Confluent, Inc. (Confluent) creates a data infrastructure platform focused on data in motion.
Confluent’s platform allows customers to connect their applications, systems, and data layers and can be deployed either as a self-managed software offering, Confluent Platform, or as a fully-managed cloud-native software-as-a-service (‘SaaS’) offering, Confluent Cloud. Confluent also offers professional services and education services.
The company has pioneered a new category of data infrastructure d...
Confluent, Inc. (Confluent) creates a data infrastructure platform focused on data in motion.
Confluent’s platform allows customers to connect their applications, systems, and data layers and can be deployed either as a self-managed software offering, Confluent Platform, or as a fully-managed cloud-native software-as-a-service (‘SaaS’) offering, Confluent Cloud. Confluent also offers professional services and education services.
The company has pioneered a new category of data infrastructure designed to connect all the applications, systems, and data layers of a company around a real-time central nervous system. This new data infrastructure software has emerged as one of the most strategic parts of the next-generation technology stack, and using this stack to harness data in motion is critical to the success of modern companies as they strive to compete and win in the digital-first world.
The leading open source offering for setting data into motion, Apache Kafka, was originally created by the company’s founders while at LinkedIn in 2011 and brought to the mainstream a new paradigm of data processing. However, this was only the beginning. Confluent was founded to create a product that could make data in motion the central nervous system of every company in the world.
Confluent is pioneering this fundamentally new category. The company’s offering is designed to act as the nexus of real-time data, from every source, allowing it to stream across the organization and enabling applications to harness it to power real-time customer experiences and data-driven business operations. The company’s offering can be deployed either as a fully-managed, cloud-native SaaS offering available on all major cloud providers or an enterprise-ready, self-managed software offering. The company’s cloud-native offering works across multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures, delivering massive scalability, elasticity, security, and global interconnectedness, enabling agile development.
The company’s open source roots are a key driver of its go-to-market success. Apache Kafka has become the industry standard for data in motion. Modern applications are expected to integrate with Apache Kafka, and the technical skill set for Kafka has become a critical requirement in the industry. Confluent’s products provide the capabilities of Apache Kafka but do so on a platform built for the cloud, complemented by connectivity to the larger enterprise, and with the ability to process and govern at scale. The developer community understands the benefits of a complete data streaming platform. Consequently, software developers within the company’s prospective customers’ engineering or IT departments are often very familiar with its underlying technology and value proposition and evangelize on the company’s behalf.
Confluent has built an operationalized customer journey, which the company calls its Data in Motion Journey, focused on data in motion that ties together product features, go-to-market efforts, and customer success capabilities, and helps take customers from their initial experiments with the technology to organization-wide adoption as one of their most critical data platforms. This starts by landing use cases in a high volume, low-friction manner while projects are still being conceived and the architecture of the solution is being designed. Awareness and use of the company’s offering begin even before the company’s sales efforts, given the widespread adoption of Apache Kafka by developers and the self-service adoption made possible with the company’s cloud product and community downloads. The company’s enterprise sales force takes these initial engagements and helps users progress to production use cases and paying customers either on a pay-as-you-go model or with a committed contract. Once customers see the benefits of the company’s product for their initial use cases, they often expand into other use cases and lines of business, divisions, and geographies. The company’s deep technical expertise, coupled with the company’s product capabilities and laser focus on customer outcomes, enable the company to form strategic partnerships with the company’s customers on this journey. This expansion is helped by a natural network effect in which the value of the company’s platform to a customer increases as more use cases are adopted, more applications and systems are connected, and more data is added. Over time, by enabling data in motion across the organization, Confluent can become the central nervous system for their entire organization, allowing data to be captured and processed as it is generated in real-time across hundreds of teams, systems, and applications throughout the company.
Solution
Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion for developers and enterprises alike. In order for enterprises to deliver rich customer experiences, it is critical for all of their business functions, departments, teams, applications, and data stores to have complete connectivity, be thoroughly integrated, and be able to analyze data as it is generated. Confluent is designed to be this intelligent connective tissue by having real-time data from multiple sources constantly streamed across an enterprise for real-time analysis.
