Confluent — a US-based vendor that provides a full-scale data streaming solution — has announced its first distribution partner in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The company has inked a deal with NEXTGEN Group.
The arrangement also allows NEXTGEN, which was acquired by France’s Exclusive Networks earlier this year, to represent Confluent in Singapore and Malaysia.
Confluent offers a dual approach with its product: a fully managed, cloud-native Software as a Service (SaaS) available on all major cloud providers and an enterprise-ready, self-managed software offering. It typically targets large enterprises in the channel (Accenture, EY, Deloitte, and KPMG are existing partners). In a media release, Confluent Senior Vice President of APAC Kamal Brar said that this new partnership will allow the company to rapidly expand that local partner ecosystem.
This is not the first major stride forward in A/NZ that the vendor has made this year. In March, the company announced that the Confluent Cloud service had been fully assessed by the Australian government and was now available for use at the Information Security Manual PROTECTED level – a key milestone for the partners that Confluent typically works with – and their typically deep engagements with government clients.
Meanwhile, NEXTGEN Group CEO John Walters said, “Confluent is a pioneer in data streaming technology, and we’re proud to introduce more customers to its industry-leading solutions and enhance its offering through our unique collaborative service model.”
Building channel-friendly models
Confluent has been active in re-working its channel model in recent months. In April of this year, the company announced a revamped channel program aimed at helping partners to “develop repeatable services and solutions and help customers realize value more quickly.”
Meanwhile, in February, it launched a partner initiative aimed at migrating customers from the open-source Kafka software to its own data streaming platform.
The company has navigated some turbulence in 2023 as the cloud market has fluctuated. However, as noted by Forbes, it is now seeing revenue gains significantly ahead of expectations, which it is expecting to continue through 2024, making for good conditions to target growth.
Confluent’s rebound echoes the analysis by groups such as ISG data, which found that cloud-based contracts in the channel have been growing by double digits over the last few quarters.