IBM and Confluent, the information streaming pioneer, has introduced they’ve entered right into a definitive settlement below which IBM will purchase all the issued and excellent widespread shares of Confluent for $31 per share, representing an enterprise worth of $11 billion. Confluent supplies a open-source enterprise knowledge streaming platform that connects, processes and governs reusable and dependable knowledge and occasions in actual time, foundational for the deployment of AI.
IDC estimates that a couple of billion new logical purposes will emerge by 2028, reshaping know-how architectures throughout industries. To gasoline significant outcomes and drive productiveness in operations, these purposes, in addition to AI brokers, want entry to linked and trusted knowledge – in actual time. IBM and Confluent will allow end-to-end integration of purposes, analytics, knowledge programs and AI brokers to drive intelligence and resilience in hybrid cloud environments.
“IBM and Confluent collectively will allow enterprises to deploy generative and agentic AI higher and quicker by offering trusted communication and knowledge move between environments, purposes and APIs. Knowledge is unfold throughout private and non-private clouds, datacentres and numerous know-how suppliers,” mentioned Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president and chief government officer. “With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will present the good knowledge platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”
“Since its founding, Confluent has helped organisations unlock the complete potential of their knowledge, driving innovation in an more and more advanced IT panorama. We’re extraordinarily pleased with the work we’ve accomplished in offering shoppers with a real-time knowledge streaming platform for the subsequent period of know-how, together with generative and agentic AI,” mentioned Jay Kreps, the CEO and co-founder of Confluent. “We’re excited by the potential to affix IBM and to speed up our technique with IBM’s go-to-market experience, international scale and in depth portfolio. I look ahead to the longer term we are going to construct collectively as Confluent turns into a part of IBM.”
The true-time nature of Confluent’s platform is vital for organisations as they use knowledge residing throughout all IT environments. Confluent addresses the challenges of as we speak’s know-how and knowledge panorama. Confluent excels at getting ready knowledge for AI, retaining it clear and linked throughout programs and purposes, eliminating silos inherent in agentic AI. Within the final 4 years alone, Confluent’s whole addressable market (TAM) has doubled from $50 billion to $100 billion in 2025. Confluent’s real-time knowledge and occasion streaming capabilities, mixed with IBM’s AI infrastructure software program and Automation choices, will higher place the businesses to seize this chance.
Transaction Rationale
- Strategic Match: Confluent is a pure match for IBM, in line with the corporate’s hybrid cloud and AI technique. Knowledge and purposes are experiencing dramatic progress – by 2028, international knowledge will greater than double, and over one billion new purposes will emerge. This exponential progress shall be amplified by the continued adoption of AI, growing calls for on IT departments. Organisations world wide flip to IBM to simplify, automate and combine disparate programs. The addition of Confluent will complement IBM’s current capabilities in its Knowledge and Automation portfolio. Moreover, the acquisition of Confluent represents additional dedication to IBM’s 25-year historical past of open-source innovation and funding, constructing on the acquisitions of open-source leaders like Crimson Hat and HashiCorp.
- Robust Synergy Alternatives: The acquisition of Confluent is anticipated to drive substantial product synergies throughout IBM’s portfolio – together with AI services and products, Automation, Knowledge and Consulting – and speed up income progress through the use of IBM’s go-to-market attain. The acquisition can also be anticipated to lead to vital operational efficiencies by way of IBM’s scale and best-in-class productiveness actions.
- Engaging Monetary Profile: The acquisition of Confluent is anticipated to speed up IBM’s progress over time. IBM additionally anticipates that the transaction shall be accretive to adjusted EBITDA throughout the first full yr and free money move in yr two, publish shut.
Confluent is headquartered in Mountain View, CA and at the moment has greater than 6,500 shoppers throughout industries – greater than 40% of the Fortune 500. The corporate companions and integrates throughout the know-how business with leaders like Anthropic, AWS, GCP, Microsoft, Snowflake and extra. That is in line with IBM’s method to deep business partnership and dealing throughout a broad and open know-how ecosystem of utility suppliers, ISVs and hyperscalers.
Confluent is constructed on Apache Kafka, an open-source knowledge and occasion streaming platform for knowledge in movement. Apache Kafka permits quick, dependable and scalable knowledge streaming capabilities for analytics, monitoring and event-driven architectures. Confluent’s platform contains Knowledge Streaming, Connectors, Stream Governance, Stream Processing, Tableflow, Confluent Intelligence and Streaming Brokers. The platform has versatile deployment choices, together with:
- Confluent Cloud: A totally managed deployment of Confluent’s knowledge streaming platform. Its serverless Apache Kafka engine powers probably the most environment friendly solution to deploy and scale real-time knowledge streams within the cloud.
- Confluent Platform: The self-managed deployment of Confluent’s knowledge streaming platform, powered by a cloud-native, enterprise-grade distribution of Apache Kafka.
- WarpStream: A hybrid Convey Your Personal Cloud (BYOC) deployment mannequin with the convenience of use of a totally cloud hosted answer, however the fee profile, safety and knowledge sovereignty of a self-hosted deployment.
- Confluent Personal Cloud: Brings a cloud‑native, managed‑service expertise to self‑managed, non-public environments, making use of Confluent Cloud’s Kora improvements to on‑prem and personal cloud Kafka workloads.
Transaction Particulars
Beneath the phrases of the settlement, IBM will purchase all the issued and excellent widespread shares of Confluent for $31 per share in money, representing an enterprise worth of $11 billion. Confluent shall be acquired with accessible money readily available.
The board of administrators of IBM and the board of administrators and unbiased particular committee of Confluent have every authorised the transaction. The acquisition is topic to approval by Confluent shareholders, regulatory approvals and different customary closing situations.
Confluent’s largest shareholders and buyers, who collectively maintain roughly 62% of the voting energy of Confluent’s excellent widespread inventory, entered right into a voting settlement with IBM pursuant to which every has agreed to vote all of their widespread shares in favor of the transaction and towards any various transactions.
The transaction is anticipated to shut by the center of 2026.
Investor Briefing:
An investor briefing is out there on the Investor Relations web site right here: https://www.ibm.com/investor/occasions/ibm-confluent
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