Confluent Launches Program To Assist ISV Technology Partners

The new Connect with Confluent initiative will help developers of database, data analytics and other big data software build integrations with the Confluent data streaming platform.

Paul Mac Farland

Data streaming software provider Confluent has launched a new partner program to provide technical, sales and marketing support for technology partners – including database, data analytics and other big data software developers.

The new Connect with Confluent program is targeted toward ISVs who develop software and services that work with the Confluent Cloud streaming data platform. Confluent’s broader partner ecosystem also includes systems integrators and cloud platform companies.

“Our goal is to increase the value of the network,” said Paul Mac Farland, Confluent vice president of partner and innovation ecosystem, noting in an interview with CRN that the more ISVs and cloud services that integrate their offerings with the Confluent platform, the more potential use cases for customers. “The goal is to proliferate as wide as we can because it benefits our mutual customer bases.”

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Confluent, founded in 2014 and based in Mountain View, Calif., markets its namesake data streaming platform – including on-premises and cloud service editions – that access, store and manage data as a continuous, real-time stream. The technology is based on the open-source Apache Kafka data streaming technology that was originally developed by Confluent’s founders when they worked at LinkedIn.

Confluent has long operated a program that covers all its partners and the new Connect with Confluent program will operate under that umbrella.

Mac Farland said the move from on-premises and private cloud systems to hybrid- and multi-cloud and software-as-a-service systems means that data today is more distributed. So the more data applications and cloud services that link with the Confluent platform, the more effective it is for customers, he said.

The core goal of Connect with Confluent is to make the Confluent platform – and the data that flows through it – available to a wider ecosystem of ISV partners.

Through the program Confluent will provide partners with technical assistance to develop native integrations with Confluent Cloud that can shorten project delivery times, create new use cases and applications, and better provide customers with fully managed data streams.

Sales And Marketing Assistance

The program also offers partners a range of sales and marketing resources and support to boost go-to-market efforts. That will include lead generation and joint webinars. “I think a big portion of this is really enablement and awareness,” Mac Farland said.

Mac Farland noted the move to cloud is accelerating software sales cycles because SaaS products can be more easily demonstrated to prospective customers. That means ISVs with products that are already integrated with Confluent will have an advantage.

Along with helping current ISV and technology partners work better with Confluent, the Connect with Confluent program will also be a vehicle for recruiting additional partners.

Imply, a developer of real-time data analytics software and services based on the open-source Druid platform, is a long-time Confluent partner. “The two technologies themselves are very complementary,” Imply co-founder and CEO Fangjin Yang said in an interview with CRN. “When you combine the two technologies, you can solve a lot of really interesting use cases.”

There is already a significant level of integration between the Confluent and Imply platforms given the overlap in the Kafka and Druid communities, Yang said. And Confluent and Imply are already doing co-marketing together and working on joint commercial deals.

“It’s been a great partnership across multiple levels from a community developer perspective, from a marketing perspective and from a sales perspective,” Yang said. But he noted that the Connect with Confluent program will formalize business processes and define roles for people in each company.

“It’s always nice to have more structure in how two or more companies work together,” Yang said. “And I think it’s ultimately beneficial to the customer as well because the customer has a framework to understand how the two companies work together. From what we’ve seen, the program has helped unlock means of communication and collaboration that allows us to try and create value for the customer in a better way.”

Partners Already Connecting With Confluent

A number of other software and service providers are onboard with the Connect with Confluent program including Arcion, Clickhouse, Elastic, HiveMQ, Materialize, MongoDB, OneHouse, Precisely, Qlik, Quix, Rockset, StarTree, Tinybird and Waterstream. Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services Lambda are also in.

“With Confluent Cloud now accessible within BigQuery, customers can easily stream and analyze data in real-time from across cloud and hybrid environments,” said Manish Dalwadi, product management director, BigQuery, Google Cloud, in a statement. “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.”