Current 23: That’s a Wrap!

#Current23 is a wrap! We hosted over 2,000 attendees at the San Jose Convention Center, with customers, partners, and employees and to hear about what’s next in the data streaming category.

Monday was technically “day 0” of Current 2023 but we had a ton of great activity already happening. This included Partner Day, with a growing number of partners surrounding the data streaming landscape, as well as a Customer Executive Summit, where we were joined by several customers that each spoke about their OSS to Confluent journey, use cases, advice on implementing data streaming and the ROI that Confluent has helped make possible within their organizations.

Last Tuesday, at the opening keynote, we made a few exciting announcements:

• Apache Flink? on Confluent Cloud is now available in open preview and allows teams to create high-quality, reusable data streams that can be delivered anywhere in real time. With our fully managed and elastically scalable Flink service, teams can reduce the architectural complexity and operational burdens of stream processing to enrich streaming data and power innovative use cases.
• Data Portal, an expansion of our Stream Governance suite, leverages Confluent’s Stream Catalog capabilities to simplify the developer experience and increase productivity. With its flexible and self-service interface, Data Portal gives teams a secure way to find and access all the data streams flowing throughout their organization, accelerating the development of real-time applications and products.
• Enterprise clusters are now available for all customers in AWS via AWS PrivateLink, with more networking options coming soon.

• We all know that the resurgence of AI has sparked many organizations to accelerate their AI investments. We announced Data Streaming for AI to help organizations develop real-time AI applications through extended partnerships and our commitment to deliver more AI capabilities on our own platform.
• The Data Streaming Startup Challenge is a global competition that recognizes and rewards early-stage startups that are building innovative applications with Confluent. Startups will compete for a grand prize up to a $500,000 investment from Confluent, marketing exposure, and access to venture capitalists and Confluent co-founders who will provide seasoned mentorship.

Catch up on all our product announcements in our press releases or check out this quick

.

We had a multitude of world-class customer speakers, including Uber, BMW Group, Warner Bros. Discovery, JPMorganChase, NASA and Notion join us on stage. In particular, I want to highlight the Q&A I had with Daniel Sternberg, Head of Data at Notion during Tuesday’s Day 1 keynote.

Notion is a connected workspace where teams can go to create and share documents, organize knowledge, take notes, all in one place. They have a diverse set of use cases with Confluent, but one in particular is Notion AI which helps users work faster and automate mundane tasks. Daniel and Notion initially considered data streaming to power a feature called AI autofill. AI autofill automatically add properties to every document in the respective databases. Since they have to do regular updates to each of the documents in these databases, streaming is a way to actually process this on an ongoing basis. Such a cool utilization of Confluent!

On Wednesday (see the day 2 keynote here), I moderated a Women in Tech Panel, where I was joined by these amazing women:

• Denise Hemmert, VP of Enterprise Enablement Services at Cardinal Health
• Joey Fowler, senior director of Technical Services at Denny’s
• Mona Chadha, director of Infrastructure Partnerships at AWS
• Sharmey Shah, AVP, Sales-East at Confluent
• Shruti Modi, director of Data Platform at Penske Transportation Solutions

From practical tips such as finding a mentor to words of encouragement for future women-in-tech entrants and leaders, our panelists had a ton of great advice to share. Key themes we covered included:

• Be authentic, kind, and focus on cognitive diversity
• Make a greater impact with mentorships, ERGs, and trainings
• Identify your safe people and allies

Read more about our Women in Tech panel in this blog post.

With a full slate of press and analysts in attendance, we’ve seen our third-party and social channels lighting up. Jay even went on CNBC Mad Money with Jim Cramer and Shaun on CNBC Asia Squawk Box to share all of the goodness coming out of Current this week and what’s next in the data streaming category.

Current 2023 truly is the next generation of Kafka Summit, and the energy last week has further reinforced that the data streaming category continues to grow dynamically. As the demands of real-time data streaming become increasingly paramount, Confluent is helping companies scale their data streaming needs and set their data in motion.

Thank you to all of our customers, partners, employees, and the Apache Kafka and Flink communities for joining us in San Jose last week. I can’t wait to see everyone at Current 2024 next September in Austin, Texas!