IBM to acquire Confluent, folding Kafka’s leading distro into its hybrid cloud and AI stack
IBM says it will acquire Confluent, a move that plugs the market’s dominant Kafka platform-and its managed Flink, connectors, and governance layer-directly into IBM’s hybrid cloud and data fabric. Under the hood, Confluent brings battle-tested Kafka operations (tiered storage, serverless scaling, Schema Registry, Stream Governance) and a cross-cloud