Confluent to invest over $300m in partner ecosystem

Confluent intends to invest USD$200 million (AUD$306 million) in its partner ecosystem over the next three years.

The data streaming platform vendor said it wants the investment to encourage partners to make data streaming a core part of their business.

The investment will be focused on enabling partners to launch new solutions based on Confluent’s products, co-develop use cases for high data streaming demand customers, and work with partners to build integrations for its platform.

The company pointed to a comment from analyst firm IDC that organisations require AI-ready data to make the most of AI.

“This readiness is not solely about adopting AI tools but more about building the foundational infrastructure, processes, and culture required to support AI initiatives at scale," the IDC statement said.

Confluent's regional head of Asia Pacific and Japan for partner innovation ecosystem, Sandeep Shirodkar, said the investment is designed to help partners grow with data streaming—giving them more ways to build it into their strategies, unlock new revenue and explore fresh use cases.

"Our strategy is simple: empower our partners—from regional specialists to global integrators—to harness data streaming to deliver transformative AI-powered solutions for our customers," he said.

"This investment is targeted at building the deep domain knowledge and technical expertise required to lead the next wave of innovation."

Shirodkar said an AI agent's accuracy depends on taking the right action at the right time, which is only possible with real-time, contextual data.

"Our platform delivers this through Apache Flink, our engine for stateful stream processing - it acts as the AI's 'nervous system', analysing real-time data streams to provide the situational awareness and complex event detection an agent needs to make an informed decision - and Tableflow, which automatically converts data streams into open source table formats such as Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake analytics-ready tables," he said.

"It serves as AI's reliable "worldview," taking the intelligence from Flink and materializing it into a fresh, queryable table that the agent can use as its source of truth before it acts.

"This is where our investment in the partner ecosystem becomes critical to extend our reach into the ANZ market. We are committing our resources to build this expertise directly within our ANZ partner network."

Shirodkar also said Confluent's goal is to build a mature and highly skilled partner ecosystem, with a focus on empowering Global System Integrators (GSIs) to establish dedicated Confluent practices in ANZ.

"This is a commitment to co-invest in building industry-specific frameworks, solution accelerators, and intellectual property through our OEM program that solve the unique challenges of Australian industries—from predictive maintenance in mining to real-time fraud detection in banking," he said.

"A mature ecosystem of partners with both technical prowess and deep business knowledge will act as a massive force multiplier. It ensures our partners can turn  data streaming into a powerful tool for solving their customers' most complex, high-value challenges.

"This will allow partners to drive measurable impact and strengthen their ability to support the modern, AI and data driven businesses.”

Last year, Confluent launched an OEM programme targeting managed service providers (MSPs), cloud service providers (CSPs), and independent software vendors (ISVs).

The programme allowed these partners to globally redistribute Confluent’s platform.