Win the CSP & MSP Markets by Leveraging Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform and OEM Program

In today’s fast-paced digital and AI landscape, Apache Kafka® has emerged as the de facto standard for enterprises seeking to harness the power of data streaming to drive intelligent decision-making, customer experiences, and business operations in real time. In fact, it has already been adopted by over 75% of the Fortune 500.

However, as the complexity of managing Kafka infrastructure grows, an increasing number of organizations are turning to fully managed Kafka services. These solutions allow them to remove the burden of infrastructure management and stay focused on growing their businesses. According to “The Cost of Apache Kafka®: An Engineer's Guide to DIY Kafka Pricing,” managing Kafka in-house can lead to significant hidden costs, longer time to market, and increased risks.

Confluent Platform completes Kafka with a set of enterprise-grade features and services to solve this challenge, reducing Kafka’s infrastructure footprint, day-to-day operational burden, and the intangible costs stemming from downtime and security risks. The whitepaper “Measuring the Cost-Effectiveness of Confluent Platform” illustrates how Confluent Platform can reduce the Kafka total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 40%, and accelerate the time to value by more than six months versus traditional Kafka development.

This article explores how Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) can develop high-margin businesses, quickly providing their customers with a data streaming platform offering, while maintaining operations excellence and lowering risk. By leveraging Confluent’s OEM Program, service providers can unlock customer potential with the best-in-class Kafka offering, Confluent Platform, and Kafka expertise. 

Key benefits for CSPs and MSPs

Confluent Platform goes far beyond Apache Kafka. It is a complete data streaming platform, with a comprehensive suite of tools and features designed to meet the complex needs of modern enterprises.

Confluent Platform’s advanced features provide several key benefits for MSPs and CSPs:

1. More resilient Kafka architectures for a wider spectrum of customers

Confluent Platform enhances Apache Kafka with advanced features, such as automatic observer promotion (AOP) and cluster linking, which enable the implementation of sophisticated multi-data center architectures. These architectures allow service providers to offer more profitable fully managed Kafka services, by delivering higher service level agreements (SLAs) in terms of recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), and availability.

Key architectures supported by Confluent Platform include:

• Stretched clusters: By distributing clusters across multiple data centers (DC) or availability zones (AZ), connected by a low-latency network, stretched clusters can achieve zero RPO and near-zero RTO. Confluent enhances traditional stretch clusters with multi-region clusters (MRC), which allow a single architecture to support different availability and latency requirements.

• Active-passive or active-active two-cluster configurations: These configurations facilitate seamless failover between clusters, enhancing the resilience of applications, while minimizing downtime.

• Multi-cluster replication: This allows for the replication of events across multiple clusters, ensuring that data is consistently available, even in the event of a failure.

• Aggregation architectures: These architectures enable the collection of data from multiple regions into a central hub, supporting global operations, and compliance with data governance requirements.

The flexibility of these architectures allows service providers to tailor their offerings to a wider spectrum of customers. Whether the customer prefers on-premises, colocation, private cloud, or public cloud deployments, service providers can adapt to meet diverse customer needs, and drive more profits by enhancing the reliability and performance of the services provided.

In addition, many customers increasingly seek hybrid or multicloud architectures to leverage best-of-breed environments. With Confluent Platform embedded into their solution, service providers can support their customers' long-term roadmaps by offering flexible solutions that seamlessly integrate different resources.

Confluent's capabilities enable CSPs and MSPs to:

• Facilitate data migration: Service providers can assist customers in migrating data between on-premises, colocation, and private and public cloud systems, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption.

• Ensure consistent data everywhere: By employing multi-cluster replication architectures, service providers can guarantee that data remains accessible across different environments in real time.

• Integrate with existing Confluent (or Apache Kafka) deployments: Over 5,000 companies worldwide have already deployed Confluent’s data streaming platform. By offering managed Kafka services, CSPs and MSPs can facilitate their customers with a seamless path to complete their data streaming architectures.

• Optimize performance: Confluent allows for the optimization of data streaming and processing across hybrid environments, helping customers achieve lower latency and improved responsiveness.

• Support compliance and governance: With robust data governance features, service providers can help customers meet regulatory requirements, while managing data across multiple locations and jurisdictions.

By leveraging Confluent, service providers can not only meet the immediate needs of their customers, but also align with their strategic goals, enabling them to adapt to future technology landscapes and grow faster with enterprise-grade data streaming. 

2. Reduce total cost of ownership and drive operational excellence

Confluent Platform empowers service providers to reduce operating costs and achieve operational excellence through several key strategies:

• Multi-tenancy: Confluent Platform’s advanced features give service providers the possibility of offering cost-effective, multi-tenant Kafka services on shared clusters. These capabilities ensure effective isolation between customers, allowing for secure and efficient use of resources. This multi-tenant approach not only attracts a broader customer base, but also maximizes resource utilization, leading to better profitability for CSPs and MSPs.

• Deployment and operation automation: Utilizing Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK) or Confluent Ansible Playbooks, service providers can automate the deployment and management of Confluent clusters on virtual machines, bare metal, or Kubernetes. This reduces manual effort and streamlines operations, leading to significant cost savings.

• Flexible scaling: Confluent Platform is designed to scale up and down easily to fit different needs, allowing service providers and their customers to adjust resources dynamically, based on demand, without incurring unnecessary costs.

• Deployment on cost-effective ARM infrastructure: ARM64 is supported in Confluent Platform 7.6.0 and later. By deploying Kafka on ARM CPUs, service providers can further lower infrastructure costs, while still benefiting from the performance and scalability of the Confluent Platform.

• Self-balancing capabilities: Confluent’s self-balancing feature intelligently ensures optimal performance by moving hot partitions among brokers. This removes the ongoing pain of manual intervention, enhancing efficiency and reducing operational overhead.

• Tiered storage: Tiered storage separates the concerns of data storage from the concerns of data processing, allowing each to scale independently. MSP and CSP customers that have large storage requirements can send warm data to cost-effective object storage, and scale brokers only when they need more compute resources.

3. Deliver a data streaming platform with enterprise-grade security for compliance

Security is crucial for enterprises, particularly those in highly regulated industries. While Apache Kafka provides basic security features, Confluent Platform offers a robust set of out-of-the-box, enterprise-grade security capabilities designed to protect data and resources comprehensively.

These comprehensive capabilities ensure that the compliance and security requirements of MSP and CSP customers are met, even when their data spans across enterprises, locations, and infrastructures—including on-prem, colocation, private cloud, public cloud, or even on existing Confluent Cloud clusters.

4. Power modern customer use cases

The advanced features in Confluent Platform open up possibilities for the CSP and MSP customers in every industry who believe that data streaming will be the most strategic part of their next-generation technology stack. The potential use cases are limitless, and organizations that powerfully harness their data, whether analytical or contextual—moment by moment—will be the ones to create the innovations that will drive the economy of the future.

Confluent Platform’s connect and stream processing features enable service providers to power modern use cases that cater to their customers' evolving data needs. Here’s how these components contribute to innovative solutions:

• Seamless data integration with pre-built connectors: Kafka Connect simplifies the process of moving data into and out of Kafka, making it easier for service providers to integrate various data sources and sinks. Confluent provides a library of 120+ pre-built connectors for popular databases, cloud services, and file systems, enabling quick and easy integration without extensive custom development.

• Real-time stream processing: Apache Flink®, Kafka Streams, and ksqlDB are powerful stream processing frameworks that allow service providers to deliver real-time analytics and data processing capabilities.

By leveraging Confluent, Flink, and Kafka Connect, service providers can provide a range of modern use cases that add significant value to their customers, such as:

• Event-driven architectures: Service providers can help organizations transition to event-driven architectures, enabling real-time data flow and responsiveness across applications and services.

• Data lakes and data pipeline modernization: With seamless data integration and real-time processing, service providers can assist customers in building modern data lakes and warehouses that support analytics and business intelligence initiatives.

• IoT data management: Flink’s capabilities are particularly suited for processing streaming data generated by IoT devices, allowing service providers to offer solutions for real-time monitoring, alerts, and analytics.

• Customer experience enhancements: By analyzing customer interactions and behaviors in real time, businesses can personalize experiences, optimize marketing efforts, and improve service delivery.

In summary, Confluent, combined with Kafka Connect and stream processing, empowers CSPs and MSPs to deliver modern, scalable, and efficient data solutions that meet the diverse needs of their customers. By leveraging these technologies, service providers can enhance their offerings, and drive greater business value for their clients.

