The Stream Processing Shuffle

Rethinking stream processing solutions.

Confluent’s acquisition of Immerok will lead competitors to scramble to reposition themselves in the market to either take advantage or avoid irrelevancy.

TL;DR

• Confluent needs to conceive a new identity that incorporates Flink while still being “the Kafka company.”

• The title “the Flink company” is up for grabs.

• Competitors need to build partnerships between themselves to take on Confluent.

• Flink is winning the market for stream processing.

• Real-time OLAP databases are getting better.

• ksqlDB and Kafka Streams are still highly relevant in microservces and ZeroETL.

The Shuffle

This shuffle will not only cause disruption in the real-time streaming market, it will also disrupt Confluent. They will have to conceive a new identity which includes being an Apache Flink company without losing their core Apache Kafka identity. They will need to reposition themselves to be able to talk about two different stream processing solutions: Flink and ksqlDB, without ruffling any feathers internally and confusing existing customers using ksqlDB or Kafka Streams. Most of all, they will have a lot of pressure preparing themselves to go to market with a technology many of them are still unfamiliar with. A year and a half into being a public company, Confluent finds themselves in an unfamiliar position of being a large ship trying to make a sharp turn.