Vespa, created by Yahoo in 2005, is a tool used to compute large-scale data sets in real time. It drives searches and recommendations on Yahoo-owned sites and is used by thousands of brands, including Spotify, OkCupid, and Wix. The spin-off is aimed at increasing capacity to meet the growing demand for Vespa's cloud service.
Key takeaways:
- Yahoo is spinning off Vespa, its big data serving engine, into an independent venture with Jon Bratseth, a former VP architect at Yahoo, as CEO.
- Yahoo will continue to invest in Vespa and remain its largest customer, also holding a stake in Vespa and a seat on its board of directors.
- Vespa, which was created by Yahoo in 2005, is used by Yahoo and thousands of other brands, including Spotify, OkCupid and Wix, serving a user base of a billion people and processing 800,000 queries per second.
- The decision to spin Vespa into its own company was made to increase capacity, as a growing number of companies are asking to deploy their applications to Vespa's cloud service.