Kafka Summit 2016 Agenda and Sponsors Unveiled

Dropbox, Cerner Corporation, Comcast, Netflix and Uber Headline Speaking Sessions on Kafka Deployments, Integrations

PALO ALTO, Calif.—March 21, 2016—Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache™ Kafka®, today announced the initial lineup of speakers and sponsors for the inaugural Kafka Summit, set to take place on April 26 at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco.

Bringing together the Apache Kafka community, Kafka Summit will host more than 500 community members who will engage with experts, core committers and leading production users of Kafka, other stream processing frameworks and related projects. Participants will learn where project development is headed and how companies are using Kafka for large-scale, real-time data integration and stream processing in a variety of applications.

“The use of Apache Kafka as a central data platform for streaming data is skyrocketing, and this growth is an indication of a paradigm shift to stream data processing across industries,” said Neha Narkhede, original co-creator of Apache Kafka and CTO and co-founder of Confluent. “We can’t wait to bring the stream processing community together at the conference and hear from users around the world that are making a shift to real-time data integration and stream processing using Kafka.”

The one-day conference is packed with 28 sessions, and participants will have the opportunity to discuss the future of Kafka, hear real-world use cases and share Kafka-related tips and best practices with one another. Featured sessions at the show include:

• “Ingesting Complex Healthcare Data with Apache Kafka” with Cerner Corporation software architect Micah Whitacre
• “Towards a Stream Centered Enterprise” with Comcast principal software engineer Gabriel Commeau
• “Deploying Kafka at Dropbox” with Dropbox site reliability engineers Sean Fellows and Mark Smith
• “Kafka at Scale in Cloud” with Netflix senior software engineer Allen Wang
• “Stream Processing with Kafka in Uber” with Uber software engineer Danny Yuan

Sessions were selected from more than 120 submitted speaker proposals by the Kafka Summit program committee, which includes data experts and Kafka core committers from Confluent, Elodina, Google, LinkedIn and United States Digital Services.

“The number of strong speaker applications we received demonstrates how important stream processing is to businesses at all levels, as well as the depth of Kafka’s impact within that fast-growing ecosystem,” said Tyler Akidau, software engineer at Google and a member of the Kafka Summit program committee. “I look forward to seeing how these talks shape the future of streaming, and what the Kafka community will deliver next.”

Dozens of speakers from various industries will share insights and lessons learned across Systems, Operations and User Tracks, including:

• Frances Perry, software engineer at Google
• Helena Edelson, VP of product engineering at Tuplejump
• Joel Koshy, staff software engineer at LinkedIn
• Lucian Lita, director of data engineer at Intuit
• Paul Osman, staff software engineer at Under Armour
• Rene Parra, chief architect at HomeAway Inc.

Kafka Summit participants will be able to see live demos and interact with the industry’s most prominent vendors in open source, data and analytics. The Apache Software Foundation is a marquee community partner, and sponsors currently include Datadog, GE Digital, Heroku, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpsClarity, MapR, MemSQL,Microsoft, Qubole, Salesforce and SignalFX.

For the most up-to-date list of speakers, please visit https://kafka-summit.org/speakers.

For details on conference sponsors, please visit https://kafka-summit.org/sponsors.

For more information about Kafka Summit or to register to attend, please visit www.kafka-summit.org.

About Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open source technology that acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation. Its key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements—from batch systems like Hadoop, to real-time systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as they arrive. This infrastructure lets you build around a single central nervous system transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within an company.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the creators of Apache™ Kafka®, enables organizations to harness business value from stream data. The Confluent Platform manages the barrage of stream data and makes it available throughout an organization. It provides various industries, from retail, logistics and manufacturing, to financial services and online social networking, a scalable, unified, real-time data pipeline that enables applications ranging from large volume data integration to big data analysis with Hadoop to real-time stream processing. Backed by Benchmark, Data Collective, Index Ventures and LinkedIn, Confluent is based in Palo Alto. To learn more, please visitwww.confluent.io. Download Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform at www.confluent.io/download.

Jill Reed or Alex Cardenas
Highwire PR for Confluent
confluent@highwirepr.com
(415) 963-4174, ext. 5