Confluent foresees continued growth in Southeast Asia

Confluent has more than doubled its investments in the region over the last three years, demonstrating the potential momentum they have in the market, says Kamal Brar, Senior Vice President, Worldwide ISV / MSP & APAC at Confluent.

As enterprises in Southeast Asia continue to embrace AI, Confluent plays an important role in ensuring business are capable having access to their data seamlessly at the edge to ensure they get the best outcome. The cloud-native data streaming platform recently unveiled new capabilities to simplify data access for its customers as well.

According to Kamal Brar, Senior Vice President, Worldwide ISV / MSP & APAC at Confluent, the data streaming platform has more than doubled its investments in the region over the last three years, demonstrating the potential momentum they have in the market.

“Whether you look at Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, which are the core markets in Southeast Asia, we have a very strong presence. In fact, our Southeast Asia business and India business are two of our strongest performing businesses,” said Brar.

Taking a look at the industries in which Confluent is experiencing the most growth, Brar said the financial services sector, especially banks in the region are witnessing the best adoption of the technology. Confluent currently works with local banks in Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia.

“A great thing with our business is when we do well in one bank, it gives us expansion opportunities. So, we're now talking to other digital banks, which are truly innovative in their architecture and how they're thinking about building components and making that experience for the customer great. Ultimately, we have built out that in residence support for some of these mission critical workloads. We need to have those customers serviced at the highest levels. And that's something that we've also invested in as we've grown to more local domestic use cases,” explained Brar.

Singapore’s Trust Bank leverages Confluent’s data streaming platform for its event-driven architecture, enabling different teams to produce, share, and consume self-service data products in the form of real-time streams, drive innovation, improve agility, reduce the total cost of ownership, and optimize quality controls and security policies across the organization.

The role of partners

Working with the banks and other customers in the financial services sector also requires Confluent to be constantly connected with them, especially in providing the highest level of service. As such, Brar pointed out that the partner ecosystem is critical for them.

“We have a full certification program where we've certified our partners. Last year, we announced a partnership with Infosys for MSP and even at the scale of Infosys, they still need our training. They need to go through a certification process. So, we have enabled an entire process internally for our partners to onboard. And on the delivery side, it's very similar. We want to make sure any of the delivery partners are certified with our technology stack and have the relevant skills. And in many cases where it's a complex engagement, we'll kind of handhold them,” explained Brar.

Brar also pointed out that Confluent works with different partners in various areas. This includes working with resellers that resell the software, through subscription or consumption model.

“We work with our partners in helping to sell right in the go to market in territories where we may not be present. We have distribution agreements across the region, and we also have resale agreements. But one area that we've been consciously kind of working through is how we get better partner support on our delivery,” said Brar.

Specifically, Brar mentioned that in some of these markets, Confluent may not be obviously driving as the prime contractor, but supplement that with some of their delivery capabilities for a partner. Put simply, they rely on partners to help deliver and scale the services organization, which has worked out well for Confluent.

Brar also highlighted that Confluent has partners who are willing to co-innovate with them. The partner would like to build with Confluent or connect with Confluent through the connector ecosystem. They're building custom connectors to service specific regional markets or very specific use cases.

“We've also kind of leveraged Connect with Confluent or Build with Confluent, as we call it, where we're encouraging our partners to go build around the ecosystem through a marketplace offering. That's another area that we see a lot of interest and synergies in, given the localization needs of the Asia Pacific market. Partners for me are very important. And I think without their alignment to us, we would struggle. We can't be in every market, and we definitely can't be servicing the local needs without some of them involved,” said Brar.

Growth with AI

With AI adoption experiencing tremendous momentum in the region, Brar believes Confluent can bring real-time data stream processing with Apache Flink. The open-source data processing framework is designed for both stream and batch processing. As it can handle unbounded data streams and bounded data sets, it allows for real-time data processing and data analysis, which will be core for AI use cases.

“What's happened with the world of AI disruption is you now have the LLMs and all this public information which is now available in your hands. The problem is that information does not correlate or link to your enterprise or business context. So, one of the areas that we're very focused on is Confluent becoming the key enabler to provide the natural enterprise or business context to the LLMs. We want to be able to give that data in real time,” said Brar.

For Brar, this would be where the streams are processed with Flink and Confluent as the data streaming platform through core Kafka. He believes that journey and bringing the real-time essence of the business with that powerful element of LLM and what Confluent can do with LLMs, is something that they’re really excited about and working very closely on.