Confluent Is Named Microsoft’s 2024 OSS on Azure Global Partner of the Year

Confluent is thrilled to be named Microsoft’s 2024 OSS on Azure Global Partner of the Year. As a three-time Partner of the Year award winner, this recognition reflects our commitment to delivering outstanding open source-based applications and infrastructure solutions on Microsoft Azure.

As illustrated last year, when we won Microsoft's 2023 OSS on Azure Partner of the Year Award in the US, customers can easily access our tightly integrated solution through Azure Marketplace, allowing you to take advantage of Azure's enterprise-grade security, management, billing, and data analytics services. This integration provides our joint customers like DKV Mobility with a highly flexible and reliable approach to acquiring and implementing our data streaming solution. 

“Choosing Confluent Cloud has allowed DKV Mobility’s platform team to create a self-service tool for internal stakeholders developing customer-facing products. As a result, platform team members can spend less time managing clusters and more time working on higher value projects critical to the company’s success.” — Tobias Gockel, platform team manager, DKV Mobility 

Reaching this milestone underscores the advantages of using Azure services alongside open source-based software like Confluent. This award exemplifies our unwavering dedication to simplifying the deployment and integration of Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® with Azure, ensuring a seamless experience for our joint customers. 

Apache Kafka is a critical component of the modern data stack, encompassing Azure services, third-party ISVs, and open source technologies that run on Azure. By leveraging Confluent’s cloud-native, complete data streaming platform, these cloud services gain accelerated data streaming capabilities, allowing companies to prioritize application and analytics development over Kafka and data pipeline management. This helps organizations achieve greater data accessibility, fostering continuous ingestion, processing, governance, and sharing of data as a readily available and trustworthy product. 

Stream processing empowers developers to dynamically filter, join, aggregate, and transform data, enhancing downstream usability. Traditional batch processing downstream of Kafka falls short, resulting in applications built on outdated and inconsistent data. Apache Flink, known for addressing these challenges, comes with complexities and costs. By effortlessly filtering, joining, and enriching data streams at scale, Confluent Cloud unifies Kafka and Flink into an integrated platform with monitoring, security, and governance, redefining the data streaming experience.

Confluent offers a fully managed cloud-native Kafka service that integrates into Azure and can run anywhere, making data streaming accessible to various companies in various industries. With 120+ pre-built connectors, you can build real-time streaming pipelines with just a few clicks to Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Synapse, Azure Functions, and more. No matter where your data lives, Confluent helps integrate and process all of your data in real time, to eliminate the burdens and risks of self-managing Apache Kafka.

Our collaboration with Microsoft Azure is built on a shared commitment to drive innovation and technical integrations for our joint customers. Together we’re redefining real-time data solutions for customers, making it easy for companies to connect their data to Azure’s market-leading services, like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL Database, and others. 

Here are a few highlights from our partnership with Microsoft over the last year:

• Azure was part of a cohort of launch partners for the Confluent Migration Accelerator. The Confluent Migration Accelerator enables a seamless transition from any version of Apache Kafka or traditional messaging systems to Confluent. This program offers exclusive access to resources from our partner ecosystem, and tailored migration offerings, to make migrations a breeze. 

• Confluent Cloud announced support of outbound Azure Private Link connections using Egress Access Points. Egress Access Points enable Confluent Cloud fully managed connectors to securely access services powered by Azure Private Link, such as Azure Blob, MongoDB, Snowflake, or a service that a customer creates themselves, without traversing the public internet.

• Building on our strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft Azure, we plan to develop integrations, proofs of concepts (POCs), and go-to-market efforts specifically around artificial intelligence (AI). With Azure OpenAI and Azure Data Platform, Confluent is planning to create a Copilot Solution Template that enables AI assistants to perform business transactions and provide real-time updates.

• At Kafka Summit London we announced the general availability (GA) of Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink® across all three major clouds, including Microsoft Azure. Now customers can experience Apache Kafka and Flink as a unified, enterprise-grade platform to connect and process data in real time, wherever they need it.

By going through Azure Marketplace, you can expect a seamless onboarding process, including a 30-day free trial and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities to help you quickly get started. 

Being awarded the Microsoft Partner of the Year for the third consecutive year highlights our enduring collaboration with Microsoft. We look forward to continuing our momentum with Microsoft as we approach the second half of the year. 

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a free trial of Confluent Cloud on Azure Marketplace. New sign-ups receive $1,000 to spend within Confluent Cloud during your first 30 days.