Confluent, the data streaming pioneer, has announced the Connect with Confluent technology partner program.

The program is designed to enable partners to bring fully managed data streams directly to their customers through native integrations with Confluent Cloud. It also provides access to Confluent's expertise for technical, sales, and marketing support to amplify go-to-market efforts and ensure customer success at every stage.

By joining the program, partners tap into an ecosystem of technologies fuelled by data streams and unlock massive potential for what's possible on their platforms, the company states.

Erica Schultz, President of Field Operations, Confluent, comments, "When companies can harness streams of real-time data from previously siloed teams and applications across their business, it creates a powerful network effect that opens new avenues for growth and innovation.

"As technology partners bring Confluent data streams directly into their platforms, they unlock potential for more cutting edge, real-time applications to be developed on their platform."

Business is conducted in real time and companies need their customer experiences and operations to reflect that. This need for real-time data has cemented data streaming as a critical business requirement.

According to the 2023 Data Streaming Report, 89% of technology leaders say investments in data streaming are important, while 44% cite the technology as a top strategic priority for their business.

This shift increases pressure on technology providers to support low latency data movement, skipping data-at-rest pit stops in cloud storage buckets and enabling development of end-to-end real-time experiences their customers expect.

To solve this problem, developers often turn to Apache Kafka, the open source data streaming platform used by more than 75% of the Fortune 500. However, when partners build integrations with open source Kafka, they put extra burdens on their customers to develop and deploy Kafka clusters, which must be manually secured, governed, and managed as they scale.

Customers are then responsible for individually integrating all of their data into this cluster. These operational burdens come at the expense of customers actually building and deploying anything new on the partners platform, Confluent states.

The new Connect with Confluent partner program

This program is launching with support from many Confluent technology partners, including Arcion, AWS Lambda, Clickhouse, Elastic, Google Cloud, HiveMQ, Imply, Materialize, MongoDB, Onehouse, Precisely, Qlik, Quix, Rockset, Startree, Tinybird, and Waterstream.

Through a single, native integration with Confluent Cloud, Confluent's technology partners provide customers with the best experience for working with data streams from across their entire business.

Confluent Cloud provides access to more than an exabyte of data processed per year, eliminates the operational shortcomings of an open source integration and accelerates project delivery times for customers.

It delivers fully managed stream processing, enterprise-grade security controls, the industry's only governance suite for Kafka, and more. And its all available wherever customers data may residein the cloud, across clouds, or on premises.

According to the company, technology partner benefits include: 

• Power streaming use cases: Enable low latency workloads from any source or sink with high-quality, serverless data streams and no data-at-rest pit stops. Unlock new data streaming use cases built on your platform with ease by eliminating data silos with Confluent's 120+ source and sink connectors covering the entire Kafka ecosystem.
• Accelerate consumption and growth: Integrate with a complete data streaming platform so customers can focus more on driving consumption and spend less time managing open source Kafka. Shift the ongoing management and support of data streaming capabilities on your platform over to Confluent's Kafka experts.
• Supercharge GTM strategies: Amplify marketing efforts and identify more selling opportunities. Generate and close more opportunities for real-time use cases faster with sales and marketing tooling built specifically for data streaming pipeline generation. 

Confluent partners commented on the annoucement.

Manish Dalwadi, Director of Product Management, BigQuery, Google Cloud, says, "With Confluent Cloud now accessible within BigQuery, customers can easily stream and analyse data in real-time from across cloud and hybrid environments.

"Our mission is to keep data open, flexible, and secure, and our partnership with Confluent will streamline data management and free up resources that can be reallocated toward other digital transformation projects."

John Broad, VP of Partners and Alliances, Imply, says, "Together with Confluent, were 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, were able to massively widen our sales funnel and quickly accelerate adoption of new functionality on our platform."

Anjan Kundavaram, Chief Product Officer, Precisely, says, "We're proud to join the Connect with Confluent program to partner in helping organisations break down legacy data silos, complete cloud migration projects on time and in budget, and supercharge data and analytics innovations.

"Bringing together Confluent Cloud and the Precisely Data Integrity Suite's Data Integration service will seamlessly connect critical systems and data to modern platforms with resilient data pipelines."