IBM has confirmed the purchase of Confluentdeveloper of an open source data streaming platform, with which she hopes to improve her preparation for next-generation AI. As confirmed by the company through a statement, it will Buy the shares of Confluent paying 31 dollars for each titlewhich raises the sum of the operation to 11,000 million dollars, which will be paid in cash.
Confluent’s platform for enterprises delivers data streaming that connects, processes and governs data and events that can be reused, and does so in real time. With its purchase, IBM will have what is necessary to integrate end-to-end applications, analytics, data systems and AI agents, with data as the common thread.
Thanks to the real-time activity of its platform, Confluent can address the challenges of preparing data for AI. It is responsible for keeping them “clean” and connected with systems and applications, in addition to eliminating the silos that can arise in agentic AI systems.
This activity has led the company to double the value of the market it addresses in four years, which has gone from 50,000 million to 100,000 million dollars. Following its purchase, which is in line with its AI and hybrid cloud strategy, IBM will combine its real-time data and event streaming capabilities with its software infrastructure and automation offerings, enhancing its positioning in the enterprise AI sector.
Additionally, the purchase of Confluent has the potential to create product synergies in virtually all areas of relevance to IBM, from those related to AI and automation products and services, to data and consulting. With its entry into them, the company plans to accelerate its revenue growth, in addition to advancing efficiency in operations.
Confluent is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and currently has more than 6,500 major customers. Among them, 40% of the companies in the Fortune 500 index. Among their partners are technology companies such as Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft and Snowflake.
Its platform, developed from Apache Kafka, includes, in addition to data streaming, connectors, flow governance, streaming process, Confluent Intelligence and Streaming Agents. It offers flexible deployment options, including Confluent Cloud, a fully congested deployment of its data streaming platform.
It also includes WarpStream, a hybrid deployment based on a model in which customers put the cloud of their choice to deploy the platform, with the cost, security and data sovereignty profile of a self-hosted deployment. In addition, it offers Confluent Private Cloud, which provides a cloud-native experience of managed services to private and self-managed environments through the Confluent Cloud Kora application, to Karfa workloads in private clouds and on-premises deployments.
The board of directors of IBM and Confluent have already approved the operation, which now must have the approval of shareholders, in addition to that of regulators. In the case of shareholders, the main shareholders, who together with investors account for 62% of the vote of common shareholders, have already reached an agreement with IBM to vote in favor of the transaction. If everything goes as planned, the purchase will be closed around the middle of next year 2026.
Arvind Krishna, President and CEO of IBMhighlighted about the operation that «IBM and Confluent, together, will enable enterprises to deploy generative and agentic AI more efficiently and quickly, providing reliable communication and data flow between environments, applications and APIs. Data is distributed across public and private clouds, data centers and countless technology providers. With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the intelligent data platform for enterprise IT, designed specifically for AI.«.
Jay Kreps, Co-Founder and CEO of Confluenthas pointed out for his part that «Since its founding, Confluent has helped organizations unlock the full potential of their data, driving innovation in an increasingly complex IT landscape. We are very proud of the work we have done in providing customers with a real-time data streaming platform for the next technological era, including generative and agentic AI. We are excited about joining IBM and accelerating our strategy with IBM’s go-to-market expertise, global scale and broad portfolio. I look forward to the future we will build together when Confluent becomes part of IBM«.
