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Confluent Awarded a Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year

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We're pleased to announce our new, expanded partnership with Google Cloud and for being named a Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year for Marketplace–Data and Analytics. Together, our collaboration helps create an even easier path forward for companies looking to connect data across any environment to Google Cloud and harness it in real time. The recognition as a Technology Partner of the Year underscores our belief that cloud marketplaces like the Google Cloud Marketplace are critical platforms to meet our customers where they want to transact. 

Our deepened partnership includes increased technical support for integrations between Confluent and Google Cloud’s data, analytics, and AI service portfolio and enhanced go-to-market efforts showcasing Confluent's value to Google Cloud customers. Ultimately, this strengthens our joint alignment across sales, marketing, and engineering teams.

As more traditional and cloud-first companies adopt the cloud, they increasingly look to innovative companies like Confluent and Google Cloud to unlock solutions to their most pressing and complex data-streaming challenges. Combining our pioneering data streaming platform and Google Cloud's leading data and analytics capabilities deliver a powerful way for organizations to gain deeper insights from their data, regardless of where it may live. Together, we've helped companies operationalize data streaming by creating event-driven applications, accelerating developer velocity, and analyzing data at a massive scale. 

As consumers expect more personalized experiences, businesses face challenges from navigating fragmented data silos to updating applications in real time. Confluent helps companies overcome these challenges by combining real-time data from multiple sources to continuously stream across the organization. 

Our solution helps companies stream data from anywhere into best of breed Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Dataflow, and Vertex AI for organizations to develop innovative machine learning, artificial intelligence, and analytics solutions. We provide a real-time contextualization layer for customers using Google Cloud's LLM and generative AI capabilities through our deep integration with BigQuery. Confluent's cloud native platform allows AI developers to focus their time building applications and less time managing the operational overhead of open source kafka. This provides our joint customers governed, real-time context for all of their gen AI needs.

Confluent's fully managed, cloud-native solution powered by the Kora engine offers 10x the capabilities of Apache Kafka, delivering greater scalability, reliability, and performance while reducing the total cost of ownership. 

Delivering data streaming through the Google Cloud Marketplace

In addition to strengthening our alignment with Google Cloud, we were named Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year for Marketplace-Data and Analytics. As a proud recipient of a Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year Award in 2018, 2019, and 2020, we're delighted to be recognized again for our unwavering commitment to delivering exceptional data streaming solutions for our joint customers. 

"Google Cloud’s partner awards recognize the significant impact and customer success that our partners have driven over the past year," said Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem and Channels at Google Cloud. "We're delighted to recognize Confluent as a 2023 Google Cloud Partner Award winner, and look forward to a continued strong partnership in support of our mutual customers."

We are especially excited to be recognized this year for the work that has gone into enhancing the experience for customers looking to transact Confluent Cloud via the Google Cloud Marketplace. Industry analyst Canalys expects sales of third-party software and services via cloud provider marketplaces to grow to $45 billion by 2025 (84% CAGR over 5 years). At Confluent we see the criticality of marketplace platforms like Google Cloud Marketplace as a mechanism to make it easier for our customers to centralize and simplify their IT spend. Meeting our customers where and how they want to purchase is a core operating tenet for us, and is one of the reasons why we offer options for customers to purchase Confluent through the Google Cloud Marketplace as either a committed contract or on a pay-as-you-go basis.  

Achieving meaningful milestones through our partnership

Our partnership with Google Cloud has led to many meaningful milestones over the past year as we’ve worked to help organizations tackle their most pressing data challenges, from modernizing their data platforms to seamlessly bridging their on-premises and multi-cloud data architectures to Google Cloud. A few highlights:

  • Achieved Google Cloud Ready validations for BigQuery, AlloyDB, PostgreSQL, and today we’re excited to add CloudSQL. 

  • Released the fully managed AlloyDB Sink Connector to move Confluent Cloud data streams to AlloyDB  to power analytical use cases. 

  • Launched Connect with Confluent to help organizations get direct access to data streams through the native integration of Confluent Cloud via BigQuery. 

  • Support for Google Cloud Private Service Connect (PSC), which enables secure network connectivity for sensitive data, which is especially beneficial for organizations in highly regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare. 

Overall, our expanded partnership with Google Cloud is a significant milestone that furthers our joint mission to help organizations of all sizes and industries unlock the power of real-time data to drive deeper insights, make more informed decisions, and transform their businesses.

If you’re attending Google Cloud Next ‘23 please visit us at Booth #1041 to learn more about our most common Confluent and Google Cloud use cases.

And if you haven't already, sign up for a free trial of Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Marketplace. New signups can use $400 in Confluent credits within 30 days and Pay as you Go (PAYG) for a low commitment, easy way to start using Confluent Cloud.

  • 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.

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