Confluent Data Streaming Platform

Confluent, Inc., whose main address is in Mountain View, California, was founded by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka and became a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM in March 2026. Its platform lets enterprises stream events between applications, databases and analytics systems in real time instead of moving data in nightly batches, and the company says more than 6,500 enterprises, including 40% of the Fortune 500, rely on it.

Confluent Cloud is a fully managed Kafka service built on the Kora engine, while Confluent Platform and Confluent Private Cloud run on-premises or in private clouds, and WarpStream offers Kafka-compatible streaming in the customer's own cloud. Around the core, the platform provides Flink stream processing with Flink SQL, Tableflow to turn topics into tables, more than 120 pre-built connectors, Stream Governance with Schema Registry, Cluster Linking for migration and streaming agents for AI. Customers named include Notion, SAS, Michelin, BMW Group and L'Oreal.

• Confluent Cloud: Fully managed Kafka on the Kora engine with autoscaling across major clouds.
• Self-managed options: Confluent Platform, Private Cloud and WarpStream for on-premises or private clouds.
• Flink stream processing: Real-time transformation and analytics with Flink SQL.
• Tableflow: Materializes Kafka topics as tables for lakehouse and analytics engines.
• Connectors and governance: 120+ connectors, Schema Registry and Stream Governance.
• IBM integration: Streams into watsonx.data and connects with IBM MQ, webMethods and IBM Z.

A Vietnamese bank can stream core banking and card transactions into fraud detection and customer notification services in real time. A retailer can synchronize orders, inventory and loyalty events across stores, apps and its data lakehouse. A manufacturer can stream machine and ERP events to dashboards and AI models for predictive maintenance.

Teams avoid the effort of operating Kafka themselves, with autoscaling, a 99.99% uptime SLA for production workloads and claimed throughput cost savings of 20 to 90%. SAS reports 69% savings according to the site. Pre-built connectors and Tableflow shorten integration of databases, SaaS apps and lakehouses. One platform covers cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployments, and new cloud sign-ups receive 400 USD in credits.

Enterprise AI and agents need live operational events rather than day-old batch data, which makes event streaming a core layer of the data stack. Banks and large enterprises with mainframes and message queues are modernizing toward Kafka-based architectures. In Southeast Asia, where Confluent has Singapore and Malaysia entities, banks, telecom operators and super-apps are adopting streaming for payments, customer engagement and AI.

Founded by the co-creators of Apache Kafka; main address 899 West Evelyn, Mountain View, California. IBM completed its acquisition on 17 March 2026 at 31 USD per share, about 11 billion USD enterprise value, and the Confluent brand continues. Affiliates include Confluent Singapore Pte. Ltd. and Confluent Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. Certified SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.