Confluent Current 2026: GM Clowes Says Streamhouse Opens Partner AI Opportunities

‘The people who can harness their data fastest are the ones who will win. They will need a bunch of SIs to help them do that,’ says Shaun Clowes, general manager of Confluent and data at IBM.

The artificial intelligence era and Confluent’s expanded data streaming portfolio are creating greenfield opportunities for its partner ecosystem, including IBM partners following Big Blue’s acquisition of Confluent this year.

Shaun Clowes, general manager of Confluent and data at IBM, told a CRN reporter during a press conference at the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor’s Current 2026 event that any beliefs that solution providers would become unnecessary in the AI era have been dashed because organizations will turn to trusted advisers to harness data fast.

For customers restructuring their technology stacks, solution providers will put the building blocks in place, said Clowes, who served as Confluent’s chief product officer before the acquisition.

“We are in the middle of the most incredible technology transformation of our entire careers,” Clowes said. “The people that can harness their data fastest are the ones who will win. They will need a bunch of SIs to help them do that.”

Clowes also kept the door open to IBM solution providers exploring how Confluent could expand their Big Blue practices, as well as partners aligned with other IBM acquisitions, including Red Hat, HashiCorp and DataStax. “The more the merrier,” he said.

Tony Giang, CEO and founder of Psyncopate Technologies, a Dallas-based Confluent solution provider, told CRN in an interview that his company is exploring ways to get more out of the IBM portfolio.

“Our relationship with Confluent was great before the announcement of the acquisition, but now with IBM’s leverage and reach into large accounts, it seems like [we have] a lot more pull in these accounts, which has been fantastic,” Giang said.

Psyncopate has also created a solution to help customers migrate to Confluent Kafka from other versions and is at work scaling it.

Kafka is a free, open-source, distributed event-streaming and messaging platform, with Confluent offering an enterprise-grade platform built and commercialized from the project’s creators.

“Our tool takes all of our knowledge, all the technical aspects of it, we packaged as much as we could into it, and we think we can reduce about 75 percent of that friction up front, which is pretty exciting,” Giang said.

Confluent Streamhouse, Lightning Tables Target Real-Time AI

One of the biggest reveals at Current 2026 was new capabilities for building what Confluent calls a Streamhouse, a data architecture that aims to keep business context current for AI agents, applications and analytics as they make decisions and take action.

While data lakes, warehouses and lakehouses focus on reporting and batch jobs, Streamhouses continuously capture, process, govern and serve current business context. Confluent promises to handle the infrastructure automation, and the architecture avoids developers needing to build custom integrations or micromanage data movement.

Streamhouses aim to add a real-time operational layer to existing data warehouses and lakehouses. For Confluent Data Streaming Platform users, DSP looks to bring 150-plus fully managed and custom connectors, hybrid connector management and the ability to enrich and derive context close to the source through Apache Flink.

To support Streamhouse adoption, Confluent has made Lightning Tables generally available on Amazon Web Services , with plans for availability on other clouds in the future, Sean Falconer, Confluent vice president of product, AI products and strategy, told CRN in an interview.

Lightning Tables aims to provide a read-only serving layer that materializes Apache Kafka data into tables and continuously updates them as the underlying data changes. Confluent positions Lightning Tables as going from new data creation to serving in about 100 milliseconds, with query latency of 10 to 100 milliseconds and throughput of 1,000-plus queries per second.

This layer doesn’t require ETL pipelines, databases or caches, according to Confluent. Users can query through SQL and a direct API.

Confluent Expands AI, Data Streaming Portfolio

The vendor moved Confluent Intelligence’s on-premises AI model serving in Confluent Platform for Apache Flink into open preview, giving users access to production-grade, lightweight specialized AI models from a curated catalog.

Flink is an open-source processing engine designed to perform complex computations on data streams in real time.

The vendor also made a conversational, notebook-style Confluent Assistant experience available for querying real-time Flink data using natural language and without using SQL.

Other products reaching GA include Managed Model Inference for LLMs hosted through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Managed Model Inference aims to give users a zero-configuration capability for calling supported AI and machine learning models from Flink SQL, enabling real-time inference without managing credentials, endpoints or serving infrastructure.

Real-Time Context Engine reached GA for users looking to serve fresh context to AI agents through Model Context Protocol (MCP) as an access pattern for Lightning Tables.

Confluent also moved managed MCP servers into GA for use by people leveraging AI assistants. Confluent Skills also became GA as complementary coding-assistant plugins for designing, building and debugging Kafka Streams applications without using MCP tools.

Confluent Private Cloud gained multi-tenancy to allow users to consolidate Kafka clusters, reduce the total cost of ownership and on-board in minutes on private infrastructure.

IBM Sees Confluent Growth, Cross-Sell Opportunities

During the latest quarterly earnings call From IBM, executives shared that Confluent growth helped support 20 percent growth year over year in its data business and about 20 percent bookings growth.

Demand from enterprises seeking to unlock data for AI applications bodes well for Confluent, Krishna said. He noted that 90 percent of enterprise data remains outside the cloud, while more than 70 percent of organizations report insufficient real-time data infrastructure.

“We believe Confluent is uniquely positioned with a complete open and hybrid approach that helps clients avoid lock-in while deploying wherever the data resides,” Krishna said.

As the CEO told CRN in its August cover story, Confluent “is the world’s best answer to” unlocking data for AI.