Moving data in real-time is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses as they handle ever-increasing amounts of data. Confluent is a streaming data platform built on top of the Apache Kafka open source project and designed to handle large amounts of data. Confluent CEO and co-founder Jay Kreps will join us for a fireside conversation at TC Sessions: SaaS on October 27th to discuss this and more. Because data plays such an important role in every business, it is a key element of the story we’re telling at the SaaS event. Data streams, according to Kreps, are at the heart of any organization, from sales to orders to customer interactions.
Confluent is aiming to process all of this data in real-time, as he noted in a corporate blog post announcing the company’s $250 million Series E in April 2020, and that was a significant reason why investors were prepared to pour so much money into the company.
“The rationale is simple: event streaming is developing as a key new category that is on a road to be as fundamental and foundational in the architecture of a modern digital firm as databases have been,” Kreps wrote at the time.
The company’s streaming data platform is based on the open-source Kafka project and takes a multi-faceted approach to stream. While anybody can download and use Kafka, organizations may lack the resources or experience to work with the raw open-source code, as with many open-source projects. Confluent and Kafka are two examples of startups founded on open source to assist simplify whatever the project accomplishes.
Netflix, Uber, Cisco, and Goldman Sachs are among the companies that use Kafka as a fundamental technology, according to Kreps. Those businesses, on the other hand, have the resources to manage complex software like this. Confluent offers a managed cloud version for a fee, or enterprises can manage it themselves and install it in their preferred cloud infrastructure provider. The project began in 2011 at LinkedIn, when developers were tasked with creating a tool to process the massive amount of data pouring through the site. Apache Kafka was founded when the corporation decided to open source the technology it had developed.
Confluent was founded in 2014 and has already risen over $450 million in funding. The company received a $4.5 billion valuation on a $250 million investment in its most recent private round in April 2020. It currently has a market capitalization of approximately $17 billion.
In addition to Kreps, the conference will feature Javier Soltero from Google, Olivia Rose from Amplitude, and investors Kobie Fuller and Casey Aylward, among others. We hope you’ll be able to join us. It’s going to be an interesting lineup.
