Confluent and StarTree’s growing SI capabilities in APAC

“We want the SI community to build centers of excellence and services practices around Confluent and around what we offer,” says Paul Mac Farland, SVP, Partner Innovation & Ecosystem at Confluent.

In March this year, StarTree was named the 2025 Confluent Data Flow ISV Partner of the Year for APAC. The cloud-based real-time analytics company has been a strong partner for Confluent in the APAC region as it continues to help organizations in their data journey.

In 2024, StarTree consumed more data than any other real-time database natively integrated with Confluent Cloud. StarTree was also recognized as Confluent’s 2023 Integration ISV Partner of the Year, highlighting sustained commitment to each other and the immense value jointly brought to the market.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, StarTree’s Uday Vallamsetty, VP Product Lead Growth and CX and Paul Mac Farland, SVP, Partner Innovation & Ecosystem, Confluent, shared more about their partnership. Mac Farland also discussed the role and importance of the partner ecosystem for confluent.

How’s Confluent’s growth been in the Asia Pacific region?

Paul: Overall, it is growing at a phenomenal pace. It's growing faster than the rest of the world. This is a huge investment for us. India is a massive area of investment, so is Asia-Pacific.

And for the partner ecosystem here, I've been putting a lot of feet on the ground here with new hires in order for us to really capture the community here. Because, how we go to market with partners varies by region. The US has a very direct business. It’s a distributor reseller, and so we want to make sure that we've got everything covered there.

Can you tell us a bit more about your partnership with StarTree in India?

Paul: StarTree has been a partner of ours for quite a while now. It's gone on for like three years or so. We've seen a lot of growth there.

So, with the ISV partners, one of the things that we're capable of doing is what they're able to say to us, this is Kafka signal that we're seeing within our account. Are you seeing the same Kafka signal? And if we say no, we know that it's open-source Kafka, and we can go and convert them together. So, we help each other with the accounts.

That's one thing that StarTree does really well. They let us know, with customer permission, to go and have those conversations.

On top of that, we have a lot of telemetry between each other. StarTree has had a huge amount of success with digital natives. They're capable of scaling on a really large scale.

Looking at how a Confluent business model is set up, a lot of the time, the more voluminous the data that is being moved, the more revenue that can come with that. Now, we have things, depending on the latency profile, that make that cheaper. But the real-time analytics players like StarTree, they just demand huge amounts of data because they’re doing interactive user queries that really have a deep understanding of everything that’s going on.

Can you tell us a bit about your journey with Confluent and how’s it been like over the years?

Uday: It’s been a fantastic journey. Actually, the journey between Confluent and StarTree started long before these two companies existed, in my view. Because both of these companies were built on open-source technologies that were born out of the same group and same company.

Confluent with Apache Kafka and StarTree with Apache Pino, they were created by the same team at LinkedIn back in the day. I think the journey started early. We were working very closely with Confluent, with the Confluent team in terms of product guidance and a lot of things.

Most recently, as we started scaling our go-to-market teams, we actually built tight integration with Confluent Cloud. There is now native integration between StarTree Cloud and Confluent Cloud. That allowed us to, of course, make it easy for our users to consume the data and draw insights from our database.

As StarTree was recently recognized by Confluent for its success in the region, how does that build on the relationship?

Uday: Confluent is a global brand and being associated with that is always going to help us. We already have some fairly big, large enterprises that we work with, and this is going to amplify that. This award and partnership showcase what StarTree brings to the table. It also amplifies the message of what we are able to do, that we are able to work with these large enterprises and solve their problems.

In terms of working with your customers and carrying that Confluent message and working with them, how is that journey like as well with customers?

Uday: One thing that typically both Confluent and StarTree have done is we have always believed in breaking glass and pushing beyond what common boundaries are available.

There are a number of stories where Kafka has beaten earlier records on how much throughput you can drive, what kind of latencies that you can provide, and we continue to stay in the same tradition. For example, recently we worked with one of the largest gaming platforms in the world, where we are able to sustain ingestion traffic of 20 million events per second. That is scaled beyond what you would normally see for any large enterprise.

Now Kafka is able to sustain that, Confluent is able to sustain that pipe. Now you need a platform like StarTree to be able to consume and allow users to read the data. One by itself is useful, but the combination is what makes it so powerful to our end users.

It has been a fantastic journey, and we continue to break glass and reach levels that we have actually been able to before this.

With this success, what's next in your partnership that you're looking towards?

Uday: We are actually forging a global partnership, trying to repeat this across other regions. As we increase our GTM footprint, we want to continue to leverage this partnership, leveraging the feet on the ground that a company like Confluent has to be able to continue that growth.

How important is the SI community to Confluent?

Paul: We want the SI community to build centers of excellence and services practices around Confluent and around what we offer. In order to do that, we have a bunch of different programs in place to help with that. So if a partner finds an opportunity and tells us about it, we will not compete with them. We will not position another partner against them.

We offer partner protections for them to go and force opportunities for us so that we can work together. Those partners, we also offer incentives to. So, for example, one thing that's kind of unique is that we offer incentives based on consumption. If they can show us that they have a statement of work that's going to drive Confluent consumption, we'll provide incentives for that as well.

On top of that, we focus a lot on enablement and training. We have kind of like the rudimentary stuff, which is making sure that they're familiar with Confluent from a sales perspective, going all the way through into being actually delivery ready and capable of delivering a customer business outcome.

We augment that with especially things like migrations. We'll actually augment that with either credits and revenue from ourselves, or the cloud service providers provide us with a really large pool of money to do those migrations with partners as well. So overall, what's in it for them is that we don't want to grow our services business.

Our services business is a necessity of us being a software company and just understanding what we need to build and understand. So, for them, it's the ability to deliver services.

If you look at most of the SIs, a lot of them are talking about modernization. We're a key tool for that. Because usually the system that is the source is what the customer is divesting in, and the system that is the destination is what the customer is investing in. It’s pretty common for a partner to help a customer bring data from an IBM mainframe to Databricks or Snowflake or BigQuery or Redshift or something like that.

What else is Confluent hoping to see from its partners?

Paul: Overall, because our business is a consumption business, especially Confluent Cloud, it keeps us all very honest. In the end, the customer will use our product in earnest whenever they get into production.

The ultimate goal for both of us is how can we get a customer into production faster? That usually solves that customer's business goals. That means that the service provider partner has established what will become the central nervous system for that organization. And then they can continue to provide more and more services in the periphery of systems around us.

For us, net revenue retention, which is one of our key metrics, is really a velocity metric. Whenever customers do it alone, they might be doing it alone for the first time, and it takes them a lot longer than it would if they had someone who's done it many times before guiding them along the way.