Confluent Named a Leader in Two IDC MarketScape Reports Evaluating Data Streaming Technologies

Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ: CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced that it has been named as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment(1) and the IDC Marketscape for Worldwide Event Brokering Software 2024 Vendor Assessment(2).

"We believe our position as a Leader in both IDC MarketScapes is based on market recognition of data streaming platforms," says Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer, Confluent. "From critical use cases like accelerating the development of real-time AI applications to real-time payments, companies rely increasingly on Confluent to deliver trustworthy data across their organization."

At the heart of the data streaming movement is Apache Kafka®. Kafka is the de facto standard and most successful open source technology for streaming data used by hundreds of thousands of developers, including 75% of the Fortune 500. Confluent provides everything companies need to implement Kafka use cases quickly, securely, and reliably, everywhere they need it. With the only data streaming platform that streams, connects, processes and governs real-time data, organizations can break down data barriers and easily reuse and access data streams for endless use cases. Instead of tackling a complex data mess, teams can now focus on developing real-time applications that drive significant business value.

The IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment notes, "As a data streaming platform, Confluent Cloud seeks to serve the needs of a large pool of potential customers through a broad coverage approach." It also states, "Confluent Cloud removes the complexities of implementing and operating Kafka infrastructure, connectors, processing, and governance, allowing customers to focus on building streaming data pipelines and real-time applications to achieve operational and strategic business outcomes." The excerpt also says, "Confluent Cloud is highly infused with predictive AI, interpretive AI, and generative AI, which can provide for a wide range of potential use cases within each of these three categories."

The company's strengths as evaluated by the IDC MarketScape in this excerpt include:

• Stream Governance: "Confluent has built an extensive set of stream intelligence capabilities that enable stream governance. The company supports event discovery through its stream catalog and data portal, runtime schema validation provided by a schema registry, stream lineage capability to trace data flowing through the stream, and the ability to tag sensitive event data flowing within the stream. These capabilities contribute to improving the quality of data in the stream, stream tracing, and compliance with internal and external policies and regulations."
• Confluent partner program and multicloud support: "Confluent has a large and diverse set of global channels, implementation, and technology partners. Confluent is available on all public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and the IBM Cloud."

The IDC MarketScape for Event Brokering Software 2024 Vendor Assessment notes, "Confluent Cloud offers users many event processing capabilities that provide a strong foundation for a general-purpose model, such as event routing, event transformation, event filtering, load balancing, and event replay." It also says, "within the platform, Confluent Cloud can utilize commercial LLMs like ChatGPT/Bard to convert natural language into SQL-based pipelines that execute on Confluent. Confluent Cloud is decoupled from any particular LLM implementation, increasing the ease to change between vendors. In addition, Confluent recently announced expanded AI-focused partnerships with MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz to provide real-time contextual data from anywhere for their vector databases."

The company's strengths as evaluated by the IDC MarketScape in this excerpt include:

• Strong analytical and operational capabilities: "Confluent Cloud supports a wide range of analytical and operational capabilities like partitioning, advanced routing and processing, and metrics monitoring. Implementation of AI capabilities, such as integration of commercial LLMs and, more recently, partnering for real-time contextual data with vector databases, will only continue to expand the range of analytical and operational capabilities available for Confluent customers."
• Out-of-the-box monitoring and security capabilities: "Confluent sets itself apart from many vendors with the number of out-of-the-box capabilities offered on Confluent Cloud, including in-demand monitoring and security capabilities that are expected or commonly utilized for event brokers. This gives Confluent a great competitive advantage over vendors that require third-party integrations or other, more complicated processes to engage these tools and capabilities."

Additional resources

• Download an excerpt of IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Event Broker Software 2024 Vendor Assessment
• Download an excerpt of IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment
• Read more about Confluent's placement in the IDC MarketScapes in this blog post
• Click here for more information on data streaming for real-time AI

About Confluent

Confluent is the data streaming platform that is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure that sets data in motion. Confluent's cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion ? designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization. With Confluent, organizations can meet the new business imperative of delivering rich, digital front-end customer experiences and transitioning to sophisticated, real-time, software-driven backend operations. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

About IDC MarketScape

IDC MarketScape vendor assessment model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT (information and communications technology) suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor's position within a given market. IDC MarketScape provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of IT and telecommunications vendors can be meaningfully compared. The framework also provides technology buyers with a 360-degree assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and prospective vendors.

(1) IDC MarketScape for Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, doc #US51053123, March 2024
(2) IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Event Brokering Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, doc #US50301923, March 2024