Introducing the Connect with Confluent Partner Program: Supercharging Customer Growth and Extending the Data Streaming Ecosystem

Today, we’re excited to introduce our new Connect with Confluent (CwC) partner program—unlocking growth for technology partners and further extending the global data streaming ecosystem.

Modern enterprises operate in real time, and customer expectations are higher than ever. In today’s world, everyone wants instantaneous access to information, more automation, and better overall experiences. Whether you are checking your credit card balance, detecting a cyber threat, or just ordering lunch on your phone— everyone requires the most up-to-date information to operate.

To enable this new world with no data-at-rest pit stops, technology providers need a better way to connect into the superhighway of data streams within their customers' environments. With Connect with Confluent, our tech partners now have the fastest path to support their customers’ end-to-end real-time use cases. By integrating Confluent directly within their platforms, they can tap into the data network that processes more than an exabyte of data per year. 

When you join the Connect with Confluent program, you become a part of the largest data streaming network, making it easier for your customers to use data streams and drive consumption for your service. And with access to Confluent’s expert data streaming resources across engineering, marketing, and sales, you’ll be supported in both building your integration and maximizing consumption through the investment.

Ready to get started? Join the upcoming Webinar: Build Your Integration With Confluent Cloud and create your step-by-step plan together with Confluent’s Kafka experts. Spoiler: We’ll be sharing code samples—invite your developers!

Connect with Confluent launch partners include Arcion, AWS Lambda, Clickhouse, Elastic, Google Cloud BigQuery, HiveMQ, Imply, Materialize, MongoDB, Onehouse, Precisely, Qlik, Quix, Rockset, Startree, Tinybird, and Waterstream.

Businesses need end-to-end data streaming with no data-at-rest pit stops

In recent years, we’ve seen an explosion among enterprises of modular application development and popular adoption of best-of-breed tools. This results in data that is critical to a business being stored across many islands of disconnected systems and applications. This increases pressure on technology partners to support low-latency movement of diverse data types in and out of their platforms—skipping unnecessary costs and complexities tied to data stops in cloud storage buckets like S3, while enabling development of end-to-end real-time experiences that customers expect.

The solution to this problem is data streaming, which keeps every system and application constantly connected in elegant fashion to fuel a business with a central nervous system of real-time data. Through data streaming, the historical challenges tied to real-time data access for customers can instead be seen by technology partners as a major opportunity—one that unlocks new levels of customer innovation and business expansion.

When seeking to bring data streaming capabilities to their customers, many application developers turn to Kafka—the open source data streaming technology used by more than 75% of the Fortune 500. While this can be a good first step, building an integration for open source Kafka is not enough. It tasks customers with major operational burdens while they seek to scale the technology for mission-critical use, leaving less time and resources available for development of new use cases on partner platforms.

Connect with Confluent and seize the data streaming opportunity

As part of the Connect with Confluent partner program, you’ll join the data streaming leader to give your customers the best experience for working with real-time data while you maintain maximum focus on your core business. Our technical subject matter experts will be available to assist with the design, verification, and publishing of your integration. Upon completion and readiness for use, our category-creating sales and marketing organizations will work together with you to generate more opportunities for data streaming use cases that drive new consumption on your platform.

Power streaming use cases and allow customers to deliver what their consumers expect

The CwC program enables your customers to develop low-latency workloads from any source or destination with access to high-quality, serverless data streams embedded right within your application. This eliminates the requirement for data-at-rest pit stops in cloud storage buckets like S3 which block development of any truly real-time use case.

Additionally, bringing data to applications via data streams instead of cloud storage buckets allows customers to avoid the costs, complexities, and risk tied to data consistency, replication, storage fees, etc. As a result, use cases are easier to develop, easier evolve over time, and more feasible to reproduce across your entire customer base.

Integrations with Confluent also drive organic expansion of use cases fueled by data streams throughout your customer base, exposing more users to a new, high-value data type they might previously never have accessed.

Ready to get started? Join the upcoming Webinar: Build Your Integration With Confluent Cloud and create your step-by-step plan together with Confluent’s Kafka experts. Spoiler: We’ll be sharing code samples—invite your developers!

