In addition, said Andrew Humphreys, senior director analyst at Gartner, with IBM MQ, IBM already competes with Confluent in the event broker market, the underpinning technology for event driven architectures. “Although there is some overlap, IBM MQ and Kakfa address different use cases and problems for customers, so IBM has the opportunity to bring these offerings together to deliver a comprehensive set of event broker offerings that address the full breadth of event driven architecture use cases,” he said.
Vital layer in the watsonx stack filled
Mitch Ashley, VP and practice lead at Futurum Research, noted that the acquisition of Confluent fills a vital layer in the watsonx stack and gives IBM an open source-based backbone for real time, governed data in motion. It also aligns IBM’s recent data acquisitions into a coherent architecture. “The value here is not just Kafka as a technology, but the ability to deliver fresh, contextual data into every part of IBM’s AI portfolio with consistency and control,” he said.
The acquisition, wrote Sanchit Vir Gogia, the chief analyst at Greyhound Research, in a report released soon after the purchase was announced, “marks a turning point that has little to do with price tags or portfolio expansion. What it truly reveals is a change in who controls the lifeblood of modern digital enterprises. That lifeblood is real-time data.”