The company’s offering enables organizations to deploy production-ready applications that run across cloud infrastructures and data centers, and scales elastically, with enhanced features for security and compliance. The company’s platform provides the capabilities to fill the structural, operational, and engineering gaps that are required for businesses to fully realize the power of data in motion. The company enables software developers to easily build their initial applications to harness data in motion, and enable large, complex enterprises to make data in motion core to everything they do. As organizations mature in their adoption cycle, the company enables them to build more and more applications that take advantage of data in motion. The results have a dual effect: businesses continuously improve their ability to provide better customer experiences and concurrently drive data-driven business operations. Confluent can become the central nervous system for modern digital enterprises, providing ubiquitous real-time connectivity and powering real-time applications across the enterprise.
The following are two essential attributes of a central nervous system from a data-in-motion perspective:
A full central nervous system must be able to connect and react to data wherever it exists, whether in an on-premise data center or in the public or private cloud.
It must also be able to span all environments while unpacking the ‘data mess’- i.e., the patchwork of different data ecosystems, applications, and systems created by both modern real-time use cases, while satisfying the security and compliance requirements of legacy environments.
Confluent’s offering spans both of these requirements. The company provides an on-premise offering (Confluent Platform) for deployments that must remain on-premise, and the company also provides a fully-managed SaaS offering (Confluent Cloud) that is entirely cloud-native. And with engineered features like Cluster Linking, the company provides a seamless experience to create a consistent data fabric across the entire offering that is highly performant with low latency.
Additionally, a high-performance, low-latency infrastructure for harnessing data in motion requires operating wherever a customer’s applications and systems reside. Customers with applications in a particular cloud would use Confluent Cloud in that cloud provider and region. Customers with applications on premises, or on a private cloud, would use Confluent Platform in that data center. Customers with both on premises and cloud, or even multiple clouds, need Confluent in each of these environments. Together, these solutions can act as one unified fabric for data streams that connect all of these customer environments.
In addition, Confluent’s solution is differentiated from other offerings in the following three ways:
Cloud-Native. Operating natively in the cloud is fundamentally different and requires a completely different feature set to enable elasticity and scalability, cutting right to the heart of the design of data systems. With this in mind, the company has heavily invested in rearchitecting the technologies underlying data in motion, including Apache Kafka, with the company’s purpose-built Kora engine, which powers Confluent Cloud and offers true cloud functionality for data in motion. The company’s Kora engine is designed to be fully compatible with open source Apache Kafka, but is designed from the ground up to be a true managed service.
Additionally, the company offers a high-velocity, frictionless pay-as-you-go model, allowing developers to easily sign up without having to enter a credit card, experience and see the value of Confluent, and seamlessly transition to only being billed for what is used. The combination of these capabilities and features creates a compelling and simple solution for developers looking to build upon data in motion in the cloud and for enterprises looking for a secured, governed enterprise solution. With Confluent, developers and enterprises alike can focus on their applications and drive value without worrying about the operational overhead of managing data infrastructure.
Complete. A complete solution requires more than just data streaming capabilities - rather, customers need a true data streaming platform that allows them to stream, connect, process, and govern their data. The company has created a complete data streaming platform, by leveraging capabilities from open source Apache Kafka with the company’s significant proprietary capabilities. The company’s technology moves and processes data concurrently, with specific tools such as ksqlDB, a native data-in-motion database that allows users to build data-in-motion applications using just a few SQL statements, as well as over 120 connectors, which allow users to easily stream data between the company’s data streaming platform and other data systems. The company’s robust capabilities dramatically enhance developer productivity, increase ease of operations, and provide enterprise-level security, governance, resilience, and expertise in a complete platform, providing significant benefits over companies trying to build these complex features on their own. The company’s acquisition of immerok GmbH, an Apache Flink stream processing managed services company, will enable the company to make Confluent Cloud even more compelling by adding support for Flink, a powerful technology for building stream processing applications and one of the most popular Apache open source projects.
In addition to the streaming, connecting, and processing capabilities mentioned above, the company offers a full Stream Governance suite purpose-built for data in motion. Stream Governance establishes trust in the real-time data moving throughout the business and delivers an easy, self-service experience that enables more teams to discover, understand, and put their data streams to work. With trusted, high-quality data streams, self-service data discovery, and insights into complex data relationships, teams can safely accelerate data streaming initiatives without bypassing controls for risk management or regulatory compliance.
