IBM collaborates with Astronomer to strengthen Apache Airflow's robustness within enterprises

12 March 2025

Author

BJ Adesoji

Product Manager, Databand.ai, Astronomer with IBM

IBM

We are excited to announce that IBM is working with Astronomer, a leading managed Apache Airflow platform to help bring seamless data orchestration to clients, via our OEM product, Astronomer with IBM.

This collaboration will broaden IBM’s existing data integration technologies to seamlessly work  the popular opensource Apache Airflow project. This will strengthen IBM’s positioning within cloud-native and open source-first engineering teams with enterprise-grade data security, governance and orchestration needs.

Astronomer is a New York-based organization that is the commercial driver and main contributor to the Apache Airflow project, which is used by over 15,000 data engineering teams to build, schedule and orchestrate pipelines for analytics and AI applications. Astronomer was founded in 2018 and has raised roughly $300 million from investors including Bain Capital Ventures, JP Morgan Chase and Salesforce Ventures.

Simplified data orchestration and operations

“IBM is excited to announce this initiative with Astronomer and their leading enterprise platform for the popular Apache Airflow,” says Scott Brokaw, VP of Product, Data Integration at IBM. “This collaboration aligns with our commitment to open source and aims to strengthen IBM's presence among modern data and cloud engineering teams. Our clients will benefit from the integration of IBM’s top-tier data solutions with Astronomer's best-in-class managed service for Apache Airflow, offering them the best of both worlds.”

Astronomer with IBM is the unified platform to orchestrate and govern all the key components of your data and application stack, including gen AI workloads. Our solution helps to ensure that data is delivered on time, with the speed and scale your critical applications and data products demand. We also abstract the manual plumbing that teams traditionally perform to deploy Airflow in production and at scale within enterprises.

Minimize data disruptions with orchestration

“Every business is looking for ways to better operationalize their data for a competitive advantage, whether it’s AI and MLOps solutions or advanced analytics, and strong data orchestration is the key to success,” said Andy Byron, CEO, Astronomer. “Data teams across the world have gravitated to Apache Airflow because it is the de facto standard for data orchestration, and at Astronomer we provide the best way to run Airflow. Collaborating with IBM allows us to pair our Airflow expertise with their deep enterprise knowledge and proven hybrid cloud and AI-driven data management platforms so that customers drive more value from their data.”

Astronomer with IBM will be available as a client-hosted software to serve the data orchestration needs of our clients within medium-to-high regulation industries and markets.

What are the client benefits?

Clients running Astronomer with IBM can expect an estimated 70% reduction in data downtime and 20% time savings to develop, test and build new pipelines. Other benefits include:

  • Accelerate innovation: Astronomer with IBM’s versatility offered via UI, API & CLI enables deploying various workload types, from legacy scheduling to MLOps, all on our best-in-class orchestration platform.
  • Improve data reliability: Gain full visibility and control over the data supply chain of your critical data products and optimize them with enterprise-grade controls and functionality.
  • Optimize resources: Eliminate the operational overhead of running and managing open-source Airflow deployments in production and at scale with our easy-to-use managed offering.
  • Enterprise support: Minimize risk with a commercial distribution and SLA-backed support.

Astronomer with IBM, leverages IBMs leading data management technology and stellar support with Astronomer’s leading managed Airflow technology.

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