Confluent, Alibaba Cloud Announce Expanded Data Streaming Partnership
Alibaba Cloud and Confluent have announced a deepened strategic multi-year partnership in Asia.
The strengthened partnership will expand from mainland China to more markets in the region including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
This comes on the heel of an announcement last month where Confluent announced Data Streaming for AI initiative to help organizations accelerate their development of real-time AI applications.
Confluent Data Streaming service
In this case, the Confluent Data Streaming Service on Alibaba Cloud will be available to customers in the new markets by the end of the year.
Confluent offers managed Kafka, an open-source distributed event store and stream-processing platform originally developed at LinkedIn. Today, Apache Kafka is used by a growing list of firms in the technology space, the FSI sector, and enterprises.f
Confluent considers data streaming a foundational technology for the future of AI and is also used to power critical applications. Indeed, it cited research in which 89% of technology leaders in APAC say investments in data streaming are important, while 69% say they are using data streaming to power critical applications.
According to the data streaming pioneer, data streaming is used in a variety of apps, including ride-sharing apps to provide a real-time mobile experience to match riders to drivers, provide dynamic pricing, and update driver ETAs. It also makes it possible for retailers to personalize their customers’ shopping experiences, across every channel and interaction – in real time.
Confluent says its Data Streaming Platform is used by a range of customers across numerous industries, including financial services, omnichannel retail, automobile, and gaming.
This expansion is a testament to the successful partnership, says Selina Yuan, president of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group. “[This] allows us to support more customers as demand grows to connect enterprise-wide apps and data systems with real-time data flows.”
Alibaba Cloud has rapidly grown its cloud presence in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia over the last few years. In fact, it has built clouds in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia ahead of cloud giants such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.
“By extending our partnership with Alibaba Cloud from mainland China to further across Asia, more organizations can now set their data in motion, by harnessing real-time, flexible data insights,” said Kamal Brar, senior vice president of APAC at Confluent.
“The additional capabilities that we and Alibaba Cloud have enabled provide better experiences for our customers. This significantly accelerates time to value and improves developer productivity in building their real-time streaming applications.”
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/SeanPavonePhoto
