Confluent, an IBM Company

Confluent, an IBM Company, builds a cloud-native data streaming platform for what it calls data in motion, a category of data infrastructure it describes itself as pioneering. The platform is designed to act as connective tissue that lets real-time data from multiple sources stream continuously across an organization, functioning as a kind of central nervous system for its applications. Data streaming treats information as a continuous flow of events rather than periodic batches, an approach that lets systems react as things happen instead of waiting for scheduled processing jobs.

The company was started by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka, the open-source event streaming technology, and its offerings rework Kafka for the cloud. Confluent Cloud, a managed cloud service, runs on a cloud-native engine called Kora, while Confluent Platform serves self-managed deployments; the company also offers Stream Governance, a fully managed governance suite that includes a Schema Registry, and more than 120 pre-built connectors. This split between a managed service and a self-managed distribution is common in infrastructure software, letting customers choose between reduced operational burden and direct control over on-premises or multi-cloud environments.

Confluent positions its platform as a way for customers to deliver rich digital customer experiences and real-time business operations, with a stated mission of helping every organization harness data in motion. Its users range from startups to global enterprises, with use cases spanning fraud detection and real-time payments in financial services, inventory visibility in retail, predictive maintenance in manufacturing, network monitoring in telecommunications and patient monitoring in healthcare. Buyers of such platforms are typically engineering and data teams replacing brittle batch pipelines or feeding live data into analytics and AI systems. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and also operates a London-based entity, Confluent Europe Ltd.