Confluent has announced a new strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft. The partnership adds greater investments across technology integrations, solution development, and go-to-market activities. With this commitment, Confluent and Microsoft aim to reduce the operational burden of managing data streams in Azure and speed up real-time application development in the cloud.
“COVID-driven disruption has drastically accelerated timelines for delivering end-to-end digital experiences and real-time operations,” said Erica Schultz, President of Field Operations, Confluent. “We are extremely dedicated to ensuring our customers can innovate fast in the cloud, and have deepened our partnership with Microsoft to support businesses at this critical time in their transformation.”
“Streaming data in the cloud is the foundation of next-generation customer experiences and business operations,” said Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Microsoft. “Through Microsoft and Confluent’s expanded relationship, more organizations will be able to fully realize the power of cloud-native data streaming and benefit from faster development of modern applications with easier access to real-time data in the cloud.”
Since the start of their strategic alliance, Confluent and Microsoft have made strides in building tighter integrations, extending Confluent’s managed cloud connectors across Azure services and supporting customers’ business-level initiatives.
Confluent maintains the industry’s largest portfolio of data streaming connectors, and recently released new fully managed connectors for Azure deployments, including Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Synapse Analytics. These pre-built connectors are designed with Confluent’s expertise in Apache Kafka to save organizations the months of engineering time typically needed to build and maintain custom integrations.
Setting data in motion with Confluent and Azure is fast and frictionless. Confluent Cloud can be quickly accessed with single sign-on through Azure Marketplace’s Active Directory, and billing is integrated with Azure billing accounts for simple cost management. Confluent on Azure is one of the easiest ways to get started with Kafka and removes the operational burden of managing a complex, open-source distributed system.
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