Forest Hill, MD, Oct. 24, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® PredictionIO™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.

Apache PredictionIO is an Open Source Machine Learning Server that enables developers to manage and deploy production-ready predictive services for various kinds of Machine Learning tasks.

“PredictionIO was started with the goal of democratizing Machine Learning, by providing a high-degree of customization through templates, using an integrated stack of proven technologies provided by other Apache and Open Source projects,” said Donald Szeto, Vice President of Apache PredictionIO and Principal Data Engineer for Einstein at Salesforce. “It has been inspiring to see the project going through incubation, with a growing user and developer community who provided invaluable feedback and contribution. We are excited about our graduation, and look forward to continuing the project’s goal with the help from the community.”

Apache PredictionIO focuses on enabling developers to quickly develop and deploy production-ready Machine Learning pipelines. The project features an engine template gallery, where developers can pick a template, and quickly ramp up a complete setup for their Machine Learning use cases. Each template in the gallery is designed for a specific Machine Learning scenario.

Apache PredictionIO is in use at ActionML, BizReach, LiftIQ, Pluralsight, and Salesforce, among others.

“We are very interested in PredictionIO for solving any Machine Learning tasks,” said Shinsuke Sugaya, Chief Scientist at BizReach, Inc. “At BizReach, using PredictionIO, we have built a data-analysis platform for HR, which fits learning models from about 5 million job descriptions and recommends preferred items from them to users everyday. PredictionIO has accelerated our analysis and development tasks for data scientists and developers, and simplified infrastructure from data management to prediction server.”

“It was indeed an honor to be asked to mentor PredictionIO through its successful graduation out of the Apache Incubator,” said Suneel Marthi, ASF Member and Apache PredictionIO Incubation Mentor. “Apache PredictionIO is the platform that fills the gap between academic research and productionizing Machine Learning-as-a-Service. As a long-time practitioner of Machine Learning involving large scale analytics, and Apache Mahout project committer for many years, I’ve enjoyed working with PredictionIO team, and can see myself coming back to this community for help with questions when using PredictionIO on the job.”

“I’m excited to see Apache PredictionIO begin to gain the recognition it has truly earned,” said Cody Kimball, Machine Learning Engineer at Pluralsight. “I was fascinated with the growing field of Machine Learning, but had no idea how to get started given my limited development experience. I had the opportunity at work to spearhead some marketing-related Machine Learning efforts, with a 9-month plan to get a working POC up and running. After only 12 weeks, using PredictionIO, I was able to build a fully functioning recommendation engine on our externally-facing Website. We soon saw a 29% increase in forms being filled out, which resulted in a 29% increase in new qualified sales leads, and projected $1,333 increase in MRR. We rolled out this POC test to just 10% of the Web traffic, with much more areas to improve on. This has opened up so many opportunities that never would have been possible had it not been for the availability and reliability of the PredictionIO platform!”

“Apache PredictionIO is a strategic platform that Data Scientists around the globe should learn to master!” said Shane Johnson, Founder and CEO at LiftIQ. “Our team of developers use PredictionIO at the core of our product architecture, and to power our Lift Intelligence Platform (LiftIQ, an app on Salesforce App Exchange). We have been super impressed with the flexibility of the framework: PredictionIO is built on a solid, progressive foundation and cuts Machine Learning development time in half. It allows developers to stay focused on tuning models and integrating Machine Learning with existing apps. The contributors and community are extremely active and helpful. We have had multiple challenges along our path to proving out our product. Each time we have reached out, we received responses from the community within minutes. Thank you PredictionIO team and community and congratulations on becoming an Apache Top-Level Project!”

“ActionML has been obsessed with Machine Learning for years. Some of us have been committers to Apache Mahout, for instance. Apache PredictionIO proved the missing link in putting ML into production for our more demanding clients, several of which are Fortune 500 companies,” said Pat Ferrel, Chief Consultant at ActionML. “PredictionIO plays a key part in our story of ‘Success at Apache’ https://s.apache.org/l9OO “

“Salesforce is committed to making machine learning more accessible and empowering business users from companies of all industries and sizes to work smarter and be more productive. After donating PredictionIO’s Open Source code to ASF, we’ve seen collaboration from several of our teams, as well as customers, ISVs and a wider community,” said Simon Chan, Senior Director, Product Management, Einstein. “Apache PredictionIO reaching Top-Level Project status will unlock the power of AI for companies large and small, empowering them to combine machine learning with their CRM to deliver smarter, more productive customer experiences.”

“We welcome anyone who is passionate about our mission of bringing Machine Learning to the masses to join our effort,” added Szeto. “Any feedback or contribution is invaluable to the project. Join the discussion on our user and development mailing lists.”

Catch Apache PredictionIO in action at the Salesforce Dreamforce 2017 conference 6-9 November 2017 in San Francisco.

Availability and Oversight
Apache PredictionIO software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache PredictionIO, visit http://predictionio.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApachePIO

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server –the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as “The Apache Way,” more than 680 individual Members and 6,300 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSIGMA, ODPi, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. “Apache”, “Mahout”, “Apache Mahout”, “PredictionIO”, “Apache PredictionIO”, and “ApacheCon” are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

CONTACT: Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
+1 617 921 8656