PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Confluent, provider of the only streaming platform based on Apache KafkaTM, 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 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."
Company Momentum and Customer Highlights
Confluent saw significant growth in 2016 due to the demand for streaming platforms. Highlights include:
- Grew subscription bookings by over 700 percent year over year
- Built a world class leadership team, hiring a CFO, CMO, vice president of sales, vice president of EMEA and a vice president of business development from industry leading companies
- Nearly tripled the number of employees and opened a European headquarters in London, United Kingdom to support the growing demand for streaming platforms across EMEA
- Added new customers including Priceline.com, Surescripts, Zopa and TiVo, along with other leading companies across industries in fifteen countries
- Launched Kafka Summit in San Francisco with over 550 attendees and thirteen sponsors. Due to the event’s success, there will be two Kafka Summits in 2017: one in San Francisco and one in New York City
- Earned recognition as one of the coolest startups of 2016 by CRN and named in the ESG Delta-V Awards for impact on the big data and analytics market
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:
- Announced Confluent Enterprise, which includes Confluent Control Center, the company’s first commercial product designed to operate and manage Apache Kafka at scale. Confluent Enterprise also includes multi-datacenter replication and auto data balancing for global scale and uptime, improved performance and greater ease when moving data, regardless of whether it is deployed on premises or in the cloud
- Grew the list of supported connectors leveraging the Kafka Connect API to over 60, including HDFS, JDBC, Apache CassandraTM, S3 and Elasticsearch, with more in development and supported from companies in the Apache Kafka community
- Launched Confluent University, a training program designed to teach developers, operators and administrators how to leverage and manage Kafka within their own organizations, and trained over 1,000 people on Apache Kafka in 2016
- Contributed the Kafka Streams API to Apache Kafka, a powerful yet lightweight solution that allows enterprises to build elastic, scalable and secure real-time applications to power their core business. Companies from a variety of industries are already running Streams applications in production to process millions of business events per second
- Worked with the community to make Apache Kafka one of the most dynamic open source projects with more than 9,000 meetup members, over 1,500 individual code commits in 2016, 49 Kafka Improvement Proposals completed, increased stability with over 200 system tests that run nightly, and over 3,000 unit and integration tests that run before any change is accepted to ensure resiliency and quality
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:
- Surpassed 100 partners to-date since the program launched in March 2016 and continued to support the growing Apache Kafka ecosystem with connectors and supported services. New technology partners include Attunity, Couchbase, DataStax and Mesosphere, among others, as well as a wide-range of consulting and SI partners, including each of the Big Four consultancies
- Launched a fully supported Elasticsearch connector using the Kafka Connect API so developers can set up a reliable indexing pipeline; and partnered with DataStax to develop the Certified DataStax Enterprise Connector to easy connect Apache Kafka and Apache CassandraTM
- Worked with Couchbase to release the Couchbase Kafka Connector to allow customers to expand their Confluent streaming platform with powerful analytics capabilities. Users can publish data from Couchbase buckets or archive Kafka records into Couchbase by specifying a simple configuration, all while maintaining the document structure that enables modern, data-driven applications
- Released Docker images for Confluent Open Source and Confluent Enterprise. The images and documentation reflect best practices observed in the course of working with enterprise customers and a wide range of open source community users run Kafka on Docker at scale
- Became available and supported on both Mesosphere Enterprise DC/OS (Datacenter Operating System) and the open source DC/OS distribution, making it easy for customers to build and operate stream processing applications using Kafka
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 creators of open source Apache KafkaTM, 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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