Want to dive right in? Check out the Connect with Confluent: Developer Documentation.

Accelerate consumption and growth by providing the best experience for working with data streams

When planning how to bring new data streaming capabilities to customers, not all integrations are created equal. Integrations based upon open source Kafka leave technology partners dependent upon their customers to manage all the costs of self-supporting the technology alongside any new investment into the partner platform. It takes many businesses 2+ years to scale Kafka for mission-critical use with $3-5M+ in ongoing platform development and operations costs, hundreds of thousands spent annually on underutilized and sub-optimal infrastructure, and substantial hidden costs by way of unplanned downtime and breaches.

On top of this, an open source Kafka integration requires customers to maintain an additional Kafka Connect cluster and manually integrate every individual data source and destination required for real-time use cases running on the partner platform. Time to value for partners is delayed by a three to six month engineering project per source or destination, plus a lifetime of support and maintenance for the customer.

Connect with Confluent partners allow their customers to use Confluent Cloud—a cloud-native and complete data streaming platform that is available everywhere their data resides. This gives them more time to focus on development of new consumption-driving activity and less time managing an open source technology. Confluent is:

• Cloud Native: Customers spend more time innovating when working with a 10x Apache Kafka® service powered by the Kora Engine including GBps+ elastic scaling, infinite storage, a 99.99% uptime SLA, and more.

• Complete: New use cases are deployed quickly, securely, and reliably when customers have a complete data streaming platform with 120+ connectors, built-in stream processing, enterprise-grade security & governance controls, pre-built monitoring options, and more.

• Everywhere: Whether your customers’ data resides within a single cloud, multiple clouds, or on-premises, Confluent seamlessly brings it all to your application to unlock every streaming use case.

The benefits of Confluent’s platform extend beyond the superior customer experience for working with data streams and directly impact partner platforms as well. Confluent provides Stream Governance, the industry’s only fully managed governance suite for Kafka, inclusive of fully managed Schema Registry. With support for Avro, Protocol Buffers, and JSON serialization formats, Schema Registry allows customers to deliver trusted, high-quality data streams to partners and always maintain data integrity as applications evolve. This results in fewer incidents related to data quality and higher overall customer satisfaction rates.

Supercharge your GTM strategy by working with the data streaming leader

Rather than bringing new data streaming capabilities to market alone, Confluent partners amplify their marketing efforts and generate more selling opportunities by partnering with the data streaming industry leader and category creator. With sales and marketing tooling built specifically for data streaming pipeline generation—like our OSS Kafka to Confluent sales play—partners work together with teams across Confluent’s business to identify and close more opportunities for real-time use cases, faster.

“Together with Confluent, we’re bringing to market a game-changer for businesses seeking to build interactive, infinitely scalable analytics applications that drive actionable insights from data in real time. Our native, connector-free integration built for the Connect with Confluent program unlocks real-time analytics on continuous data streams with unparalleled ease and speed for our users. By partnering with the data streaming leader, we’re able to massively widen our sales funnel and quickly accelerate adoption of new functionality on our platform.”

John Broad, VP Partners & Alliances, Imply

CwC partners gain access to the larger Kafka community and an annual calendar of data streaming events including Current, Kafka Summit, and more. Year round, they are in direct contact with Confluent’s field teams to collaborate and close more opportunities for real-time use cases.

Data streaming is what we do. You should join us.

Ready to get started? Become Confluent Connected

Give your customers the absolute best experience for working with data streams— right within your application, supported by the Kafka experts. Empower customer innovation, supercharge your go-to-market, and free your internal teams from the burdens and shortcomings of an open source integration.

Ready to get started? Join the upcoming Webinar: Build Your Integration With Confluent Cloud and create your step-by-step plan together with Confluent’s Kafka experts. Spoiler: We’ll be sharing code samples—invite your developers!

If you haven’t done so already, sign up to become a Confluent partner. 

Existing technology partners can visit the Confluent Partner Portal to learn more about program updates.