Confluent named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023

In today's fast-moving world, data streaming platforms are gaining more significance. Whether it's a conventional retail giant like Walmart, which keeps track of inventory levels to avoid stockouts, or a modern, innovative tech company like 10x Banking, which creates unconventional banking solutions for traditional banks, data streaming platforms are at the core of these processes. By connecting all applications, systems, and teams, regardless of location or deployment, data streaming platforms provide a shared perspective of the most current real-time data.

Forrester has named Confluent a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023. This is in addition to Confluent’s recent recognition as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2023. 

The Cloud Data Pipelines report evaluates vendors that provide advanced capabilities to enable teams throughout an organization to rapidly create, deploy, and manage data pipelines, resulting in faster execution of complex use cases and support of automation.

Confluent is at the heart of the data streaming revolution. We were built by the founders of Apache Kafka®, today’s de facto standard and most successful open source technology for data streaming, used by over 75% of the fortune 500. Confluent reinvented Kafka to build a cloud-native, complete data streaming platform, available everywhere and for every use case. Today, Confluent is used by 4,800+ customers across every industry, all over the world.

“Confluent is ahead of other vendors evaluated in innovation. Confluent’s superior roadmap promises expanded capabilities for generative AI, self-service, expanded API, collaboration, extensibility, and data quality,” states The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023. The report also states, “Confluent is an excellent fit for customers who need to support a high-performance, scalable, multicloud data pipeline with extreme resilience.”

Confluent tied for the highest score in the Strategy category. The company also scored the highest possible score in 13 of the 26 criteria that Forrester evaluated, including

• Current offering: data delivery, observability, UI and automation, data ingestion, data access, data lineage, deployment options, reliability and resilience, and performance and scale

• Strategy: innovation, roadmap, partner ecosystem, and adoption

Data Streaming Platforms: The Key to Building Cloud Data Pipelines

Data streaming platforms are the key to turning your data mess of complex, batch-oriented, custom code integrations into data value. This isn’t just bolting on more tech or adding a “streaming” feature to an existing data warehouse. A data streaming platform is a software platform that streams, connects, processes, and governs all your data, and makes it available wherever it’s needed, however it’s needed, in real time. It helps set your data in motion, so you can create real-time experiences faster, safer, and more cost-effectively than ever.

How does it do this? A data streaming platform helps connect and unlock all your enterprise data from source systems—wherever they reside—and serves it as continuously streamed, processed, and governed data products. These real-time data products are instantly valuable, trustworthy, and reusable, and they ensure your data is used in a consistent manner everywhere it’s needed.

This approach unleashes a virtuous cycle of innovation, with each new data product increasing the value of the others and enabling more reuse across the organization. It changes your focus from “Where is my data, and is it accurate?” to “What is my data, and how do I get value from it immediately?” Data streaming platforms connect all your applications, systems, and teams with a shared view of the most up-to-date, real-time data.

Data streaming platforms are critical components in building cloud data pipelines, which are used to move data from various sources to a central location for storage, processing, and analysis. Data streaming platforms allow for continuous data ingestion and processing, which is essential for powering many high-impact use cases that involve real-time data. By leveraging data streaming platforms and data products, organizations can build efficient and effective cloud data pipelines that can handle large volumes of data and deliver insights in real time.

The Confluent Advantage: The World’s Leading Data Streaming Platform

Confluent is the only data streaming platform that delivers on all four fundamental principles to a successful streaming service—to stream, connect, process, and govern data. It’s why we say Confluent is the world’s leading data streaming platform.

Stream:  Streaming is at the heart of our platform. We transformed Kafka with Kora engine, our Apache Kafka engine built for the cloud. Kora abstracts all the operational challenges of self-managing Kafka and delivers a fully managed, cost-effective Kafka service. Kora powers Confluent Cloud to support streaming across 30,000+ clusters around the globe. Kora is elastic, resilient, cost-efficient, and runs at low latencies.

Connect: Our connector ecosystem enables customers to connect to any data source and sink—wherever they reside—including databases, message queues, cloud services, and more! We support over 120+ pre-built connectors and 70+ fully managed connectors. We’ll also manage your custom connectors to homegrown systems and apps.

Process: Stream processing combines multiple data streams and shapes them on the fly to drive greater data reuse. Confluent supports SQL-based stream processing and recently announced the public preview of Apache Flink® on Confluent Cloud. Flink has emerged as the de facto stream processing standard, and Confluent has gone beyond "cloud-hosted" Flink to build a truly cloud-native, serverless stream processing service.

Govern: We offer the only fully managed governance suite for data in motion. Stream Governance allows you to catalog streams as data products—so you can apply data quality controls, compliance standards, and maintain visibility into usage while still making streams available for anyone in your organization to discover and consume. Furthermore, Confluent offers built-in security tools, including granular RBAC, cloud audit logs, private networking capabilities, data encryption at rest and in transit, and much more.

With these four principles, we take data from your data mess and turn it into reusable, high quality data products. These data products can then be shared and used to build custom applications that deliver real-time experiences for customers and other data systems.

At Confluent, we are committed to our customers' success. We are proud of our recognition as a leader in both The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023 and The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2023, and we will continue to innovate and provide the best platform for our customers.

A Thank You to Our Customers, Partners, and Community

We’re excited to share this recognition with our customers, our broad partner ecosystem, and the open-source community of developers. Without your feedback, input, and contributions, we couldn’t deliver the value we do today. Thank you!