Ride-hailing firm Grab signs up for Qubole’s cloud-native big data platform

Singapore-based ride-sharing company Grab has selected Qubole’s cloud-native big data platform on Microsoft Azure for Presto-based reporting and ad-hoc exploration. 

Presto is a query engine for big data.

“Qubole’s cloud-native architecture with multiple big data open source engines, ease-of-use for monitoring and cluster management, and work-load aware auto-scaling Presto at scale while being faster than other available alternatives, are some of the reasons we selected Qubole as our big data solution,” Edwin Law, head of data engineering at Grab, said in a statement.

Qubole, a cloud platform partner with Microsoft, has built a cloud-native data platform to process large amounts of data for self-service analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The US- and India-based company said that Grab has also forged a strategic partnership with Microsoft to transform the delivery of digital services and mobility. 

Grab is using Microsoft Azure for its machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, to scale its platform efficiently and increase its capacity and capabilities, the statement added.

"Grab's Qubole solution uses Microsoft's new Generation 2 Azure Data Lake storage. Azure Generation 2 Storage combines the scalability, cost-effectiveness, security model and rich capabilities of Azure Blob Storage optimised for big data use,” said JG Chirapurath, general manager of Azure data services marketing.

 Grab currently has more than 600 analysts who are using Qubole Presto.