Confluent goes IPO as Kafka event streaming goes mainstream

Confluent went public now with an IPO on the NASDAQ inventory exchange underneath the inventory image CFLT, with an original share selling price of $36.

Launched in 2014 and based in Mountain Watch, Calif., Confluent had previously elevated $456 million in funding to expand the company’s celebration info streaming technologies, which are based on the open up supply Apache Kafka system.

Confluent’s co-founder and CEO, Jay Kreps, served generate Kafka although he was a team engineer at LinkedIn, wherever he worked for seven decades right before starting Confluent.

Main up to the IPO, Confluent in excess of the earlier year has included abilities to its Confluent Cloud and Confluent System based on Kafka — that allow more scalability for celebration streaming.  

Confluent has also expanded beyond Kafka with its ksqlDB celebration steaming databases that is goal constructed for Kafka.

Confluent driving the relocating to celebration streaming info

The driving force driving Confluent is organizations’ rising demand from customers for real-time info, which is at the core of the vendor’s celebration streaming abilities.

At the Kafka Summit Europe virtual conference on Might 12 hosted by Confluent, important brand end users like automaker BMW Group, Porsche and Sony Playstation outlined how they advantage from the celebration streaming engineering.

“Confluent carries on to be a solid participant in the shift by enterprises to become significantly more celebration driven, especially in source chain and digital functions,” mentioned IDC analyst Maureen Fleming. “This is specifically true wherever enterprises are competing and monetizing speed and wherever swift and info-intense collection of info for AI is required.”

Confluent celebration streaming allows corporations to use info in motion

Fleming mentioned she sees Confluent as the dominant vendor in the industry for constant collection and delivery of info in excess of very dispersed programs. It really is an method that Confluent generally refers to as “data in motion.”

Fleming noted that Confluent’s audio economical efficiency reflects the swift improvements in the technologies applied to allow celebration-driven functions.

In its S1 IPO filing with the U.S Securities and Trade Commission, Confluent described that it had more than two,five hundred customers and was obtaining whole revenue development of fifty one p.c year over  year for the initial quarter of 2021.

The chance for an celebration-driven architecture could likely be large, with Confluent estimating in the IPO filing that the whole addressable industry may be really worth as significantly as $fifty billion.

“Over time as this type of architecture gets more ingrained in how firms operate, Confluent will keep on to be a big beneficiary of this shift,” Fleming mentioned.

The Kafka connection

David Menninger, an analyst at Ventana Investigate, mentioned he was also optimistic about Confluent’s prospective clients. The vendor’s association with the open up supply Apache Kafka system is a critical driver of development for Confluent, he mentioned.

Kafka is so extensively applied for celebration streaming to the point that Menninger known as it ubiquitous. With that extensive utilization, he noted that any business making use of the open up supply variation of Kafka is a prospect for Confluent’s accredited solution. 

“We see essential changes happening in enterprise info architectures,” Menninger mentioned. “Facts in motion will switch info at relaxation as the principal way in which corporations system info.”

Facts at relaxation is the standard method to accessing info in which it is initial loaded into a databases wherever it “rests” and then is accessed. The info in motion method allows business to use info as it is relocating from an celebration supply.

“It’s not that info at relaxation goes absent, but the initial occasion of info in most corporations will be info in motion,” Menninger stated. “Then it will be saved to a databases for historical and other non-real time analyses. Confluent has positioned itself very well to choose gain of this pattern.”