Confluent Named a Gartner Peer Insights 2019 Customers’ Choice for Event Stream Processing Market and Receives Highest Rating for this Distinction

_Confluent secures 4.5 out of 5-star rating as of November 21, 2019 based on customer peer reviews for ease of use, product innovation, and Apache Kafka_® expertise

Mountain View, Calif. – December 9, 2019 – Confluent, Inc., the event streaming platform pioneer, today announced it has been designated the highest vendor rating in Gartner’s 2019 Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Event Stream Processing (ESP). Confluent’s rating is based on Gartner-verified feedback and reviews from end-user professionals who have experience purchasing, implementing and using event stream processing products and solutions.

“Enterprises around the globe are transforming their businesses by leveraging the power of event streaming,” said Sarah Sproehnle, vice president of Customer Success, Confluent. “But many organizations lack the teams or resources required to take full advantage of Apache Kafka, so our goal is to make that easy for any developer in any organization. This community-driven recognition shows that developers and enterprises are excited to adopt platforms that make it much easier to harness the power of Kafka and event streaming at massive scale.”

According to Gartner, Event Stream Processing (ESP) platforms are software systems that perform real-time or near-real-time calculations on event data “in motion.” The input is one or more event streams containing data about customer orders, insurance claims, bank deposits/withdrawals, tweets, Facebook postings, emails, financial or other markets, or sensor data from physical assets such as vehicles, mobile devices or machines. The platforms process the input data as it arrives (hence “in motion”), before optionally storing it in some persistent store. They retain a relatively small working set of stream data in memory, just long enough to perform calculations on a set of recent data for the duration of a time window.

Here is what some of Confluent’s customers had to say:

Ease of Use

• “Confluent Cloud was extremely easy to set up and configure. Managing Kafka and its components can be extremely complex. The Confluent Cloud took all the complexity away and really allowed us to focus on solving business problems.” – Director of Engineering for Retail
• “Confluent is faster than our on premises solution and bundled with their managed support offers great value.” – Systems Integration Supervisor for $10B+ enterprise
• “Managed Kafka Saves Us Money And Headaches” – Director of Engineering for Healthcare

Event-Streaming Innovation

• “Confluent has been great to work with, really having the only fully featured Kafka platform in the industry makes them the go to vendor for the platform.” – Solutions Architects in the Services industry
• “Makes Using Kafka To Its Full Potential Easier, Even For Those Without Technical Knowledge. Confluent Platform provides a number of features that are not in Kafka by default. This decreases the level of expertise needed for a team or company to get their worth out of Kafka.” Data Engineer
• “Excellent feature set, Kafka streams is outstanding. It was always a very good experience working with Confluent team, they are very supportive and provide the required help on architectural help or support as and when needed”. Enterprise Architect and Technology Innovation in Communications industry.

Industry Leading Apache Kafka Expertise

• “From first contact, through many technical sessions, all the way to ongoing support, they have been exceptionally responsive. Confluent *knows* Kafka—deeply—and is able to share / impart their knowledge easily and efficiently.” – Senior Architect Consultant in the Finance industry
• “Confluent has built an excellent Streaming Platform on top of Apache Kafka. The Vendor is highly engaged with the customers, provides SLA driven support , Architectural recommendations as well as helps customer in achieving their business priorities. “ Engineer for large manufacturing enterprise
• “We appreciate Confluent for their focus on helping us to understand and grow rather than trying to sell us more of their stuff. Refreshing after working with many other vendors that don’t seem to really care so long as you’re paying.” – Solutions Architect in the Transportation industry

We believe this distinction is a result of Confluent’s continued mission of putting an event streaming platform at the heart of every business by pushing the event stream processing market forward by making Kafka simple to use and deploy at massive scale in large, complex enterprise environment. Among its achievements in the past 12 months:

• Enhanced Confluent Cloud with cloud-native capabilities to make delivering event-driven applications faster and easier than ever.
• Introduced ksqlDB, an event streaming database to unify the multiple systems involved in stream processing into a single, easy-to-use solution for building event streaming applications.
• Named to the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100 for the 3rd straight year
• Received Morgan Stanley CTO Innovation Award at 19th TechWeek and CTO Innovation Summit
• Named Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year for data and analytics
• Inducted into the JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation
• Honored by Bank of America for Enterprise Technology Innovation

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/
• Confluent success stories: https://www.confluent.io/customers/
• Confluent blog: https://www.confluent.io/blog/
• Try Confluent Cloud for free: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/

About Peer Insights

Peer Insights is an online platform of ratings and reviews of IT software and services that are written and read by IT professionals and technology decision-makers. The goal is to help IT leaders make more insights purchases decisions and help technology providers improve their products by receiving objective, unbiased feedback from their customers. Gartner Peer Insights includes more than 215,000 verified reviews in more than 340 markets. For more information, please visit www.gartner.com/reviews/home.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease of use, scalability, security and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real time. Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, Confluent is headquartered in Palo Alto and London with offices globally. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud at www.confluent.io/download.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

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