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Confluent Continues Momentum in 2017 with 4X Subscription Growth

Leading streaming platform provider enters 2018 with market momentum and high customer satisfaction ratings

Palo Alto, Calif. – February 8, 2018 – Confluent, provider of the leading streaming platform based on Apache Kafka®, today announced 2017 results, which include 4X subscription growth year over year and 98 percent customer satisfaction. Throughout the past year, Confluent has furthered its vision of placing streaming platforms at the heart of every modern business, by putting data at the heart of the business itself. With a streaming platform that spans to the edges of an organization and captures data into streams of real-time events, businesses are able to respond in real time to every customer event, transaction, user experience and market movement.

Confluent gives a competitive advantage to every company that leverages data, including retail, healthcare, financial services, automotive, technology and media, among others. By processing data in a real-time, distributed and scalable way, companies can make decisions that drastically improve brand loyalty and user experience, while lowering operating expenses and business risk.

The past year saw a surge in the use of Kafka for a broadening set of business and technical objectives. In the 2017 Apache Kafka Report, many companies reported using the distributed streaming platform for more accurate and faster decision making, reduced operating costs, improved customer experiences and reduced risk. 1 in 4 respondents work for organizations with more than $1 billion in annual sales, illustrating how quickly this technology has gained traction across large enterprises. In addition, more than 15% of respondents are processing more than a billion messages a day.

“We’re seeing customer adoption of real-time data streams to run some of the most critical applications in businesses across virtually every industry you can imagine,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO at Confluent. “We believe that event streaming platforms like Kafka and Confluent Platform are on a path to becoming as strategic to a company’s data management strategy as relational databases.”

2017 highlights include:

Grew total subscription bookings by 4X year over year with 98 percent customer satisfaction.
Extended leadership team with key hires, including Simon Hayes, Vice President of Corporate and Business Development; Sarah Sproehnle, Vice President of Customer Success; and Ivan Ernest, Chief People Officer.
Raised $30 million from Sequoia, Index Ventures and Benchmark to meet global demand for streaming platforms.
Expanded employee base by 120 percent, added numerous offices throughout the US and extended its footprint to six additional countries.
Added new customers around the globe, including Alight Solutions, Capital One, Funding Circle, HomeAway and Nordea Bank.
Sponsored Kafka Summit in San Francisco and New York City with over 1,300 attendees and 30 sponsors across both events. There will be two Kafka Summits in 2018: one in San Francisco and the first-ever international event in London.
Announced the general availability of Confluent Cloud, an Apache Kafka as a Service offering that empowers enterprises and developers to move faster with streaming data.
Released KSQL, an open source streaming SQL engine that enables continuous, interactive queries on Apache Kafka.
Introduced Confluent Platform 4.0, the enterprise distribution of Apache Kafka 1.0. This release included a number of significant improvements, including enhancements to Confluent Control Center, Kafka Connect, the Streams API and Apache Kafka 1.0.
Surpassed 200 partners, including some of the largest Systems Integrators and Platform partners in the industry.
Worked with the community to make Apache Kafka one of the most dynamic open source projects with more than 19,500 meetup members, over 1,507 individual code commits in 2017, and a 160 percent increase in Kafka Improvement Proposals with 76 completed this year. In addition, the community announced exactly-once semantics and Apache Kafka 1.0.

“Real-time streaming data is a foundational part of our technology strategy at Alight,” said Chris Roberts, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Alight Solutions. “Kafka and Confluent have allowed us to lower costs and unlock innovation, which ultimately has led to an improved customer experience for the nearly 40 million employees from over 1,400 organizations we serve.”

“Because Nordea is in the highly-regulated financial services industry, we need a real-time view of all trade executions to comply with the latest regulations,” said Niels Bjørkøe, Head of Core Services and Market Risk IT at Nordea Bank. “With Confluent Platform, we’re able to connect all data sources across the bank to create a real-time governance reporting model as well as a variety of use cases beyond compliance reporting.”

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the creators of open source Apache Kafka®, provides the leading streaming platform that enables enterprises to maximize the value of data. Confluent Platform empowers leaders in industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services, technology and media, to move data from isolated systems into a real-time data pipeline where they can act on it immediately. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Open Source at www.confluent.io/download.

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