Everywhere. The company has built a truly hybrid and multi-cloud offering. The company can support customers in their cloud and multi-cloud environments, on-premises, or a combination of both. From early on, the company recognized that the journey to the cloud is not overnight or simple, and in order for the company’s customers to effectively digitally transform, they require a fundamental data streaming platform that can integrate seamlessly across their entire technology environment. The company offers this essential capability and enable organizations to seamlessly leverage data in motion across their public cloud, private cloud, and data center environments, ensuring total connectivity throughout an organization. For enterprises that are increasingly expanding internationally, Confluent’s multi-cloud support also enables organizations to leverage data in motion across multiple data centers and providers, stretched around the world. For enterprises that want to be hybrid cloud, the company is able to extract information from the entirety of their infrastructure, allowing the company to act as the bridge that unites legacy systems in older environments with modern applications in the cloud. This ability to let customers embrace the new without having to fully replace everything that is old is a critical point of differentiation and a critical element in the cloud adoption strategy of many of the company’s customers.
Growth Strategy
The company is pursuing its substantial market opportunity with growth strategies that include easy and frictionless land with cloud pay-as-you-go; continuing the company’s focus on its customer growth go-to-market model; enterprise-wide adoption via use case expansion; extending the company’s product leadership and innovation; continuing to invest in the open source community; grow and harness the company’s partner ecosystem; expand internationally; expanding the scope of the company’s data streaming platform with stream processing, connect, governance, and other investments; and growing further use cases up-the-stack leveraging the company’s strategic position for data in motion.
Product Offering
Confluent’s full-featured data streaming platform provides a complete solution for working with data in motion, including the ability to read, write, store, capture, validate, secure, and process continuous streams of data. It also has features designed to fulfill the requirements of modern cloud infrastructure: it is a modern distributed system built to be secure, fault tolerant, and scalable elastically from a single application to hundreds or thousands of applications within an organization. In a world increasingly reliant on a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, the company enables customers to deploy across on-premise and cloud environments as needed and provide a seamless experience across the entire offering.
The company provides Confluent Platform for deployments that must remain on-premise. The company also provides Confluent Cloud, a fully-managed SaaS offering that is entirely cloud-native. Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud offer unique benefits both individually in their respective environments and collectively as a single unified data streaming platform. And regardless of where the company’s customers have their technology environments, the company is able to deliver an integrated data streaming platform that can grow to become the core of their central nervous system.
Confluent Cloud is the company’s fully-managed cloud-native offering, available on all of the major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure). Confluent Cloud is offered to the company’s customers via a pay-as-you-go model with no commitment, or via an annual, or multi-year, subscription model where customers draw down upon a committed dollar amount. Confluent Cloud offers several unique attributes:
Serverless. Confluent Cloud offers self-serve provisioning with no complex cluster sizing, zero downtime, upgrades and bug fixes, elastic scaling, and the ability for customers to pay only for what they actually use.
Complete. Confluent Cloud offers data compatibility with fully-managed Schema Registry, rapid development through fully-managed connectors, real-time processing with fully-managed ksqlDB, virtually infinite data retention, and committer-led support with contractual response times of 60 minutes or less for severe-impact issues. The company has heavily invested in rearchitecting open source Apache Kafka with the company’s purpose-built Kora engine, which powers Confluent Cloud. The company’s Kora engine is designed to be fully compatible with open source Apache Kafka, but is designed from the ground up to be a true managed service.
Flexible. Confluent Cloud offers the ability to build a persistent bridge from on-premises to cloud, and the ability to stream across public clouds for multi-cloud data pipelines.
Highly Available. Confluent Cloud offers a guaranteed 99.95% uptime SLA, ability to scale to 10s of GBps with dedicated capacity, ability to achieve sub 30ms latency at scale, and multi availability-zone (AZ) replication.
Secure. Confluent Cloud offers at-rest and in-transit data encryption, SAML/SSO for user authentication, private networking via VPC peering or AWS Transit Gateway, and monitoring visibility with topic- and cluster-level metrics.
Confluent Platform is the company’s enterprise-grade self-managed software offering, able to be deployed on-premises, as well as across public and private cloud environments. Confluent Platform is offered to the company’s customers via an annual or multi-year subscription. Confluent Platform offers several unique attributes:
Unrestricted Developer Productivity. Confluent Platform offers developers the ability to build across multiple development languages, utilize a rich pre-built ecosystem of over 120 connectors, and benefit from a fully integrated data-in-motion database.
