Confluent (an IBM company, brought its Data Streaming World Tour to New Delhi, bringing together technology leaders and enterprises to discuss how real-time data is shaping the way organisations build and scale Al, applications and analytics. India’s digital-native businesses are operating in increasingly real-time environments, with data continuously generated across customer interactions, transactions, operations and applications.
As these businesses scale and continue to incorporate Al into their products and operations, access to fresh, relevant and trusted data is becoming increasingly important. Al systems need the right context at the right time, and data streaming enables organisations to continuously move, process and govern data as it is generated, making fresh and contextualised data available to applications, analytics and Al. As Al moves further into production and supports real-time decisions and actions, the ability to make that data continuously available becomes increasingly important, because Al ships when data streams.
The event brought this conversation to India’s growing digital-native ecosystem, with Zomato, Blinkit, PhysicsWallah, BharatPe, Magicpin, IndiGo, Wayfair and TBO.com among the customers attending the event.
The event’s executive keynote was delivered by Gaurav Agarwal, Vice President, Technology, IBM India & South Asia. Key Confluent speakers included:
- Rubal Sahni, Vice President, Sales, Confluent
- Ananda Bose, Vice President, Data Streaming Platform, Confluent
- Rohit Vyas, Director, Solutions Engineering, Confluent
India’s Digital-Native Economy Drives Confluent’s Growth
India’s growing digital-native ecosystem is an important area of focus for Confluent. As technology companies scale into larger enterprises, their data infrastructure needs to support greater volumes of data, more complex environments and increasingly demanding Al use cases, while retaining the flexibility to adapt as the business evolves.
As organisations grow, their technology environments increasingly span multiple clouds, on-premises infrastructure and different technology providers. Confluent enables organisations to stream and process data across cloud, on-premises and multicloud environments, giving businesses the flexibility to adapt their infrastructure as their needs change while maintaining security, governance and scale. This flexibility is particularly relevant for digital-native businesses moving through different stages of growth, where infrastructure requirements can evolve quickly. Confluent’s cloud business in India has grown significantly, with cloud accounting for the majority of Confluent’s India revenue and digital-native companies representing a significant share of that business.
Also read: IBM Acquires Confluent to Strengthen Real-Time Data Capabilities
Rubal Sahni, Vice President, Sales, Confluent, said, “India is seeing a strong new wave of IPO activity, including a growing number of technology companies and unicorns preparing to enter the public markets. For us, this is an important segment to double down on. As these businesses move from startup scale to becoming large, more complex enterprises, they need data infrastructure that can support greater scale, speed and governance without limiting their flexibility. We see a significant opportunity to work with these companies through that next phase of growth.”
Confluent is also seeing an uptick in public-sector projects in India, expanding its opportunity beyond the digital-native segment. The company’s public-sector proposition is centred on connecting data across systems and making trusted, real-time data available to applications and services. In India, Confluent’s partnership with Jio Platforms has also extended its managed data streaming offering to public-sector organisations, with enterprise-grade security and governance for trusted data at scale.
Making data infrastructure more efficient
As organisations generate and manage more data, moving and transforming that data across complex architectures can add significant cost and operational overhead
Confluent brings together capabilities to stream, connect, process and govern data, helping organisations reduce unnecessary data movement and simplify the architecture required to make data available to applications, analytics and Al.
Rohit Vyas, Director, Solutions Engineering, Confluent, said, “In my experience, as organisations scale their data infrastructure, as much as 70% of the cost of a data lake can be associated with ingesting and transforming data. That is an area where Confluent can make a meaningful difference. By processing data closer to where it is generated, organisations can reduce unnecessary movement and transformation, simplify their architecture and ultimately lower costs.” A complete data streaming platform can deliver 40-70% potential TCO reduction, alongside faster developer velocity.
Expanding the opportunity for enterprise Al
The combination of Confluent and IBM brings together complementary capabilities across data, infrastructure and Al as enterprises move Al and agents into production. IBM’s acquisition of Confluent reflects the growing importance of real-time, trusted data as enterprises build Al systems that need access to data across increasingly complex and fragmented environments.
The importance of the combination is also reflected in Shaun Clowes’ expanded role as General Manager, Confluent and Data at IBM, where he is leading the next generation of data products across both organisations. Bringing together the product and engineering expertise, technology and reach of IBM and Confluent gives us a more focused opportunity to solve the data challenges enterprises face as they move Al and agents into production.
Confluent’s mission remains the same, and the scale of the opportunity has grown. We remain focused on making data continuously available, trusted and useful in real time, with IBM giving us greater reach and resources to solve that problem for more enterprises. Together, we are in a stronger position to advance our ambition of delivering the world’s best data streaming platform and helping enterprises put Al to work with the real-time data it needs.
