Confluent, Inc., the data streaming services provider, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Immerok. Immerok is a leading contributor to Apache Flink, a powerful technology for building stream processing applications and one of the most popular Apache open-source projects. Immerok has developed a cloud-native, fully managed Flink service for customers looking to process data streams at a large scale and deliver real-time analytical insight. Immerok leadership includes multiple Flink Project Management Committee members and Committers for the open-source technology and would add extensive stream processing expertise to the Confluent team upon the closing of the transaction. Immerok’s investors have included Cusp Capital, 468 Capital, and Cortical Ventures.

With Immerok, Confluent plans to accelerate the launch of a fully managed Flink offering that is compatible with its market-leading managed Kafka service, Confluent Cloud. Thanks to Flink, Kafka Streams, and ksqlDB offerings available natively on Confluent, customers are expected to soon have access to the three leading stream processing tools designed specifically to process and enrich data in real-time. Data streaming is essential to competing in today’s digital-first world, enabling businesses to connect their many different applications, data systems, and SaaS layers in real-time. With a unified and constantly up-to-date view of their data, businesses can deliver streamlined workflows, more automation, and ultimately, superior customer experiences and more efficient business operations.

“Stream processing plays a particularly critical role in data streaming,” said Jay Kreps, the co-founder, and CEO of Confluent. “Stream processing enables organizations to clean and enrich data streams to derive actionable insights from their data in real-time. Our planned acquisition of Immerok will accelerate our ability to bring one of the most popular and powerful stream processing engines directly into Confluent. Soon, customers will be able to leverage the power of Apache Flink natively in Confluent to quickly and easily build the real-time applications that are required to win.”

While many different stream processing technologies exist today, developers are increasingly turning to Flink. In addition to its exceptional performance and rich feature set, Flink boasts a robust developer community, is the third highest repo by commits, and supports mission-critical use cases at innovative companies like Uber, Apple, Netflix, and Goldman Sachs.

“I’m deeply excited about the opportunity to combine our deep Flink expertise with the world’s foremost Kafka experts,” said Holger Temme, the co-founder, and CEO of Immerok. “Together, we can deliver a cloud-native data streaming platform that gives customers the combined power of the best of the stream processing layer, with the best of the data movement and storage layer, so they can unlock new insights from data in real-time.”

Additionally, Immerok’s leadership and core engineering team lead all the way back to the original creators of Apache Flink and with it brings unparalleled knowledge and experience to Confluent. A public preview of the Flink offering for Confluent Cloud is planned for 2023. Confluent’s initial focus will be to build an exceptional Apache Flink service for Confluent Cloud, bringing a cloud-native experience that delivers the same simplicity, security, and scalability for Flink that customers have come to expect from Confluent for Kafka.