Confluent

CEO: Jay Kreps

Working with live, streaming data is one of the big challenges in big data management and analytics. One technology that's addressing the problem is the open-source Apache Kafka message broker project that provides high-throughput, low-latency software for handling real-time data feeds.

Confluent, founded by Apache Kafka's original developers, has created a complete real-time data platform around Kafka that acts as a fault-tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. The software can be used for collecting data from user activity logs, stock ticker systems, device instrumentation and a broad range of other use cases.

In May the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company announced the general availability of Confluent Platform 3.0, incorporating Kafka Streams for adding stream processing capabilities to applications, and the Confluent Control Center for operationalizing Kafka across an organization.