Some interesting stuff about the relationship between enterprise and open source. I know the 'risks' section is always to be taken with a pinch of salt, but I found this interesting.<p>> Software developers, including those within our customers’ IT departments, are often familiar with our underlying technology and value proposition. We rely on their continued adoption of our offering to evangelize on our behalf within their organizations and increase reach and mindshare within the developer community.<p>> Actions that we have taken in the past or may take in the future with respect to Apache Kafka or our community license, including the development and growth of our proprietary offering, may be perceived negatively by the developer community and harm our reputation.<p>They know that there's a fine line between making enough open source to be seen as 'really' open source software. The 'open core' model is sometimes abused where they intentionally cripple the open-source version to prod people towards the closed one.<p>Also confirms what I have heard from a lot of smaller developer-tools companies - 'traditional' marketing and sales doesn't really work, and they go to pretty big efforts to get support from the bottom up, instead of taking the CIO to a fancy conference.
Can someone ELI5 what confluent is/does?<p>Going to the landing page of any enterprise B2B Saas company is always bizarre. You can tell nobody cares if the copy makes sense because these types of products get sold in person.
Hmmm they really look to have huge losses. I understand a big part of that is because of growth but they have a bit more than a years cash remaining based on current burn - maybe 5 or 6 quarters? This IPO will need to generate a lot of cash to get them to a sustainable place.<p>Their cloud growth is good but their total growth (~50%) although nice isn’t so big for a company doing 236m in revenue but spending ~400m to do that at 50% growth.<p>Still I like their product and will keep an eye on this one.
Interestingly they don’t list Apache Pulsar or Splunk as a competitor yet list AWS.<p>Splunk acquired Streamlio the people bind Pulsar in 2019 so you have to ask with the Confluent IPO what are Splunk doing with Pulsar? It is looking like a missed opportunity at this point.<p>Pulsar is a direct replacement for Kafka. Pulsar even supports the Kafka wire protocol.
Interesting. Kinda weird that they don't see more growth, they do have a pretty compelling "serverless Kafka" cloud offering for those cases where Kafka shines, but where the ops overhead of running your own is a bit too much, which should cover quite a lot of real-world cases. IIRC last time we checked they weren't able to offer Confluent Cloud under fully GDPR-compliant terms, so we had to pass, but otherwise we were pretty impressed, especially considering the pretty attractive pricing at the time.
TL:DR - $230 million in losses last year, mostly because of headcount costs to fuel growth, with about a bit over $200 million working capital left. Yeah they're growing quickly, but clearly not fast enough for VC firms to offer better terms than Wall Street underwriters.
This looks much worse than I expected for a company synomous with kafka. They only have 60 customers with 1m+ arr for a product thats used pretty much by every established companies .
IMO Confluent is trying to rush this IPO. I'd be trying to push for an IPO aggressively with everything that has happened related to Elasticsearch.<p>It showed a lot in the industry that Elastic didn't have nearly that much to offer than what everyone thought once Amazon stepped into the ring and the same is apparent with Confluent.<p>The same similar situation seems to be emerging with their managed Kafka service. Once you're on AWS there will be incentive to move to their Firehose platforms.<p>Very few customers actually should be running a Kafka cluster at all and the bulk of those would be better off running Pulsar to reduce their pipeline storage costs significantly.