IBM To Buy Confluent For $11 Billion To Expand AI Services 20
IBM is buying Confluent for $11 billion in a major push to own real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads. It marks Big Blue's biggest acquisition since Red Hat in 2019. Bloomberg reports: The AI boom has touched off billions of dollars in deals for businesses that build, train or leverage the technology, propelling the value of an entire ecosystem of data center developers, software makers, generative AI tool developers and data management firms. Mountain View, California-based Confluent sits in the data corner of that world, providing a platform for companies to gather -- or "stream" -- and analyze data in real time as opposed to shipping data in clunkier batches.
Manufacturers such as Michelin, for example, have used Confluent's platform to optimize their inventories of raw and semi-finished materials live. Instacart adopted Confluent to develop real-time fraud detection systems and gain more visibility into the availability of products sold on its grocery delivery platform. Businesses are increasingly tapping AI systems that manage tasks like this in real-time and require live flows of data to do so. IBM, which pioneered mainframe computers, has been trying to reposition its business around AI over the past few years. Under Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna, it's been buying software companies and selling generative AI-related services to enterprise clients. Software now makes up almost half its total revenue and continues to grow at a steady rate.
Manufacturers such as Michelin, for example, have used Confluent's platform to optimize their inventories of raw and semi-finished materials live. Instacart adopted Confluent to develop real-time fraud detection systems and gain more visibility into the availability of products sold on its grocery delivery platform. Businesses are increasingly tapping AI systems that manage tasks like this in real-time and require live flows of data to do so. IBM, which pioneered mainframe computers, has been trying to reposition its business around AI over the past few years. Under Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna, it's been buying software companies and selling generative AI-related services to enterprise clients. Software now makes up almost half its total revenue and continues to grow at a steady rate.
What does this mean? (Score:3)
what does this mean "....real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads."
I did go to the Confluent website...things became less clear
"Confluent is a data streaming platform designed to handle data in motion. It enables organizations to access, store, and manage data as continuous, real-time streams, allowing for real-time data integration and processing across various sources. Confluent's cloud-native offering serves as the connective tissue for real-time data, helping businesses innovate and operate efficiently in the modern digital landscape."
If I ran a business what would I need Confluent to do for me?
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If I ran a business what would I need Confluent to do for me?
They're dragging buzzwords through the water, so see whether they get any nibbles.
Your MBA/PHB eats this shit right up.
Re: What does this mean? (Score:2)
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It means "fuck you, oops the money is gone"
Best summary of the AI craze I've seen so far.
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You need them to balance your team synergies and leverage cloud-based AI hypervisor solutions to impart Eastern philosophies in the burgeoning quantum enterprise space.
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Bingo!
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Bingo!
DAMMIT! All I needed was blockchain!
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what does this mean "....real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads."
I did go to the Confluent website...things became less clear
"Confluent is a data streaming platform designed to handle data in motion. It enables organizations to access, store, and manage data as continuous, real-time streams, allowing for real-time data integration and processing across various sources. Confluent's cloud-native offering serves as the connective tissue for real-time data, helping businesses innovate and operate efficiently in the modern digital landscape."
If I ran a business what would I need Confluent to do for me?
They provide Kafka services and support. Amazing how they took a product they made at LinkedIn, open sourced it, then created a company to get rich off it
Re:What does this mean? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not just Kafka, but also stream processing of Kafka originated data.
We use it to run a cities public transit realtime data system (track vehicles, display information on realtime maps, public information displays, make predictions), and it works well - there are features which I think are snake oil (schema registry for example), but its been rock solid, performant, and the UI is decent.
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I shook the 8 ball for you.
Signs say your bill is going up after the acquisition.
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All the functional checks are done in the producer and consumer client code - the only thing any Confluent hosted tier does is check to see whether the schema-encoded Kafka message contains a schema ID that matches one for that topic, it does absolutely no data validation otherwise.
So, if you have a bad client, you can publish data to a topic which does not validate against any schema, but the topic will accept it so long as the schema ID presented is valid. The entire thing is based on trust.
You can do muc
So that means they are ... (Score:1)
... Kafka-esque?
Re:What does this mean? (Score:4, Informative)
As the article mentioned, there are generally two ways that applications process data: either using patch processing or streaming data. For real-time data processing you generally use streaming data. In addition, in modern microservices architectures you generally use a messaging service between services to provide more reliability, scalability, and to more loosely couple the services.
For streaming data or messaging services, companies tend to either use a cloud service provider (CSP) native service like Google Cloud Pub/Sub [google.com] or Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Queue Service (SQS) [amazon.com]. For companies that have their own data centers or want a uniform multi-cloud solution, they generally want a solution like Apache Kafka [apache.org] or a managed Kafka like Google Cloud Managed Service for Apache Kafka [google.com] or Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) [amazon.com]. Apache Kafka is faster than older solutions like RabbitMQ.
The streaming/messaging service is configured to meet the application requirements for message delivery like deliver once or deliver at least once, in order or out of order, dead letter queues, schema enforcement, etc. It allows for architectures with multiple publishers or multiple subscribers (e.g., fan-out architectures). It provides access controls, monitoring, and logging capabilities.
For companies that decide on managing their own Apache Kafka rather than paying a CSP to do it, they often want a commercial product with commercial support and that is what Confluent offers. Confluent also offers a Confluent Cloud service where it sounds like they deploy and manage Kafka in your AWS, Azure, or GCP environment as a cloud agnostic managed service (I am not familiar with that product).
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11 Billion, for a message queue, wow.
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They should have stuck with Kafka. Now everyone mistakes them for a failed Sharepoint competitor, and their own website isn't helpful either
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They should have stuck with Kafka. Now everyone mistakes them for a failed Sharepoint...
But you repeat yourself.
I'm surprised IBM didn't have this service already (Score:2)
My most charitable guess is that they had the foresight to see this market segment as valuable and have been developing a service like this in-house, but something went wrong and they realized their in-house service couldn't be made competitive in an acceptable time-frame without spending more than $11B. It wouldn't be the first time that IBM tried to create something in-house and wisely decided to cut bait (there is wisdom - and profit - in knowing when to cut bait).
My less charitable guess is that they d
A software company, not a hardware company! (Score:2)
Hardware is out, software is in. IBM is no longer a hardware company, it's a software company.
International Business Software.
Do you have IBS? IBS will keep your business doing its business!