Confluent, Inc. announced a new strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft. The partnership adds greater investments across technology integrations, solution development, and go-to-market activities. With this commitment, Confluent and Microsoft aim to reduce the operational burden of managing data streams in Azure and speed up real-time application development in the cloud. 

"COVID-driven disruption has drastically accelerated timelines for delivering end-to-end digital experiences and real-time operations," said Erica Schultz, President of Field Operations, Confluent. "We are extremely dedicated to ensuring our customers can innovate fast in the cloud, and have deepened our partnership with Microsoft to support businesses at this critical time in their transformation."

"Streaming data in the cloud is the foundation of next-generation customer experiences and business operations," said Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Microsoft. "Through Microsoft and Confluent's expanded relationship, more organizations will be able to fully realize the power of cloud-native data streaming and benefit from faster development of modern applications with easier access to real-time data in the cloud."

Since the start of their strategic alliance, Confluent and Microsoft have made strides in building tighter integrations, extending Confluent's managed cloud connectors across Azure services and supporting customers' business-level initiatives. 

"Cloud-powered innovation is driving the future of Walgreens Boots Alliance from every touchpoint," said Yaël Gomez, Vice President, Global IT, Integration and Intelligent Automation, Walgreens Boots Alliance. "Confluent and Microsoft Azure are core to the modern technology stack that underpins our digital transformation programs. With real-time data streams in the cloud, we have the performance, scalability and reliability to ensure today's most essential items get to customers the way they choose."

Confluent maintains the industry's largest portfolio of data streaming connectors, and recently released new fully managed connectors for Azure deployments, including Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Synapse Analytics. These pre-built connectors are designed with Confluent's expertise in Apache Kafka® to save organizations the months of engineering time typically needed to build and maintain custom integrations. 

"Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure enables us to see our data in motion much more effectively than we could previously," said Chris Varro, Senior Managing Director of Systems Development, Homepoint. "Now, we are much more capable of monitoring data trends and how the data changes over time, which is critically important for us operationally. Much like the weather radar that shows how your situation has changed by the minute, seeing our data in motion with Confluent and Azure have enabled us to tackle business challenges more efficiently, lower our costs, and deliver improved customer experiences."

Setting your data in motion with Confluent and Azure is fast and frictionless. Confluent Cloud can be quickly accessed with single sign-on through Azure Marketplace's Active Directory, and billing is integrated with Azure billing accounts for simple cost management. Confluent on Azure is one of the easiest ways to get started with Kafka and removes the operational burden of managing a complex, open-source distributed system. 

"The new streaming architecture we built with Confluent and Microsoft Azure enables our product teams to dream up new products and exciting new ideas, instead of simply making existing products less costly to operate and keeping the lights on," said Tim Wesley Interim, Senior Manager, Enterprise Architecture, Bankers Health Group. "One of the draws of moving to the cloud and Azure was to get away from the noise of the on-prem environment, with its legacy hardware and systems. Now, Confluent and Azure play a key role in our ability to scale and enable our product teams to come up with new and original products."