Confluent's Q4 Earnings Beat Expectations, Expands Partnership with Databricks for AI-Driven Applications

Confluent Q4 2024 earnings beat expectations as data streaming vendor expands partnership with Databricks

Confluent continues to deliver solid results as enterprises appear to be responding to the vendor's market positioning on utilizing data streaming to enable real-time and AI-driven applications. The vendor's largest customers, in particular, appear to be driving the majority of its growth, which is a helpful indicator for sustainable recurring revenues. These results highlight our customers' need for a complete data streaming platform, our world class innovation engine and our successful transformation to a consumption driven go-to-market model. Kreps also took the opportunity on this week's earnings call to outline the company's expanded partnership with Databricks, which will enable bidirectional integration between Confluence Tableflow with Databricks' Delta Lake and Unity Catalog. This, claims Kreps, will provide consistent real-time data across both operational and analytical systems. The partnership builds on Confluent's Tableflow launch almost twelve months ago, which essentially transforms Apache Kafka topics and the associated schemas to Apache Iceberg tables, with just a single click, making it easier to supply data lakes and data warehouses. This historically hasn't been a simple task and Confluent sees it as a key enabler for then being able to process data as a whole - using Confluent's Flink system - which in turn, Kreps has argued, is key to building a central data nervous system for organizations. Commenting on the Databricks partnership, Kreps said: Built on open standards, these integrations ensure real time interoperability and flexibility across diverse ecosystems. Seamlessly working with the tools and data infrastructure that companies already use. Operational data from Confluent becomes a first class citizen in Databricks and the insights created within Databricks can be driven back into any processor in the enterprise via Tableflow and Confluent. This is an incredibly exciting prospect for companies worldwide. This partnership extends Tableflow's reach across the analytics ecosystem, positioning Confluent as the leading vendor for delivering data across the enterprise. This is crucial for scaling AI innovation by giving application developers, data engineers, data analysts and data scientists a single real time source of truth to power advanced analytics and Next-Gen AI driven applications. Together we will enable businesses to harness the power of real time data to build sophisticated AI driven applications for their most critical use cases. Tableflow continues to be one of the most exciting and powerful additions to our data streaming platform. One of Confluent's primary ambitions is to unite operational and analytical systems, which historically have operated in separate silos, managed by different teams, using different technologies. This in theory makes building real-time AI applications a challenge, which Confluent believes can be helped through the use of Tableflow Tableflow exposes Confluent's data streams as continuously updating tables in cloud object storage using open standards like Apache Iceberg - and now Delta Lake. This allows Confluent to act as the bridge between operational systems that run the business and analytical platforms like Athena, BigQuery Databricks and Snowflake, which are used to extract valuable insights. Speaking to the challenges enterprises have historically faced, Kreps said: To compensate, teams built point to point batch oriented pipelines to move operational data to the analytical estate, resulting in insights based on outdated and incomplete data. In the era of real time data and AI, scale data simply isn't enough for modern businesses. Data streaming has emerged as a major data platform, putting Confluent in a unique position to replace the brittle connections between operations and analytics with something that is much more robust and much more scalable. In fact, our mission and business model is built on creating continuous, trustworthy and discoverable streams of data that can be consumed anywhere in the organization. Tableflow further realizes our mission by making real time, consistent and secure data available as structured tables in cloud object storage using an open table format. With Tableflow, data is defined and stored once but accessible across multiple processors, breaking down silos and enabling faster, more accurate insights. Kreps provided an example of a US customer that simplifies bookings and operations for ground transportation companies. This company's customers require real-time data for a smooth online booking experience, which needs accurate pricing and precise arrival and drop off times. Kreps said: Previously, they did this by loading data into Snowflake with batch jobs for analytics. However, this caused delays and increased data processing costs. So the digital native customer implemented Tableflow as part of our early access program to bridge their operational data with their analytics systems. Using Apache Iceberg with Tableflow, Confluent Cloud automatically performs the required data preprocessing and ingested into Snowflake as high quality data. The customer can now derive business insights directly from the data faster and at a much lower cost, significantly speeding up analysis and decision making for its transportation customers. Confluent has been patiently building its platform out over the last few years, pulling together the relevant pieces to enable data streaming across the enterprise. The Databricks partnership highlights how the vendor is looking to expand its reach in the market, with the aim of broadening out its impact beyond operational data and into the analytics arena. What's needed now is for Confluent to consistently showcase its customer stories, allowing buyers to see what's possible when real-time streaming data is enabled in this way. Onwards.

