MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — IBM and Confluent, Inc. have recently announced that they have entered a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire Confluent, a leading real-time data streaming company, at an enterprise value of $11 billion.
As part of this development, IBM will integrate Confluent’s data streaming service with its data and AI services. This will support the company’s objective of scaling AI adoption by providing customers with a platform with real-time analytics and automation.
IBM and Confluent will enable enterprises to deploy generative and agentic AI better and faster by providing trusted communication and data flow between environments, applications, and APIs. Data is spread across public and private clouds, datacenters, and countless technology providers. With this acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.
— Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman, President, and CEO
What This Means for Both Companies
This development completes a broader strategic vision for both businesses and their roles in innovation. Confluent’s data streaming infrastructure will strengthen IBM’s leadership in data-centric enterprise through:
- Real-time data across its cloud environment
- Improved data flow and unified analytics
Under this acquisition, Confluent will primarily benefit from IBM’s go-to-market scale and broad portfolio of AI solutions. It will help the company gain broader engineering and resources to help accelerate its product innovation, customer adoption, and solutions expansion.
We are excited by the potential to join IBM and to accelerate our strategy with IBM’s go-to-market expertise, global scale, and extensive portfolio. I look forward to the future we will build together as Confluent becomes part of IBM.
— Jay Kreps, Confluent CEO and Co-Founder
With the end-to-end platform both companies are establishing, enterprises will receive a more unified data solution that can power analytics and AI more efficiently.
