Confluent Inc 's

Our market is highly competitive and characterized by rapid changes in technology, customer needs, frequent introductions of new offerings, and improvements to existing service offerings.
Our primary competition, especially on premise, is internal IT teams that are attempting to ?do it themselves? using open source software. Our offering is substantially differentiated from Apache Kafka, and therefore companies using only open source tools do not benefit from our full product offering. As the move to the cloud increases, we expect that competition from open source alternatives will decrease as companies increasingly adopt fully-managed cloud solutions.
Our principal competitors in the cloud are the well-established public cloud providers such as AWS that generally compete in all of our markets. These enterprises are developing and have released fully-managed, data ingestion, and data streaming products, such as Azure Event Hubs (Microsoft Corporation), Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB Streams (AWS), and Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow (Google).
On premise there are a number of vendors with legacy products that have pivoted into this space including TIBCO Streaming, Cloudera Dataflow, Redhat (IBM) AMQ Streams, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Streaming.
We believe the principal competitive factors for companies in our industry include the following:
Focus on data in motion, characterized by:
the ability to provide an end-to-end operationalized customer journey;
mindshare and ability to drive innovation in the category of data in motion; and
the ability to support customers at scale with mission critical use cases. Product differentiation, characterized by:
Cloud-native capabilities
operate at significant scale;
offer elasticity;
offer end-to-end security; and
offer flexible pricing, including pay-as-you-go delivery.
Completeness of offering
a complete platform for data in motion (not just low-level streaming);
rich SQL-based stream processing;
integrated data governance capabilities; and
ease of integration with connectors to a wide variety of existing applications and IT and cloud infrastructure.
Availability of offering
as a fully-managed service in the three leading public clouds;
as a Kuberenetes-based software offering for the private cloud;
in legacy on-premise data centers as a software product; and
ability to span all of these customer environments in one unified data-in-motion platform. General competitive factors, including:
size of customer base and level of market adoption;
price and total cost of ownership;
brand awareness and reputation;
quality of professional services and customer support;
strength of sales and marketing efforts; and
adherence to industry standards and certifications. On the basis of the factors above, we believe that we compare favorably to our competitors. However, some of our actual and potential competitors have advantages over us, such as substantially greater financial, technical, and other resources, including larger sales forces and marketing budgets, greater brand recognition, broader distribution networks and global presence, longer operating histories, more established relationships with current or potential customers and commercial partners, and more mature intellectual property portfolios. They may be able to leverage these resources to gain market share and prevent potential customers from purchasing our products. Additionally, we expect the industry to attract new entrants, who could compete with our business and introduce new offerings. As we scale and expand our business, we may enter new markets and encounter additional competition.