Confluent Strengthens Streaming Platform to Take Enterprises into the Era of Real-time

Company builds on rapid adoption of Apache Kafka among Fortune 500 companies with new robust and scalable capabilities in Confluent Enterprise

NEW YORK – September 28, 2016 (Strata + Hadoop World) – Confluent, provider of the first streaming platform based on Apache Kafka®, today announced new features for Confluent Enterprise, making it the most complete platform to build enterprise-scale streaming pipelines using Apache Kafka and simplify the development of stream processing applications. Modern businesses need to move data from isolated systems into a real-time data pipeline where they can act on it immediately. As evidenced by its rapid adoption in the Fortune 500, Apache Kafka is quickly emerging as the leading streaming platform for real-time applications. With this release, digital businesses can scale their production environments with confidence in its reliability, efficiency and scalability for hundreds of use cases, thousands of applications and trillions of messages.

According to Gartner, “ESP [event stream processing] will eventually be adopted by multiple departments within every large company. It has already transformed financial markets — the majority of equity trades are now conducted algorithmically — and is essential to smart electrical grids, location-based marketing, and many other applications.”1

Confluent Enterprise is the complete solution for Apache Kafka in the enterprise, containing all of Kafka’s capabilities and enhancing it with integrated, tested and packaged features that make architecting and managing large scale streaming pipelines easier and more reliable.

Increase the performance and reliability of your Apache Kafka environment
Apache Kafka is being used in production by more than a third of the Fortune 500, including seven of the top 10 global banks, eight of the top 10 insurance companies, nine of the top 10 U.S. telecom companies and six of the top 10 travel companies. Confluent Enterprise provides world-class support for large-scale Apache Kafka environments as well as Confluent’s proprietary software for centrally managing and monitoring Kafka clusters. The upcoming release adds global scale and uptime, improved performance and greater ease when moving data, regardless of whether it is deployed on premises or in the cloud.

• Multi-datacenter replication – In a multi-cluster environment, it is now easy to set up secure multi-cluster replication and maintain clusters in many geographical locations with centralized configuration. As a result, Kafka clusters in each datacenter are synchronized so applications and configurations in separate datacenters are in sync.
• Auto data balancing – Confluent Enterprise improves resource utilization and reliability by automatically balancing data between Kafka servers in a cluster. Users experience a lower probability of failures or impaired performance within Kafka environments, a more efficient and operational Kafka engineering team and the ability to add nodes more easily. In addition, enterprises can now scale clusters across environments.
• Cloud migration capability – businesses can use Confluent Enterprise to create a stream to the cloud or back and synchronize cloud clusters with on-premises clusters. This capability, based on Confluent replication, gives organizations more freedom to transition to their desired cloud strategy.

“When we first created Kafka, our vision was to unlock data sitting in silos to enable companies to draw valuable and actionable insights in real time. As we continue to build out Confluent Enterprise, we’re dedicated to helping businesses make the most of streaming data,” said Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO of Confluent. “We’re building a streaming platform to make it easy to put stream processing in practice for organizations of any size and will continue to release features that help our customers along this journey.”

The new release of Confluent Enterprise and Confluent Platform, the free, open source version, will be available for download from the Confluent website at the end of October. The download is available in packages popular with open source developers including zip, tar, RPM and deb.

For a deep dive into the new features available in this release, register for the webinar here: https:/www-wp.confluent.io/webinar/confluent-platform-3-1-release.
To learn more about Confluent Enterprise, please visit: https://www.confluent.io/subscription/.

Visit Confluent at Strata + Hadoop World NYC 2016 at booth #758. More speaking session and book signing details can be found here: https://www.confluent.io/strata-hadoop-world/ny/2016.

About Confluent
Confluent, founded by the creators of open source Apache Kafka®, provides the streaming platform that enables enterprises to maximize the value of data. Confluent Platform lets leaders in industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services, technology and media, move data from isolated systems into a real-time data pipeline where they can act on it immediately. Backed by Benchmark, Data Collective, Index Ventures and LinkedIn, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform at www.confluent.io/download.

Connect with Confluent
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© Confluent, Inc. 2014–2016. All rights reserved. Apache, Apache Kafka and Kafka are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. All other marks used are the property of their respective owners.

1 Gartner, “Hype Cycle for the Internet of Things, 2016” – Jul, 14 2016 https://www.gartner.com/doc/3371743/hype-cycle-internet-things-