Introducing Confluent’s OEM Program: Deliver Data Streaming Faster and Unlock Revenue Growth

As real-time experiences become integral to everyday life and data-driven technologies like GenAI drive the next wave of innovation, one thing is clear: real-time data is the key to enterprise growth. The Confluent OEM Program empowers MSPs, CSPs, and ISVs to quickly unlock new revenue streams by integrating the industry-leading data streaming platform into their customer offerings. With the ability to globally redistribute and embed Confluent’s complete, enterprise-grade data streaming platform, built on Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®, partners can bring real-time products to market faster and easily monetize the rising demand for data streaming—all with minimal investment and risk.

The data streaming opportunity

The universal need for real-time data has cemented data streaming as a critical business requirement. According to ISG Software Research, “by 2026, more than three-quarters of enterprises’ standard information architectures will include streaming data and event processing.” To meet this need, teams often turn to popular open source technologies like Kafka and Flink. Tapping into these technologies opens a wide range of use cases across different businesses, including:

• Managed service providers (MSPs): MSPs now face increasing demand from customers for data streaming services as part of digital transformation initiatives. Across industries like retail, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing, data streaming has become essential for modernizing a business and delivering the real-time experiences that drive operational efficiency and a competitive edge.

• Cloud service providers (CSPs): CSPs are now unanimous with modern application development, where every customer expects scalable, built-in data streaming to power real-time services and analytics. A strong data streaming offering is critical to overall CSP platform utility—without it, customers must work with third-party tools or stand up their own data streaming service, both of which devalue your offering and introduce risk of churn.

• Independent software vendors (ISVs): ISVs need data streaming to deliver immersive, highly responsive solutions that meet customer demands, helping them bring disruptive, high-impact products to market faster and stay competitive in quickly evolving industries. This is true in all sectors, and having an especially large impact within technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services.

However, building and maintaining open source software, especially at scale, is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and risky. On average, self-managing Kafka takes businesses more than two years to reach production scale, with ongoing platform development and operational costs exceeding millions of dollars per year. Solutions built with open source Kafka and Flink consume extensive engineering resources, which impacts a business’ ability to focus on differentiation and maintain a competitive advantage—a problem which continues to grow over time.

Heard enough and ready to get started? Join the Confluent OEM Program webinar on Thursday, October 10 to learn how you can monetize enterprise-grade data streaming powered by Confluent.

Monetize data streaming with the industry leader

Built and supported by the original creators of Kafka—the open source technology leveraged by more than 80% of the Fortune 100—Confluent provides the easy button for establishing an unparalleled data streaming expertise within any business. With distribution licensing for Confluent Platform, businesses can avoid the costs and major complexities of building a homegrown data streaming solution from scratch and easily bring to market new real-time customer use cases on premises, at the edge, and in the cloud.

Confluent brings a highly reliable, enterprise-grade Kafka experience to any environment where data streaming is needed—at any scale. Fluctuating, unforeseen demand is easily managed with elastically scaling clusters that automate partition rebalances. With tiered storage, infinite amounts of data can be stored right within Kafka while cost-effectively separating storage from compute. Downtime costs and business disruption are minimized with clusters deployed across multiple regions. And finally, data streams can be automatically synced wherever they are needed—in the cloud, across clouds, etc.—with Cluster Linking.

Speed to market with a complete platform

Successfully delivering data streaming—whether as a customer-facing service or embedded within a product—requires far more than just Kafka. It requires a comprehensive set of features, including source and sink connectors to provide no-code data integration for the most popular data sources and destinations, stream processing, advanced security and governance controls, monitoring, automation, support for multiple programming languages, and more. Building this essential infrastructure not only expands the scope of a data streaming project but also drives up costs, increases complexity, and delays time to market. For instance, developing a single system connector can take 3-6 months of engineering effort, followed by ongoing maintenance and support throughout its lifecycle.

Confluent offers the industry’s most complete, ready-to-use data streaming platform, enabling businesses to accelerate time to value while staying focused on their core roadmaps. With over 120 pre-built connectors, it ensures comprehensive data streaming across the entire business. Unified directly alongside Kafka, Confluent Platform for Apache Flink® (limited availability) enables real-time stream processing to generate high-value data products. As deployments evolve, data quality is preserved through Schema Registry and validation, and developers always work efficiently with their choice of non-Java clients. Additionally, enterprise-grade security controls like role-based access control (RBAC), structured audit logs, and secret protection provide the confidence needed for the highest sensitivity deployments.

Confluent also provides advanced monitoring and automation capabilities to ensure seamless data streaming operations within both production and development environments. With Health+ Monitoring, businesses can identify and prevent cluster outages through intelligent alerting made available through cloud-based monitoring tools. For efficient management, Confluent for Kubernetes provides a declarative API to automate and streamline operations for deployment to any standard or managed Kubernetes environment, while Ansible playbooks enable automated deployments in non-containerized, virtual, or bare metal environments, ensuring smooth and reliable performance wherever data streaming is needed.

Altogether, Confluent reduces Kafka's total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 40% (Measuring the Cost-Effectiveness of Confluent Platform), allowing businesses to reinvest valuable resources back into innovation and true differentiation.

Reduce risks and ensure customer success

Relying on internal teams to build, manage, and support complex technologies for enterprise customers and mission-critical products can introduce significant risks. Without specialized expertise, businesses may face serious challenges such as suboptimal architectures, delayed Kafka upgrades, or misconfigurations. These issues not only drive up operational costs but also jeopardize customer satisfaction, reputation, and revenue.

Alongside enterprise-grade Kafka and a feature rich platform, Confluent provides everything necessary to build a high-margin business around data streaming, including:

• Design review and development support – Build your data streaming offerings with architectural guidance and hands-on development support from Confluent’s team of data streaming experts.

• Confluent certification – Launch confidently with proof that your real-time products or data streaming offerings are approved and backed by the industry leader.

• Flexible commercial terms – Package customer-facing offerings easily with commercial terms that match the way businesses sell.

• Expert technical support – Bring committer-led Kafka and Flink support to your business and easily handle any customer question or issue.

Confluent brings committer-led Kafka and Flink support to your business through our team of data streaming experts. With more than 1M Kafka development hours logged, we help businesses transition from supporting a few use cases to successfully leveraging the platform organization-wide across an entire customer base. Our expertise enables businesses to identify new use cases, follow best practices, and fully leverage the platform to drive revenue growth, lower costs, and reduce risk. This ensures customer satisfaction while simultaneously allowing top engineering talent to focus on high-value, strategic initiatives for the business.

Get started today

Data streaming is in higher demand than ever but can come with a complex, high price tag that introduces unnecessary risk to a business. Confluent’s OEM Program brings data streaming to your product or service quickly and easily with unified Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®, built and supported by the original creators of open source Kafka.

Get in touch with our team of Kafka experts and learn how you can start growing your business faster with data streaming.

Join the Confluent OEM Program webinar on Thursday, October 10 to learn more about our platform and OEM benefits.

Apache®, Apache Kafka®, and Apache Flink® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.