What is Confluent | Jay Kreps (CEO, Confluent)

Hi, my name is Jay Kreps. I'm Confluent CEO and one of its co-founders. At Confluent, we've pioneered a completely new category of data infrastructure that we call data in motion. At the heart of this movement is an open source technology called Apache Kafka that I, along with Confluent's other founders, created a decade ago while working at LinkedIn. Today, Apache Kafka is one of the most successful open source projects in the world. Over 70% of the Fortune 500 are estimated to have used Kafka. At Confluent, we've built a differentiated cloud-native platform that has set the standard for data in motion and is bringing the full capability of Kafka and its ecosystem to companies all over the world. Since data in motion is an emerging category, I wanted to tell you a bit more about what it is and why it matters. Let me start by stepping back and talking about how it fits into the larger changes in the world of software and data. Across virtually every industry, companies are shifting to a digital-first paradigm where large portions of their business are being defined in software. Everyday customer experiences are being completely reimagined. Requesting a ride through an app is better than calling a cab. Buying online is changing the way we go shopping, and gone are the days of waiting in long lines at your local bank. And this isn't just about the front-end customer interaction. The actual back-end logistics, manufacturing processes, all the other intricate steps of creating and distributing goods and services are increasingly being managed by software too. This is a fundamental change in the role of software in companies. We're moving from a world where software existed in disconnected apps here and there, mainly as a productivity tool around the edges of a company. But in this new world, software increasingly works as a unified system entrusted with the core aspects of how companies produce products and services and how they interact with customers. This transition isn't just a matter of bolting on an iPhone app or automating an existing process. It's an end-to-end reimagining of how a business operates. It requires moving to systems that are fully integrated, start to finish, that are built to power rich digital front-end customer experiences and smart, efficient real-time operations. To do this requires new capabilities. It requires access to real-time data across every part of the business, allowing it to react to everything in the moment, 24/7. Every millisecond counts. A modern company can't wait around for daily batch cycles to analyze and react to data coming from siloed applications and databases. Customers have no tolerance for stale data and poorly integrated experiences. What makes adapting to this new world difficult is that traditional data infrastructure isn't built to support these requirements. The platform most companies have for managing data is the database. Databases are a massively successful category and they've received enormous intellectual and commercial investment. They remain an important part of the solution, but they have a critical limitation. Databases grew out of the problem of data storage and they were built to solve the problem of data at rest. They let individual applications safely store and access data, but they don't solve the larger problem of how to turn all these applications into unified, dynamic business processes. This has left organizations with islands of disconnected data and slow periodic batch processing that can't be integrated into the real-time operations of the business or customer experiences. To reimagine their businesses in software, companies need a new type of infrastructure. They need to seamlessly harness the flow of data across all the parts of their organization, between applications, databases, SaaS layers, and cloud systems. They need to be able to react to this data continuously to be able to adapt and respond to events as they unfold in real time. In short, they need infrastructure for data in motion. This is a foundational shift in how we use data. Data in motion takes the computer science underlying traditional databases and it turns it on its head. Instead of passively storing data and only accessing it periodically, data in motion allows for ubiquitous access to data in any system as it's generated, and it provides the real-time continuous processing needed to react and respond to it in the moment. Confluent has opened up possibilities in every major industry. For instance, when it comes to fraud in financial services, every second matters. However, all too often, key components of the data to combat fraud are locked away in outdated batch systems that don't talk to each other. With Confluent, you can connect and access all the data that's required to properly analyze, detect, and prevent fraud in real time. Machine learning systems fed by continuous streams of data in motion from Confluent are providing significant cost savings to financial institutions. As companies adopt the service, it takes on a strategic role within the company. Each application that uses the platform brings with it streams of data that enable other applications. Over time, we're seeing Confluent come to contain the full real-time state of huge portions of what's happening in the business, driving hundreds of applications that feed off of this. In this role, our platform acts much like a central nervous system in biology. The nervous system ties together all the independent parts of the body into a coherent whole that can react and respond intelligently in real time. That's very much like what Confluent does for a company, uniting all the applications, SaaS layers, and data stores into a coherent whole and helping to enable intelligent applications on top of all of those. This central nervous system is what enables the kinds of customer experiences and intelligent real-time operational systems that are increasingly required to compete and win in the world today.