Efficient Operations at Scale. Confluent Platform enables the company’s customers to minimize operational complexity while ensuring high performance and scalability.
Production-Stage Prerequisites. Confluent Platform offers foundational enterprise-level features needed to implement data in motion in production.
Freedom of Choice. Confluent Platform can be deployed on-premises or in public or hybrid cloud environments.
When customers use both Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform for their cloud and on-premise deployments, they can leverage the full features and functionality of the company’s unified data streaming platform. Many of the benefits that multi-cloud and hybrid customers derive from using either Confluent Cloud or Confluent Platform are amplified when connecting both across environments, and deployments across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform benefit from the following features and functionality that enable adoption of data in motion throughout an organization:
Rich Pre-Built Ecosystem
Over 120 Pre-Built Connectors. The company develops and works with partners who develop enterprise-ready connectors to easily integrate data and build applications. Connectors are supported by either Confluent or the company’s partners.
ksqlDB and Flink. ksqlDB is a database that unifies the processing of data in motion and data at rest. This enables customers to build applications that compute new stored data sets off continuous data streams or enrich data streams with stored data. It translates the near-universal SQL interface of traditional databases to the world of data in motion, making it accessible for the vast majority of software developers with minimal learning time. And with the addition of Flink to the company’s existing investment in ksqlDB, the company will allow customers to leverage one of the most popular Apache open source projects for building stream processing applications.
Schema Registry. Schema Registry is a central repository with a RESTful interface for developers to define standard schemas and register applications to enable compatibility.
Management, Monitoring, and Global Resilience
Confluent Control Center (C3). Offers a simple way to manage and monitor data in motion as it scales across the enterprise. Control Center is a web-based graphical user interface to understand the data-in-motion environment, meet SLAs, and control key components of the data-in-motion platform.
Multi-Region Clusters. Multi-Region Clusters automate disaster recovery, allowing customers to run a single cluster across multiple data centers and automate disaster recovery with operational simplicity.
Cluster and Schema Linking. Cluster and Schema Linking enable customers to consistently geo-replicate data, making it easy to create a seamless and persistent bridge from Confluent Platform in on-premises environments to Confluent Cloud.
Dynamic Performance and Elasticity
Self-Balancing Clusters. Self-Balancing Clusters automate partition rebalances to optimize throughput, accelerate broker scaling, and reduce the operational burden of managing a large cluster. Partition rebalances are completed quickly and without any risk of human error.
Tiered Storage. Tiered Storage allows deployments to recognize two tiers of storage: local disks and cost-efficient object stores (Amazon S3 or GCP Storage). Brokers can offload older topic data to object storage, enabling virtually infinite retention.
Scalability. Confluent offers the ability to scale to trillions of events, as well as scale across business units in order to become an enterprise standard.
Enterprise-Grade Security
Structured Audit Logs. Structured Audit Logs capture authorization logs in a set of dedicated topics, on a local or a remote cluster.
Role-based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC is a centralized implementation for secure access to resources with fine-tuned granularity and platform-wide standardization. Customers can control permissions by users/groups to clusters, topics, consumers groups, and even individual connectors.
Stream Governance. Stream Governance establishes trust in real-time data moving throughout the business. The company offers an easy, self-service experience that enables more teams to discover, understand, and put data streams to work. With trusted, high-quality data streams, self-service data discovery, and insights into complex data relationships, teams can safely accelerate data streaming initiatives without bypassing controls for risk management or regulatory compliance.
Data Compatibility and DevOps Automation
Schema Validation. Schema Validation provides a direct interface between the broker and Schema Registry to validate and enforce schemas programmatically. Schema Validation can be configured at the topic level.
Confluent Operator. Confluent Operator simplifies running Confluent Platform as a cloud-native system on Kubernetes, whether on-premises or in the cloud. It delivers an enterprise-ready implementation of the Kubernetes Operator API to automate deployment and key lifecycle operations.
The company’s offering is designed to serve as fundamental data infrastructure for the company’s customers and solve an enormous variety of use cases across both front-end customer experiences and back-end business operations.
