Confluent Named a Leader in two IDC MarketScape Reports

In today's data-driven world, where every second counts, organizations are increasingly seeking solutions that enable them to harness the power of real-time data for actionable insights. Whether it’s detecting fraud in financial transactions, optimizing supply chain logistics, or personalizing user experiences in real-time, data streaming platforms have emerged as indispensable tools for organizations striving to unlock the full potential of their data and provide their customers with the rich digital experiences that they have come to expect. 

Confluent has been named a Leader in two different IDC MarketScape reports - 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 this recognition, alongside Confluent's placement in other prominent analyst reports, is a validation of our technology and vision to build a complete data streaming platform that can stream, connect, process, and govern data across the enterprise.

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT 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. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.

Confluent is committed to building the world's leading data streaming 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. 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.

The IDC Marketscape for Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software notes, “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 IDC MarketScape for Event Brokering also states, “Organizations focusing on out-of-the-box, advanced capabilities, such as Generative AI, with relatively low startup times, will also find a good match with Confluent.” 

In the IDC MarketScape for Analytic Stream Processing, Confluent was recognized for the following strengths:

• 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.

• Partnering 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.

In the report for Event Brokering, Confluent was recognized for: 

• 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.

Data Streaming Platforms: Bringing Event Brokers and Analytic Stream Processing Together

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 consistently 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 of a successful streaming service—to stream, connect, process, and govern data. We bring the best of event brokers, analytical stream processing, and much more into one complete platform. 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 IDC MarketScape of Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024 Vendor Assessment and the IDC MarketScape of Worldwide Event Brokering Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, 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!

(1) IDC MarketScape for Analytic Stream Processing Software Vendor Assessment, doc #US51053123, March 2024

(2) IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Event Brokering Vendor Assessment 2024, doc #US50301923, March 2024

Additional resources

• Download an excerpt of IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Event Broker Software 2024

• Download an excerpt of IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software 2024

• 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.