Confluent's cloud growth engines keep on firing, sending its stock higher - SiliconANGLE

Confluent's cloud growth engines keep on firing, sending its stock higher Big data streaming software provider Confluent Inc. posted solid financial results, strong guidance for the current quarter, and announced a key new partnership with Databricks Inc. today, sending its stock soaring more than 14% in extended trading. The company reported fourth-quarter earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of 9 cents per share, surpassing Wall Street's consensus estimate of just 6 cents per share. Revenue for the period came in at $261.2 million, up 23% from a year earlier and ahead of the analysts' target of $256.8 million. All told, Confluent posted a net loss of $105.8 million, down from the $84.7 million loss it reported in the same period one year earlier. The company is viewed as one of the darlings of the rapidly growing big data industry, which is being boosted by rising demand for generative artificial intelligence. It's the developer of the popular open-source data streaming platform Apache Kafka, which is used by companies to track data points such as sales, orders, trades and customer feedback in real time. This information is delivered via real-time data streams, which can be analyzed for insights using Confluent's tools. It's an important capability because the Apache Kafka software is used by more than 80% of the Fortune 500, and it is increasingly being seen as a key component of AI systems due to its ability to rapidly analyze new data as it's created. One of its most notable customers is OpenAI, the AI startup that's widely credited with kicking off the generative AI craze. Confluent has been growing fast, and most of that growth stems from its cloud-based offering, Confluent Cloud. It's an enterprise-grade version of Apache Kafka that customers can run on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, but it's notably much simpler to deploy and manage than the open-source Kafka. The company launched Confluent Cloud around two-and-a-half years ago, and it has since become its main revenue driver. During the quarter, Confluent Cloud sales jumped 38% from a year earlier to $138 million. Confluent co-founder and Chief Executive Jay Krebs (pictured) praised the company for beating all of its guided metrics during the quarter. "Our momentum reflects the increasing importance of a complete data streaming platform to power mission-critical and real-time AI applications," he insisted. "The significant partnerships and product innovations we unleashed over the past year have put us in a great position to advance our category lead in 2025." Confluent also showed strong momentum in terms of growing its customer base, saying that the number of clients generating at least $100,000 in annual sales rose to 1,381, up 12% from a year ago. For the first quarter, Confluent sees more good things happening, and it's forecasting earnings of between 6 cents and 7 cents per share, the midpoint coming in just ahead of the Street's target of a 6 cent profit. For the full year, fiscal 2025, it's aiming for a profit of 35 cents per share, in-line with guidance. Confluent is also hoping for big things from its newly announced partnership with Databricks, which aims to help customers overcome the divide that exists between operational systems where data is generated, and the analytical systems that transform such information into insights. Such systems tend to exist in separate siloes, which means different processes are applied between the two, making it difficult to marry real-time data with many analytics tools, and it's this challenge that Confluent is tackling alongside Databricks. They're announcing a bidirectional integration between Confluent's Tableflow and Databricks' Delta Lake and Unity Catalog to enable real-time data across both systems, paving the way for AI-driven decision-making, the companies said. "Real-time data is the fuel for AI," Kreps said. "Toegther with Databricks, we're ensuring businesses can harness the power of real-time data to build sophisticated AI-driven applications for their most critical use cases." Today's after-hours gains mean that Confluent's stock is up just over 7% in the year to date, though it's still down about 5% over the last 12 months.

Confluent Stock Surges On Q4 Earnings Beat, Total Revenue Up 23% - Confluent (NASDAQ:CFLT)

Confluent Inc CFLT shares are trading higher in Tuesday's after-hours session on the heels of the company's fourth-quarter results. Here's a rundown of the report. Q4 Revenue: $261.22 million, versus estimates of $256.83 million Q4 Adjusted EPS: 9 cents, versus estimates of 6 cents Total revenue was up 23% year-over-year, Confluent cloud revenue jumped 38% year-over-year and subscription revenue increased 24% year-over-year to $250.6 million. The company generated $35.2 million in operating cash flow and $29.1 million in free cash flow during the quarter. Confluent said it ended the quarter with 1,381 customers with annual recurring revenue of $100,000 or greater, up 12% year-over-year. Confluent CEO Jay Kreps credited the company's momentum to the "increasing importance of a complete data streaming platform to power mission-critical and real-time AI applications." The partnerships and products Confluent unveiled over the past year have put the company "in a great position to advance our category lead in 2025," said, co-founder and CEO of Guidance: Confluent expects first-quarter revenue to be in the range of $253 million to $254 million. The company expects full-year 2025 revenue to be in the range of $1.117 billion to $1.121 billion. Partnerships: Confluent announced a pair of partnership updates around the same time earnings were released. The company inked a new deal with Jio Platforms Limited to bring Confluent Cloud to Jio Cloud Services. Confluent also announced an expanded partnership with Databricks to empower enterprises with real-time data for AI-driven decision-making through the combination of Confluent's complete Data Streaming Platform and Databricks' Data Intelligence Platform. Confluent executives are currently discussing the quarter on a conference call with investors and analysts that started at 4:30 p.m. ET. Price Action: Confluent shares were up 13.2% after hours, trading at $34.06 at the time of publication, according to Benzinga Pro. Read Next: Upstart Shares Soar After Solid Q4 Report, Strong Q1 Guidance Photo: Shutterstock. CFLTConfluent Inc$34.7310.4%WatchlistOverviewMarket News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs