offering around it.

Open source is the future

At Preset, we believe that the future of BI is open source, and we want to empower every team to have easy access to tooling that matches their needs. The guarantees that come with open source are truly empowering, allowing organizations to be free from vendor lock-in, limitlessly extend, integrate and leverage a whole community to help them succeed. To help and achieve this, Preset has been increasing its contribution to Superset and has been a strong actor in growing the community. We’ve been working closely with companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Nielsen, and many others through the community at building a platform that best serves the modern team and integrates well with the modern stack. We are also contributing back to many other open source projects up and down the stack, most notably Apache ECharts .

As a meritocracy made of a large, diverse, welcoming group of people and organizations, open source simply is a better way to collaborate to produce great software. That garden is the best place to grow the best integrations, extensions, and customizations anyone may want, allowing the project to stay at the cutting edge of the modern data stack.

Clearly, open source at scale benefits from virtuous feedback loops powering strong network effects. As an increasing number of organization’s productivity with data is tied to Superset, the incentive to contribute grows exponentially.

Beyond the tipping point

Along with the Superset community, we’ve rebuilt the data consumption layer (ie “business intelligence”) from the ground up on the right foundation: open source, a cloud-native stack and modern web technologies. At Preset, we’ve conveniently wrapped this offering in a get-value-upfront, freemium, hassle-free SaaS managed service.

We’re super excited to make this available to everyone today. Join us in building this better future and this key component of the modern data stack!