Confluent Named a Leader in Two IDC MarketScape Reports Evaluating Data Streaming Technologies

Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ: CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced that it has been named as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment(1) and the IDC Marketscape for Worldwide Event Brokering Software 2024 Vendor Assessment(2).

"We believe our position as a Leader in both IDC MarketScapes is based on market recognition of data streaming platforms," says Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer, Confluent. "From critical use cases like accelerating the development of real-time AI applications to real-time payments, companies rely increasingly on Confluent to deliver trustworthy data across their organization."

At the heart of the data streaming movement is Apache Kafka. Kafka is the de facto standard and most successful open source technology for streaming data used by hundreds of thousands of developers, including 75% of the Fortune 500. Confluent provides everything companies need to implement Kafka use cases quickly, securely, and reliably, everywhere they need it. With the only data streaming platform that streams, connects, processes and governs real-time data, organizations can break down data barriers and easily reuse and access data streams for endless use cases. Instead of tackling a complex data mess, teams can now focus on developing real-time applications that drive significant business value.

The IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment notes, “As a data streaming platform, Confluent Cloud seeks to serve the needs of a large pool of potential customers through a broad coverage approach.” It also states, “Confluent Cloud removes the complexities of implementing and operating Kafka infrastructure, connectors, processing, and governance, allowing customers to focus on building streaming data pipelines and real-time applications to achieve operational and strategic business outcomes.” The excerpt also says, ”Confluent Cloud is highly infused with predictive AI, interpretive AI, and generative AI, which can provide for a wide range of potential use cases within each of these three categories.”

The company’s strengths as evaluated by the IDC MarketScape in this excerpt include:

• Stream Governance: “Confluent has built an extensive set of stream intelligence capabilities that enable stream governance. The company supports event discovery through its stream catalog and data portal, runtime schema validation provided by a schema registry, stream lineage capability to trace data flowing through the stream, and the ability to tag sensitive event data flowing within the stream. These capabilities contribute to improving the quality of data in the stream, stream tracing, and compliance with internal and external policies and regulations.”
• Confluent partner program and multicloud support: “Confluent has a large and diverse set of global channels, implementation, and technology partners. Confluent is available on all public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and the IBM Cloud.”

The IDC MarketScape for Event Brokering Software 2024 Vendor Assessment notes, “Confluent Cloud offers users many event processing capabilities that provide a strong foundation for a general-purpose model, such as event routing, event transformation, event filtering, load balancing, and event replay.” It also says, “within the platform, Confluent Cloud can utilize commercial LLMs like ChatGPT/Bard to convert natural language into SQL-based pipelines that execute on Confluent. Confluent Cloud is decoupled from any particular LLM implementation, increasing the ease to change between vendors. In addition, Confluent recently announced expanded AI-focused partnerships with MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz to provide real-time contextual data from anywhere for their vector databases.”