Announcing Multi-Year Microsoft Partnership to Accelerate Cloud Data Streaming

Written By

Erica Schultz

Apr 5, 2022Read Time: 2 min

We’re pleased to share a new multi-year partnership between Confluent and Microsoft to accelerate enterprises’ journey to cloud data streaming on Azure. Today’s announcement builds upon the partnership agreement we launched last year. We’ll extend our existing relationship with joint technical, marketing, and sales investments on both sides to make it easier than ever to build a modern data stack on Azure with Confluent powering real-time data streaming.

We’ve rearchitected Apache Kafka^® for Azure and we’re better together

Confluent’s cloud-native service helps migrate and connect data, no matter where it resides, to Azure’s services with 130+ pre-built connectors including CosmosDB, SQL Server, Data Lake Storage Gen 2, and Synapse. Available on Azure Marketplace and fully integrated with Azure’s security, management, and billing makes it easy to start your first data in motion use case. With this announcement, we will accelerate our joint customers’ modernization and migrations initiatives.

For enterprises born in the cloud, you can build faster with Confluent and Azure. With 50+ fully managed cloud connectors, ksqlDB, and a rich library of clients that can help you accelerate application and analytics development while reducing the TCO associated with OSS Kafka by up to $2.58 million. With joint technical investments, we will continue to reduce the operational burden of managing Kafka with our fully managed service that can connect multicloud and hybrid environments. We hear from our joint customers across industries—including retail, financial services, manufacturing, public sector, and gaming—that they need easy ways to move data to the cloud, and that real-time data is essential for their applications and analytics.

Quote from Yaël Gomez

Cloud continues to become the default for the modern data stack

This partnership is critical to our customers as they continue to build their next-generation data stack with Confluent on Azure. Azure’s agility, flexibility, and infinite scale is purpose built to meet the tremendous demands that data growth is placing on application and analytics infrastructures. With 175 ZB of data being generated by 2025, and 30% of that data being real-time in nature, this new investment in our joint partnership will help every enterprise learn about the future of data in motion and what it means to their business.

Hear how Confluent and Microsoft are helping companies like Walgreens Boots Alliance modernize their business, tune into Microsoft’s Innovate for Impact event happening on April 5, 2022.

Confluent’s cloud-native data streaming platform is designed for an easy start to data streaming on Azure. Get started with a free trial in the Azure Marketplace.

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Erica Schultz has led cloud go-to-market functions for nearly two decades and currently serves as the President of Field Operations at Confluent, the platform for data in motion. At Confluent, she oversees the sales, partner ecosystem, customer success and services teams globally. Prior to Confluent, Erica served as New Relic’s Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to that, she spent nearly 17 years at Oracle where she pioneered the company’s cloud go-to-market strategy and scaled numerous sales teams around the globe.