SoftwareMill as a Confluent Premier Consulting Partner
We have been enjoying the status of Confluent Premier Consulting Partner for several weeks now. For quite some time our developers have been carrying out projects using Kafka as well as working on the akka-streams-kafka open source project. As mentioned (here) by Adam Warski, we are receiving more and more questions regarding Kafka. For this reason, we decided to establish cooperation with Confluent, the company founded by the creators of Kafka.
Training for professionals
The invitation to participate in a partnership program was connected, among others, with the opportunity for a professional training, which was held in London at the end of July. Two of our engineers: Krzysztof Ciesielski and Andrzej Ludwikowski, participated in the training.
As a contributor to the akka-streams-kafka project, I wanted to understand how to optimally configure Kafka. Apart from that, I perceive Kafka as a very promising technology in projects. Customers often ask about it and we wanted to have experts on our team,
explains Krzysztof.
During the training, our developers had a chance to exchange experiences with other participants, but, most importantly, to confront their knowledge regarding the usage of Kafka with the system’s creators.
Our competence does not come from unverified sources, it comes directly from the creators of the Kafka system, which, in our opinion, is valuable from the customer’s point of view,
says Andrzej.
The customer gets engineers who understand how to implement, maintain and monitor Kafka for modern and scalable systems. The ability to solve potential problems and to react correctly to emergencies is also essential,
adds Krzysztof.
Before we entered the partnership program, we had to be sure that it would be a win-win situation for both parties. We confirmed that our developers will have an access to the latest knowledge and the ability to deepen it continuously. But most of all, we take care the newly-gained experience means satisfying cooperation with customers. It is crucial for us that the customers are benefited from working with senior engineers. That is why we also asked Rich Brazeau, Business Development & Alliances Director at Confluent, about their perspective:
Why is a partnership between IT companies important for customers?
Value is the common thread in businesses adopting new technology to transform their business. As a result, it is imperative that the best-of-breed technologies that are driving these transformations work well together and the companies collaborate strategically for the common goal of meeting the customer expectations and delivering value. [...] From a partnership perspective, that is why it is so important for Confluent to have proven, valued partners like SoftwareMill to work with clients and meet their development needs.
From Confluent's perspective, our team is well-regarded as the Apache Kafka experts due to our lineage in developing Kafka and still driving the majority of the core code in addition to the Confluent Platform. For companies implementing a stream data platform at enterprise-scale, the Confluent Platform extends the capabilities of Kafka and we rely on our partnerships to help drive success for our mutual customers.
What are the top requirements for a company to become a Confluent Partner?
Confluent announced its Partner Program just a few months ago and we've had tremendous demand from both the perspective of Technology Partners as well as Consulting Partners. We look at each application before allowing anyone into the program. Specifically, we're looking for Big Data experience, team background/experience, reputation, and examples of previous work[...].
