Confluent Targets India as Top 10 Market

Confluent, the data streaming company founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, is focusing on India as one of the top 10 markets for its business growth. The company announced this during the first-ever Kafka Summit in Bangalore on May 2, 2024.

“India is a very critical market for us. It is a top 10 market, probably higher up,” Hemanth Vedagarbha, the global head of sales at Confluent. “It defines our APAC strategy. Core to our APAC strategy is gaining market share in India.”

Confluent's strength in India lies in the banking, financial services, digital native, and telecom sectors. The company's go-to-market strategy in India is driven by partnerships and direct sales. 

“India's always been an incredibly important part of our team philosophy,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO of Confluent at the summit. “We have very significant parts of our R&D operations here, including massive product areas, and almost every team is represented in India.”

With approximately 20% of its global workforce based in the country, Confluent has a large engineering team in Bangalore and a distributed engineering presence across India. The company has a sales team, support staff, and engineering headquarters in Bangalore and a distributed engineering presence across the country.

The company is investing in building its partner ecosystem in India, which includes cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Provider, system integrators, Independent Software Vendors, resellers, and Managed Service Providers. Confluent's pricing is universal globally, but it offers flexibility based on commitment levels to cater to price-sensitive customers in India.

Confluent also announced new capabilities to simplify AI integration and stream processing during the summit. These include AI Model Inference for Apache Flink, Confluent Platform for Apache Flink, and cost-saving Freight clusters. 

The company believes that the increasing digitisation in India, including government initiatives like Digital India, presents a massive opportunity for its data streaming technology.

The Kafka Summit in Bangalore is part of Confluent's efforts to build broader awareness and drive demand in the Indian market. The company plans to expand its presence beyond tier-one cities and penetrate deeper into regional banks, non-banking financial services, healthcare, telecom, and gaming sectors.