We're incredibly excited about Confluent. It's an incredible team that Jay has built. And I'll give you an analogy. If you think about the industrial revolution, what drove all the growth was when the railroads connected factories to cities and to people. And that's exactly what's happening to AI right now. This is the new industrial revolution. And we need the rails that will make AI successful. Confluent and what they've built in terms of real-time data is the rails of this AI moment. So, we're incredibly excited to have this become part of IBM once we complete the closing process.
Great. Well, Jay, I want to talk to you a little bit about the business that Confluent is in. If you were explaining it to someone who isn't in tech, how would you explain the data services that Confluent provides?
The service we offer is all about the real-time flow of data between the parts of a company. So you can imagine if you're a big retailer and something is sold, what are the different software systems and databases and parts of the company that have to update or react to that? It turns out there are hundreds. And that's not just a problem for a retailer. That's a problem for a bank or an insurance company or a tech company. That's ultimately where the software was born. So this is all about harnessing and reacting to data in real time as things happen in a business, being able to build applications, AI agents that can react to that and use that data. That's what the software is for.
I think this is an opportunity to take this to a larger stage. IBM has built a fabric for applications, infrastructure, security that works across the different cloud providers, out into on-premise and edge environments. And Confluent had done a similar thing for data. So the two things fit together. If you think about what's the future of these applications that these organizations are building, I think data is a big part of that. That's the thing each organization has to figure out how to combine with these new language models in the age of AI. And so putting those two things together was a natural fit. And of course IBM has done a great job with open source. A key aspect of the platform they've built is having these open standard layers that the world wants to build around. And that's true of Confluent as well. So there was a certain strategic fit element that I think was obvious on both sides even the first time Rob and I chatted.
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Thomas, R. (2025, December 9). Why IBM Bet $11 Billion on Confluent [Interview transcript]. The Information. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/555947/
MLA
Robert Thomas. "Why IBM Bet $11 Billion on Confluent." The Information, 9 Dec. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/555947/.
BibTeX
@misc{thomas2025_555947,
author = {Robert Thomas},
title = {Why IBM Bet $11 Billion on Confluent},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Information. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {dec},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/555947/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
