Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

As a critical, stateful system, migrating Apache Kafka deployments is virtually always a complex engineering project where the most significant expenses are often hidden. Scoping and committing to a Kafka migration requires multiple layers of careful calculation involving infrastructure choices, data complexity, team expertise, and risk tolerance. Underestimating these variables leads to blown budgets and extended timelines.

Data-driven organizations know that unlocking real-time analytics from streaming data isn’t just about collecting and transmitting events. It’s about getting high-quality, governed, and query-ready tables into the hands of analysts and business users while ensuring enterprise-grade security and compliance. Traditionally, moving data from Apache Kafka into analytic tables required complex ETL pipelines, manual data wrangling, and custom governance processes.

If you’re running Confluent Platform or our new offering, Confluent Private Cloud, on-premises, you have your reasons: data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, or maybe a phased cloud migration. Your on-prem Apache Kafka isn’t going anywhere. It’s a critical part of your infrastructure.

The most innovative companies know that artificial intelligence (AI) problems are fundamentally data problems. To produce the right results, AI applications, ranging from real-time fraud detection to autonomous agents, must share a common foundation: trustworthy data in motion.

The true power of data emerges when streaming, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) connect—transforming real-time streaming data into actionable intelligence. Yet bridging that gap has long been one of the most complex challenges in modern data architecture. Confluent makes it effortless to capture and process continuous streams of data, while Databricks empowers teams to analyze, govern, and apply AI through Unity Catalog.

When we first introduced Streaming Agents, we were solving a fundamental challenge: Every AI problem is a data problem. When data is missing, stale, or inaccessible, even the most advanced agents and LLMs fail to deliver. How do we build scalable agents that aren’t just powerful in isolation, but part of multi-agent systems that are event-driven, replayable, and grounded in accurate data?

We’re excited to announce our Real-Time Context Engine, now available in Early Access. It’s a key part of Confluent Intelligence, our vision to bring real-time data directly to production AI systems through the power of Apache Kafka and Apache Flink.

The recent global IT outage experienced by a major cloud hyperscaler was a disruptive, real-world reminder that downtime and service disruptions are inevitable. The event impacted services across banking, retail, and healthcare, and served as a powerful warning that relying on any single provider, or even a single cloud region, creates a critical business vulnerability. This outage highlights the critical risk of a single-provider strategy, rather than an inherent problem with the cloud.

As 2026 planning kicks into high gear, your CFO may be putting every technology investment under the microscope, but the focus and pressure to deliver on AI Innovation has never been higher. For IT Leaders, the challenge is clear and straightforward. How do you strike a balance continuing to move your AI initiatives forward and maintaining a balanced budget in 2026?