5. Leverage Confluent’s committer-driven expertise to provide world-class Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) services

CSPs and MSPs can leverage Confluent's extensive support, professional services, and training to deliver world-class services to their customers.

• 24/7/365 committer-level technical support: Confluent provides robust technical support that service providers - combined with their own support resources - can leverage, to provide high incident management SLAs with the deepest skills, thereby ensuring that issues are resolved quickly and efficiently.

• Co-development of solutions with expert guidance and consultation: Confluent provides access to a team of experts who can offer strategic guidance on implementing and optimizing Kafka-based solutions, including:

  • Architecture design: Confluent professionals can assist service providers in designing robust, scalable architectures tailored to their customers' specific business needs, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.

  • Best practices: Confluent shares industry best practices for deploying and managing Kafka, helping service providers avoid common pitfalls and maximize the effectiveness of their solutions.

  • Migration services: For customers moving from legacy systems or other streaming solutions, Confluent can provide expert assistance in migrating data and applications to Kafka, ensuring a successful and efficient transition.

  • Tailored solutions for diverse industries: Service providers can leverage Confluent's knowledge of industry-specific use cases to develop targeted solutions that address the unique needs of their customers.

  • Customer journey for data streaming: Service providers and Confluent can work together to embark multi-year journeys to accelerate the customers’ business value use cases—based on Confluent’s proven data streaming maturity model, which ultimately results in the technology established as the central nervous system to the entire business.

• Comprehensive training and education: Confluent offers a variety of training resources that CSPs and MSPs can utilize to upskill their teams and enhance service delivery:

  • Courses, workshops, and certification: Service providers can access training courses that cover essential topics like Kafka fundamentals, stream processing with ksqlDB, Flink, stream governance, security, and data integration with Kafka Connect, helping their teams build expertise and get certified.

  • Custom training programs: Confluent can work with service providers to develop customized training programs that focus on specific technologies, or use cases relevant to their customer base.

By leveraging Confluent's support, professional services, and training, service providers can enhance their operational capabilities, deliver exceptional services, and ultimately provide their customers with reliable, scalable, and efficient event streaming solutions. This collaboration not only elevates the service providers offerings, but also drives greater satisfaction and value for their customers.

For service providers in China: How to grow your business faster

For service providers based in China, if your customers are global businesses expanding to China, or large Chinese enterprises running critical applications with compliance requirements, the ability to streamline their data across data centers, multi-region, or multicloud globally is critical. Providing an OEM SaaS solution with Confluent Platform will benefit your customers with increased cost-effectiveness, shorter time to delivery, and improved ROI. Major benefits are:

• Consistent business processes, operations procedures, and compliance practices: Many global enterprises already have Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform as their backbone and want to leverage consistent business processes when they expand into China. They expect a similar enterprise architecture that they can use to span their data and event-driven microservices in a seamless way.

  With fully managed Confluent services provided by CSPs and MSPs in China, customers can also leverage consistent global operations and compliance practices to reduce IT operations burden, and local skilled resources requirements. They can enjoy peace of mind with the high SLA, elastic scalability, zero downtime, patches, and upgrades of Confluent’s infrastructure, backed by best-of-breed support and services from your team and Confluent experts.

• Local and global business integration: Many large enterprises need to share data with their local business partners, supply chains, and/or customers who are already on services provided by China-based service providers. Adopting Confluent Platform will enable service providers to offer extensive integration capabilities with multiple protocols and patterns, such as REST, Kafka and cluster linking, as highlighted above.

For CSPs and MSPs in China, providing Confluent as the central nervous system for your customers also means driving more data into the ecosystem and greater profits. This is why Confluent is consistently recognized as a strategic partner by global cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

Confluent OEM Program for CSPs and MSPs

The Confluent OEM Program empowers MSPs and CSPs to quickly unlock new revenue streams by integrating the industry's leading data streaming platform into their customer offerings. With the ability to globally redistribute and embed Confluent Platform, built on Apache Kafka and Apache Flink, partners can bring real-time products to market faster, and can easily monetize the rising demand for data streaming—all with minimal investment and risk. For more information, you can read the blog Introducing Confluent’s OEM Program: Deliver Data Streaming Faster and Unlock Revenue Growth, or watch the on-demand webinar Drive Faster Growth with Enterprise-Grade Data Streaming.

Apache®, Apache Flink®, Flink, Apache Kafka® are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation.