Alibaba is deepening its partnership with Berlin-based data Artisans, collaborating to build up Apache Flink, software created by dA to process large amounts of data, the companies said Monday.

In 2014, dA created Apache Flink to enable user-friendly data processing on a massive scale, given the prevalence of big data in the digital era, releasing the software to the open-source community. Since then, developers have worked to enhance Apache Flink’s performance and use cases, especially for large businesses.

Alibaba has been working with data Artisans, and supporting the open-source community built around the software, since 2016. In that time, both companies have helped the Flink community improve the architecture and performance of the software to meet the stream-processing demands of enterprises worldwide. The deepening of the partnership was a natural next step for the companies as they continued their work around Apache Flink, they said.

“By leveraging the technology expertise of both teams and shared passion to develop the open-source community, we are confident that this strategic tie-in will further strengthen the growth of the Flink community, accelerate the data-processing technologies and help bolster an open, collaborative and constructive environment for global developers who are passionate about stream processing and enabling real-time applications for modern enterprises,” said Jingren Zhou, Vice President, Alibaba Group.

Alibaba said it wants to foster growth of the open-source communities around data-processing technologies, accelerate stream-processing adoption and further develop a supportive environment for even more developers globally. In turn, this would serve to drive the development of big-data technologies through open-source projects and communities, in areas such as stream processing, batch processing and machine learning, which developers can leverage to power artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and other real-time processing applications, Alibaba said.

In a blog post to the Apache Flink community, dA founders Kostas Tzoumas and Stephan Ewen wrote that Alibaba was “committed to open source and our mission, and eager to take Flink’s technological advancement to the next level.”

The two companies plan to work together to “continue and accelerate their contributions to Apache Flink and open source big data in general.” As a sign of that commitment, Alibaba will contribute its in-house modifications of Flink (called Blink) to the open-source community.

“Together with Alibaba, we can enhance our efforts and technology to new horizons by investing even more to open source,” Tzoumas and Ewen wrote. “We can expand to new areas that we have not explored in the past and”make sure that the Flink comes a more valuable data-processing framework for modern, data-driven and real-time enterprises.”