Confluent Offers Partners Chance to Improve Data Offerings

Confluent has launched a program to help its customers manage their data streams.

The data streaming firm’s technology partner program, announced in a news release Tuesday (July 18), lets Confluent’s partners “bring fully managed data streams directly to their customers through native integrations with Confluent Cloud.”

In addition, it provides access to Confluent’s expertise in technical, sales, and marketing support to help go-to-market efforts.

“When companies can harness streams of real-time data from previously siloed teams and applications across their business, it creates a powerful network effect that opens new avenues for growth and innovation,” said Erica Schultz, the company’s president of field operations. “As technology partners bring Confluent data streams directly into their platforms, they unlock potential for more cutting edge, real-time applications to be developed on their platform.”

The release points to a growing need for real-time data, which Confluent argues has made data streaming a crucial requirement for businesses.

By integrating with Confluent Cloud, the company said, technology partners can offer customers access to more than an exabyte of data processed per year, while doing away with “the operational shortcomings of an open source integration” and speeding project delivery.

The cloud also delivers “fully managed stream processing and enterprise-grade security controls,” and is the industry’s only governance suite for Kafka, the open-source data streaming platform used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies, Confluent said.

PYMNTS spoke last week with Brian Bogosian, CEO of sticky.io, about the way data provides more flexibility for merchants.

However, he added, many merchants hadn’t been able, until now, to collect and analyze the data they need to fine-tune their offerings — and transform short-term customers and “persuadables” into loyal consumers with a long, lifetime value.

Effective use of data “requires a platform,” Bogosian said, that offers granular insight into how much customer acquisition will cost and where merchants can add incentives to convince those short-term customers to stick around. Examples of this include added value, greater flexibility or breadth of products.

“You need to understand what it is about what you are offering that appeals to them and ensure that your front-end-loaded investment to acquire a customer is in balance … along with cross-sell and upsell opportunities,” Bogosian said.