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Confluent Extends Leadership Team with Key Hires

Ivan Ernest joins as Chief People Officer and Simon Hayes joins as Vice President of Corporate and Business Development

PALO ALTO, Calif. – July 18, 2017 – Confluent, provider of the leading streaming platform based on Apache Kafka®, today announced that Ivan Ernest has joined the executive team as chief people officer and Simon Hayes has joined as vice president of corporate and business development. The appointment of these executives reflects the company’s focus on building a world class organization with an excellent bench of technology leadership.

The expansion of the executive team will enable Confluent to scale operations and drive new revenue streams after a record year in 2016, including over 700 percent ACV (annual contract value) subscription bookings growth year over year, nearly tripling the number of employees, opening an EMEA headquarters in London and adding many new customers including Priceline.com, Surescripts, TiVo and Zopa.

Ivan Ernest, chief people officer: Ernest is a human resources professional with extensive experience delivering organizational design and HR innovation and scaling solutions in fast-growth technology companies. In this role, Ernest will lead the people efforts at Confluent. Before joining Confluent, Ernest was an advisor and investor to several start-up and mid-stage companies. Prior to that, he led the human resources efforts for Google engineering and operations for eight years. He has also held various HR, operations and finance positions during the past 20 years working in the technology, healthcare and real estate industries.
Simon Hayes, vice president of corporate and business development: Hayes joins Confluent from Puppet where he led corporate and business development. While there, Hayes built Puppet’s BD organization to accelerate Strategic Alliances, build new routes to market with Cloud partners like AWS, Global Systems Integrators such as Cognizant, and launch the Technology Alliance Partner Program (TAPP). Prior to Puppet, Hayes was vice president of portfolio, strategy and alliances at Citrix where he transformed the Strategic Alliances organization to scale relationships with companies like Cisco, Microsoft, SAP, IBM and Fujitsu, and built the ecosystem to support Citrix’s entry into new markets in mobility and cloud. Before joining Citrix, he was vice president of Cisco’s Enterprise Alliances, after holding a variety of business development and sales leadership roles at HP in Europe and the US.

“Ivan and Simon both bring phenomenal experience to the leadership team. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome them to Confluent,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO at Confluent. “They will be instrumental in building our culture, organization and processes that will allow Confluent to execute its vision of streaming data at the heart of every company.”

Confluent is hiring. See the open positions here: https://www.confluent.io/careers/.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of open source Apache Kafka®, provides the only streaming platform that enables enterprises to maximize the value of data. Confluent Platform empowers leaders in industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services, technology and media, move data from isolated systems into a real-time data pipeline where they can act on it immediately. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Open Source at www.confluent.io/download.

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