How Confluent Helps Software Providers Build Real-Time Products and SaaS Faster

Bringing real-time capabilities to your product or software-as-a-service (SaaS) is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive necessity. Whether you're building a real-time payment platform, a patient monitoring system, or any product where instant data processing fuels great user experiences and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven innovation, Apache Kafka® data streaming is likely at the core. 

However, building a homegrown Kafka service yourself can slow you down, distract you from your core roadmap, and introduce unnecessary risk to your business. That’s where Confluent’s OEM Program comes in. This blog post explores how software companies can embed Confluent’s enterprise-grade offering directly into their products—accelerating time to market, simplifying operations, and reducing risk with guidance and support from the data streaming experts.

Data Streaming Brings Real-Time Applications and SaaS to Life

Confluent’s 2025 Data Streaming Report, based on responses from more than 4,000 tech leaders, clearly shows how data streaming platforms (DSPs) are becoming foundational for driving AI adoption, accelerating time to market, and maximizing return on investment (ROI).

Consider these compelling stats:

• 89% of IT leaders recognize that DSPs directly address their biggest hurdles in AI adoption: data access, quality assurance, and governance. 

• 86% of IT leaders are actively prioritizing investments in data streaming for 2025, indicating a demand for data streaming solutions to achieve business outcomes.

• 44% of IT leaders report 5x or more ROI from DSPs, highlighting the significant value that you can bring to your customers by embedding these capabilities.

These insights highlight how much more software companies can achieve with a complete, production-ready data streaming platform built for scale and reliability. Rather than relying on limited, homegrown Kafka deployments, your engineering teams can focus on core product innovation. 

The Confluent Advantage: Go Beyond Open Source Kafka

Kafka has emerged as the de facto standard for data streaming. However, building and maintaining a homegrown Kafka deployment presents significant challenges for organizations. While unbelievably powerful for high-throughput, low-latency use cases, getting the open source technology to a production-ready state is a complex, multiyear endeavor that can unexpectedly drain your engineering resources and introduce unnecessary operational risk. 

You’ll need far more than just Kafka to be successful. Confluent Platform provides an entire ecosystem of tools and capabilities built around our enterprise-grade distribution of Kafka for building real-time applications and event-driven architectures with unmatched ease of use and reliability. Confluent Platform delivers elastic, resilient, and performant event streaming capabilities, allowing your customers to seamlessly stream, connect, process, and govern all their data. The image below highlights Confluent capabilities beyond open source data streaming.

Accelerate Time to Market With Confluent Platform 8.0

Compatible with Apache Kafka® 4.0, our recently released Confluent Platform 8.0 introduces a suite of features designed to directly benefit software providers like you. These updates remove operational complexity, strengthen data protection, and scale Kafka more efficiently, allowing you to focus on your core product roadmap. With Confluent Platform 8.0, you can:

• Monitor and manage your Kafka and Apache Flink® environments with ease, using the next-gen Confluent Control Center. It provides a user interface that enables you to get a quick overview of cluster health, to observe and control messages, topics, and Schema Registry, and to develop and run ksqlDB queries.

• Simplify your Kafka architecture and unlock massive scalability by replacing ZooKeeper with KRaft. Kafka Raft (KRaft) is the consensus protocol that consolidates responsibility for metadata into Kafka itself.

• Protect your most sensitive data by encrypting individual fields within messages, using Client-Side Field Level Encryption. Improve your application’s security and meet strict compliance requirements.

These powerful updates provide a strong foundation for your real-time applications, enabling you to deliver even greater value and differentiation to your customers. To dive deeper into these new features, check out the Confluent Platform 8.0 blog post.

Another Confluent offering in the OEM program is WarpStream, a DSP designed to seamlessly integrate with cloud object stores such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure while remaining compatible with Kafka. To get started, we highly recommend watching the demo video, which provides a comprehensive overview of WarpStream's capabilities.

Partner for Success: The Confluent OEM Program

The Confluent OEM Program enables you to seamlessly embed the Confluent DSP directly into your products and solutions. You can maintain engineering focus on your core product roadmap with enterprise-grade data streaming that delivers superior performance, reliability, and scalability. Here is an overview of the program benefits: 

• Complete data streaming platform: Confluent—founded by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka—has expanded the open source technology into a complete DSP. The Confluent DSP provides 120+ pre-built source and sink connectors, Flink stream processing, enterprise-grade security, data quality controls, and cloud-based monitoring. If you want control over your cloud infrastructure or if security is top of mind but you want some managed benefits, we have WarpStream. 

• Generative and agentic AI: Unify data processing and AI workflows and make real-time contextual inferences on an astonishing amount of data by bringing well-curated, trustworthy streaming data to AI systems, vector databases, and AI-powered applications.

• Accelerate time to market: Deploy Kafka about six months faster with Confluent Platform versus open source Kafka. You can automate management of clusters through infrastructure-as-code tooling and use API-driven operations to minimize management burden. 

• Cost savings: Confluent Platform is proven to lower the total cost of ownership for Kafka by up to 40%, driven by reduced infrastructure costs, development and operational overhead, and downtime risk.

• Reduce risk: Avoid unnecessary operational risk, including potential downtime, data quality issues, and security vulnerabilities, all of which can lead to lost revenue and productivity and customer dissatisfaction. Confluent Platform includes enterprise-grade security and governance tools that are ready out of the box, e.g., role-based access control (RBAC), audit logs, encryption, and Stream Governance.

We understand your unique needs and have structured our OEM program to help you thrive.

• Expert technical support: Build with architectural guidance and training from the team that has logged 1 million Kafka development hours and easily handle any customer question or issue.

• Validation: Launch confidently with publicized backing from the data streaming leader. The founders of Confluent logged more than 5 million engineering hours dedicated to building the most trusted DSP.

• Flexible commercial terms: Package your offering easily with commercial terms that match the way you sell.

• Warranty and indemnification: Operate with a warranty that ensures material conformance to Confluent documentation and protection through infringement indemnification.

Success Story: Mindgate Solutions Delivers Real-Time Payment Platform With Confluent

One of our partners, Mindgate Solutions, has embedded Confluent in its real-time payment platform, leveraging a complete DSP that dramatically expands on open source Kafka.

We strongly encourage all software providers to explore the benefits of the Confluent OEM Program and discover how it can help you grow your business, get to market faster, maintain focus on your core roadmap, and reduce unnecessary operational risk. 

Contact us to learn more about our OEM program. 

Join Us at Current New Orleans 2025!

We’re excited to invite you to Current New Orleans 2025, the premier data streaming industry event. This is a unique opportunity to gain invaluable insights directly from Confluent leaders, industry pioneers, and fellow innovators who are at the forefront of shaping data streaming's future. Register now to save $300 off standard pricing for the in-person event! You’ll get to attend technical sessions, demos, and workshops to deepen your skills and take away practical strategies and insights to apply immediately. We look forward to connecting with you in New Orleans and discussing how we can further empower your success.

Apache®, Apache Kafka®, Kafka®, Apache Flink®, and Flink® are registered trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks.