CONFLUENT, Inc. and Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence arm of Alibaba Group, have jointly announced an extended, multi-year partnership designed to significantly enhance the availability of cutting-edge data streaming solutions across the Asian region.
This deepened collaboration marks a pivotal moment in advancing the Confluent Data Streaming Service on Alibaba Cloud, expanding its reach beyond mainland China to encompass additional key markets, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Customers in these regions can expect to access the Confluent Data Streaming Service on Alibaba Cloud by the end of this year.
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, real-time operations have become a cornerstone of success, influencing everything from enhancing customer experiences to optimizing backend processes and introducing innovative products and services. The demand for real-time data streaming has established it as an indispensable asset across diverse industries.
Notably, the 2023 APAC Data Streaming Report underscores the importance of data streaming investments, with 89 percent of technology leaders in the APAC region acknowledging their significance, while 69 percent are already employing data streaming to empower mission-critical applications.
Data streaming technology is the engine behind real-time features in a multitude of applications. It enables ride-sharing platforms to instantly match passengers with drivers, offer dynamic pricing, and provide accurate driver arrival estimates. Likewise, retailers harness data streaming to personalize customer shopping experiences in real-time, across all touchpoints. Even financial institutions use data streaming to process loan applications within just five minutes, illustrating the virtually boundless applications of this technology.
Under the expanded scope of this partnership, organizations in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand will gain access to Confluent’s industry-leading data streaming platform through Alibaba Cloud. This collaboration offers customers an enhanced data streaming service built upon the robust and resilient distributed data streaming technology known as Apache Kafka. The solution equips customers with powerful and efficient data processing capabilities, incorporating features like elastic computing and storage functions, dedicated customer support, and technical consultation services.
Customers can take full advantage of enterprise-grade features of Kafka without being burdened by complex management and monitoring tasks, all while ensuring the highest standards of data stream security. Notably, Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform has already been pivotal in improving operational efficiency for a diverse array of customers across sectors such as financial services, omnichannel retail, automotive, and gaming.
“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. 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,” Kamal Brar, Senior Vice President APAC at Confluent said has he expressed his enthusiasm for the extended partnership.
For her part Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, said the strategic partnership is set to have a profound impact on the Asian business landscape, providing a new dimension of real-time data streaming capabilities to organizations across the region.
“Following our success in delivering Confluent’s services from the Alibaba Cloud platform for customers in mainland China, we’re delighted to announce this extension of Confluent’s advanced data streaming capabilities further across the region. This expansion is a testament to our successful partnership, which allows us to support more customers as demand grows to connect enterprise-wide apps and data systems with real-time data flows,” Yuan said stressing the success of their collaboration.
