Can you share insights on Confluent’s recent partner investment of US$200 million?
This investment is our boldest commitment yet to building a truly partner-first business. At its core, the US$200 million allocation is about empowering partners to succeed in the AI era by unlocking real-time data, modernising architectures, and accelerating innovation across every layer of the technology stack.
In the Middle East, where governments and enterprises are doubling down on digital transformation, partners are pivotal to delivering locally relevant, globally competitive solutions. This isn’t just about scale; it’s about creating a robust, future-ready ecosystem. In the Middle East, where digital transformation is a national priority, from Vision 2030 to Smart Government initiatives, partners are vital to scaling locally relevant, AI-driven outcomes. A great example is our partnership with SCCC by stc, which is helping bring enterprise-grade data streaming to Saudi Arabia’s growing cloud ecosystem. We are equipping our partners with the tools, training, and go-to-market alignment they need to lead in real time and deliver the next wave of data and AI innovation across the region.
What kinds of joint solutions or go-to-market opportunities will this create for partners?
We are expanding our partner playbook across cloud, ISV, OEM, and MSP routes to market. In the Middle East, this translates into co-innovated solutions that align with strategic regional sectors, financial services, aviation, public sector, and telecom.
Think: real-time payments with fraud protection, predictive customer experiences in travel, or AI-driven citizen services. We are also enhancing co-selling with global cloud providers and doubling down on joint demand generation with local system integrators. The opportunity here is to move from tactical engagements to repeatable, scalable solutions. The more embedded our partners become in delivering business outcomes powered by real-time data, the more competitive we all become, together.
What does having ‘AI-ready’ data truly mean for partners and customers?
AI-ready data is not just about having vast datasets; it’s about ensuring data is fresh, trustworthy, and accessible in real time. In the Middle East, where AI adoption is accelerating across smart cities, banks, and digital services, the difference between success and stalling often lies in the speed and structure of data pipelines.
Our partners play a crucial role in modernising these pipelines. With Confluent, they can help customers transition from batch-based, siloed systems to streaming-first architectures that fuel real-time decisioning. This enables use cases like dynamic credit scoring, intelligent personalisation, and instant anomaly detection, use cases that only thrive when AI has the right data, at the right moment.
How can data streaming help partners grow in an AI-driven world?
Data streaming unlocks a critical competitive edge: the ability to act on insights in the moment. For partners, this opens the door to new solution areas, AI orchestration, predictive analytics, data fabric modernisation, and even regulatory compliance automation.
In the AI era, businesses can no longer afford to lag. Whether it’s real-time onboarding in FinTech or intelligent routing in logistics, latency kills opportunity. Partners who embed streaming into their architectures help clients remove that latency, improve agility, and unlock operational efficiency. In essence, streaming is what connects raw data to real business value, making it the most strategic layer for partners to build upon in AI-first environments.
How will deeper integrations with Confluent’s platform benefit partners and customers?
Our platform has evolved well beyond Kafka. With innovations like Apache Flink integration and unified batch + stream processing, Confluent offers a complete, cloud-native data streaming platform. For partners, deeper integration means they can build more intelligent, scalable, and resilient solutions, faster. It also simplifies developer experience, strengthens observability, and accelerates time-to-value.
For customers, this translates to real-time use cases that are production-ready on Day 1. In markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where speed to innovate is crucial, having pre-integrated, enterprise-grade data infrastructure is a game-changer. It reduces risk, shortens the build cycle, and increases trust in AI-powered decisioning.
How do you see regional system integrators driving your growth plans?
Regional SIs are essential to our vision. They understand local market dynamics, regulatory nuances, and the vertical-specific challenges that global platforms must adapt to. In the Middle East, our top-performing engagements are often driven by local SIs who pair domain expertise with our technology to deliver tailored outcomes. With this investment, we’re deepening technical training, co-innovation programmes, and GTM alignment with our SI community, particularly in high-priority markets like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
Our goal is to enable them to become data streaming leaders in their own right, capable of owning multi-million-dollar transformation projects and scaling real-time solutions regionally.
Where do you see partners adding the most value to Confluent’s growth over the next three years?
Over the next three years, partners will be the key force multiplying our impact across the Middle East. As every business becomes data-led, the demand for streaming-enabled, AI-ready solutions will outpace what any single vendor can deliver alone.
Partners will be instrumental in co-creating vertical solutions, deploying at scale, and accelerating cloud migrations. We also see tremendous value in partners who integrate streaming with adjacent technologies, observability, cybersecurity, LLM orchestration, and more.
Ultimately, Confluent’s success in the region won’t just be measured by our product adoption, but by the strength of the ecosystems we help build. That’s the true north for our partner strategy.
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