Company growth in 2016 driven by strong demand for streaming platforms and Apache Kafka® as enterprises go real time
PALO ALTO, Calif. – February 1, 2017 – Confluent, provider of the only streaming platform based on Apache Kafka®, today announced record results in 2016 with over 700 percent subscription bookings growth year over year. The increasingly broad adoption of streaming platforms is driving demand for Confluent solutions across a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare, technology, retail and automotive, among others. As enterprises become fully digital, they are transforming mission-critical infrastructure into streaming platforms to put real-time data at the center of their business. Companies want the ability to create new products, respond to customers and make business decisions in real time. To better serve its fast-growing customer base in Europe, Confluent also opened a new London office.
Apache Kafka production deployments accelerated in 2016 and it is now used by one-third of the Fortune 500, including seven of the top 10 global banks, eight of the top 10 insurance companies, nine of the top 10 U.S. telecom companies and six of the top 10 travel companies.
“We are seeing incredible demand for streaming platforms and real-time data from customers around the world,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO at Confluent. “The dramatic shift from batch processing to real-time streaming is changing how enterprises do business, and companies that realize the potential of streams can immediately respond to their customers, their supply chain or competitive threats.”
Founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka, the leading open source streaming platform for real-time data pipelines and stream processing applications, Confluent is the top contributor to the project. Confluent provides a distribution of Apache Kafka that adds enterprise and production-scale features and support, all backed by its unique expertise to maximize the impact of deployments across a variety of use cases.
“As a leader in online and mobile travel, we process and analyze billions of messages per day,” said Ravi Peddinti, Sr. Director Software Engineering at Priceline.com. “Working with the Apache Kafka experts at Confluent gives us the confidence to scale the data pipeline, improving business operations and overall reliability.”
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Company Momentum and Customer Highlights
**Confluent saw significant growth in 2016 due to the demand for streaming platforms. Highlights include:
**Product Innovations
**In 2016, Confluent released product innovations to make its streaming platform even more robust and enterprise-grade. The company also released capabilities that give organizations more freedom to transition to their desired cloud strategy. Highlights of these innovations include:
**Confluent Partner Program
**The Confluent Partner Program is designed to enable a rapidly growing ecosystem around Kafka and Confluent. The program provides partners with the resources, technical expertise and support to integrate, implement and innovate with Apache Kafka and Confluent. Partner highlights include:
**Supporting Quotes
**“As part of re-architecting our core transaction processing infrastructure to include modern cluster based persistence technologies leveraging the Hadoop stack, we are working on incorporating streaming utilizing the robust cluster based topic architecture of Kafka. In our mixed world of Java and .NET server side code, Confluent has emerged as a key technical partner for Surescripts in support of our Kafka technology,” said Keith Willard, Chief Architect at Surescripts.
“Mesosphere DC/OS is the only production-proven platform that lets you quickly install and elastically operate containers and data services across both on-premise and public cloud infrastructure,” said Peter Guagenti, chief marketing officer at Mesosphere. “Apache Kafka is incredibly popular among DC/OS users. This partnership brings together the deepest expertise and the best deployment tools to benefit our customers. Confluent and Mesosphere are making it easier than ever to install, deploy, and operate the software across distributed systems and containers.”
“With the Couchbase Kafka Connector, companies have access to a framework for building scalable and secure stream data pipelines with Apache Kafka and Confluent,” said Narayan Sundareswaran, vice president of business development at Couchbase. “Our joint customers are using the connector to build real-time applications for a number of use cases, such as log clickstream analysis, fraud detection and recommendation engines. The Connector also enables developers using Kafka to build powerful, secure and performant IoT solutions and use cases.”
“With the Elasticsearch Connector, enterprises will have access to streaming data along with Elastic’s rich search and analytics capabilities,” said Craig Griffin, VP Business Development at Elastic. “By collaborating with Confluent, we’re supporting the growing community of users leveraging Kafka and Elastic to power real-time decision making.”
“With the DataStax Enterprise Connector, our customers can easily capitalize on the value of Confluent’s platform,” said Kathryn Erickson, Head of Technology Partner Development at DataStax. “By working with Confluent, a leader in streaming technology, we are enabling our customers to fully realize the potential of real-time data.”
“With Confluent and Apache Kafka, enterprises can scale their big data architectures more efficiently,” said Itamar Ankorion, chief marketing officer at Attunity. “Attunity Replicate enables customers to stream high-volume source data with real-time changes from many enterprise databases, such as Oracle, DB2 and SAP, into Kafka, making data lake initiatives and big data analytics easier than ever before.”
**About Confluent
**Confluent, founded by the original creators of open source Apache Kafka®, provides the only streaming platform that enables enterprises to maximize the value of data. Confluent Enterprise lets leaders in industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services, technology and media, move data from isolated systems into a real-time data pipeline where they can act on it immediately. Backed by Benchmark, Data Collective, Index Ventures and LinkedIn, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Apache Kafka and Confluent Open Source at www.confluent.io/download.
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