In addition to the company’s core offering, the company offers several services offerings:
Professional Services. Professional Services provides expertise and tools that help the company’s customers accelerate platform adoption and achieve successful business outcomes. The company offers packaged and residency offerings focused on helping customers plan, implement, manage/monitor, and optimize their platform and applications.
Education. The company’s offering includes training and certification guidance, technical resources, and access to hands-on training and certification exams. Education offerings are targeted at different types of users and delivery modalities to suit end customer needs. The company has instructor-led training, self-paced on-demand courses, and certification.
Certification Program. Technical expertise in data in motion is highly sought after and a highly-paid skill set. The company’s certification program enables technical personnel to demonstrate and validate in-depth knowledge of data in motion.
Licensing
The company’s software products are protected by its licensing policies, which include the company’s full proprietary license, as well as the company’s community license, which restricts others from offering the company’s technology as a competing SaaS offering.
Instead of opting for a traditional ‘open core’ model, the company’s core offering (Confluent Server) is substantially differentiated from Apache Kafka and was fundamentally re-architected to operate at cloud-scale, while being interoperable with existing Apache Kafka systems.
The company’s Confluent Community License makes available many features that the company has developed at Confluent. This gives developers the functionality needed to get started with Confluent, but excludes some of the core features of the company’s commercial platform. Developers can access and modify the source code for such features but cannot take these features and use them to provide a competing SaaS offering.
The company focuses on converting Confluent Community License users to paying customers by demonstrating the value of the fully-managed Confluent Cloud offering and the self-managed Confluent Platform offering, where developers get proprietary features, such as Confluent control center, Confluent operator, self-balancing clusters, tiered storage, structured audit logs, RBAC, schema validation, and multi-region clusters.
Sales and Marketing
In order to fully capitalize on the company’s large market opportunity, the company’s sales and marketing teams are tightly integrated to execute upon a cohesive ‘consumption-oriented’ go-to-market motion.
The company’s customer growth go-to-market model is centered around the Data in Motion Journey, from initial interest, to pilot, to first production project, to an integrated platform across the enterprise. Through mapping to the customer journey, the company is able to drive customer value in a highly targeted manner, and the company’s success is tied to its customers’ actual usage of and success with the company’s product.
The company’s strategy to expand within accounts has two fundamental aspects: first, to convert additional pockets of Apache Kafka interest and deployments within a given customer into a Confluent deployment, and second, to expand into additional use cases within a given customer through solutions selling with horizontal and vertical solutions.
The company’s focus on customer success is critical to its sales and marketing success. The company offers a wide range of training, professional services, education, and support offerings to enable the company’s customers to rapidly onboard, adopt, and ultimately realize value from data in motion.
Partnerships with the leading cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP), as well as global and regional systems integrators and technology ISVs (MongoDB, Elastic, and Snowflake) are also central to the company’s sales and marketing strategy. Through these partnerships, the company will significantly expand the reach of the company’s technology.
The company offers a fully self-service motion, where developers can learn and purchase in a completely online manner. The company offers direct sales engagement, where customers can interact with experienced and knowledgeable field teams. The company also offers the ability to engage and transact through the company’s partner ecosystem, including the major cloud provider marketplaces, system integrators, technology ISVs, and resellers.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2023, the company held five U.S. patents and had nine pending patent applications. The company does not hold any non-U.S. patents. The patents are scheduled to expire in 2042.
As of December 31, 2023, the company owned five registered trademarks in the United States, one trademark application pending in the United States, 41 registered trademarks in various non-U.S. jurisdictions, and three trademark applications pending in various non-U.S. jurisdictions.
Competition
The company’s principal competitors in the cloud are the well-established public cloud providers, such as AWS that generally compete in all of the company’s markets. These enterprises are developing and have released fully-managed, data ingestion, and data streaming products, such as Azure Event Hubs (Microsoft Corporation), Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB Streams (AWS), and Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow (Google). On premise, there are a number of vendors with legacy products that have pivoted into this space including Cloudera Dataflow, TIBCO Messaging, and Red Hat AMQ Streams.
The company offers Confluent Cloud on the public clouds provided by AWS, Azure, and GCP, which are also some of the company’s primary actual competitors.
History
Confluent, Inc. was founded in 2014. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2014.
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