How Confluent enables partner growth through developer education & AI integration

As real-time data becomes the backbone of modern digital businesses, cloud-native streaming architectures are reshaping how enterprises build, deploy, and scale applications. But the organisations driving this shift - ISVs, MSPs, CSPs, system integrators, and cloud-native consulting partners - face a steep learning curve as technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and data streaming platforms evolve at high speed.

At the centre of this transformation is Confluent’s global developer ecosystem, which has quietly become one of the strongest enabler networks for partners worldwide. In a conversation with DQ Channels, Tim Berglund, VP of Developer Relations at Confluent, shared how Confluent’s developer-first education engine is helping partners build, scale, and commercialise solutions on top of streaming architectures, long before formal partnerships even begin.

A Global Education Engine Driving Partner Skills

Berglund describes Confluent’s educational presence as massive and borderless, reaching practitioners across geographies and partner organisations long before commercial engagement begins.

Discussing the global reach of the Data Streaming World Tour, he notes:

“There are 30 or 40 of them and they are truly global. I was in Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, a couple places in the U.S., and there’s other speakers, and they’re all over the planet.”

These events attract developers, architects, operators, and practitioners—the very talent that ISVs, MSPs, and SIs rely on for solution development.

Berglund adds:

“Those are usually customer stories, partner stories, and some technical presentations. It helps a lot of people kind of move forward in their adoption journey.”

For partners, this global circuit becomes a pipeline of ongoing upskilling, technical awareness, and exposure to emerging practices in stream processing and real-time architectures.

Developer Relations: The Front Door for Partner Technical Enablement

While Confluent has a formal partner organisation for onboarding, training, and certification, Berglund emphasises that Developer Relations is intentionally designed to reach partner engineers early, well before any commercial engagement is signed.

He explains his team’s mission:

“My job is to help the developers themselves and operations people and architects, the practitioners, understand the technologies… and get you down that journey and then off and running.”

Through meetups, free courses, code samples, tutorials, and a global community footprint, Confluent ensures that partner organisations naturally adopt the required skills.

Berglund says:

“We have a meetup program that is global, around 350 meetup groups, and around 200,000 RSVPs a year.”

This community reach becomes a training ground for partner technical teams, enabling them to confidently build and support Kafka-based architectures.

Free Coursework, Certification, and Learning Resources for Partners

One of the strongest pillars of Confluent’s partner enablement is open access to technical learning material.

Berglund stresses:

“My stuff on Confluent Developer is just for free, You can take courses for free. You can become certified as a certified data streaming engineer for free.”

And crucially:

“Every technical person at any, partner organization, I consider them a member of our community. And we make free resources for them.”

This approach ensures that whether a partner is a global SI or a mid-sized MSP, the same foundational skills are available cost-free, removing one of the biggest barriers to ecosystem adoption.

How Confluent Aligns with Partner Certification Programmes

Beyond free resources, Confluent’s partner organisation builds structured certification pathways.

Berglund notes: “Of course, there’s now going to be a process that the partner managers take them through. There will be some of their separate content. A lot of that will be our content.”

He also explains the philosophy behind this two-layer system:

“If I haven’t already gotten to them by the time the partnership thing is going, I’ve done something wrong. Like they need to already have seen our stuff.”

Confluent’s developer-led education therefore becomes the foundation upon which the partner enablement programme builds more advanced, commercial, or deployment-specific training.

Guiding Partners on Tooling, Integration and Data Architecture Neutrality

When asked how Confluent guides partners in choosing Kafka tooling or integrating AI-linked infrastructure, Berglund emphasises neutrality and flexibility, key for partner ecosystems that rely on multi-vendor stacks.

He explains: “Confluent has always tried to be as neutral as possible with respect to other data infrastructure. We sometimes refer to ourselves as Data Switzerland.”

Whether partners work with:

• vector databases

• cloud storage layers

• enterprise systems like Salesforce

• RAG pipelines

• AI infrastructure

• or legacy mainframes

Confluent ensures they can integrate via connectors and open interfaces rather than proprietary restrictions.

Berglund adds: “All those things are potential sources and sinks, and we integrate with that.”

This integration-friendly philosophy directly benefits partners as they build customer solutions.

Partner Growth and the Future Role of Engineers

On the evolving role of developers and data engineers in a growing partner ecosystem, Berglund observes a convergence:

“I see those roles converging; the disciplines are merging.”

This industry-wide unification of application and data engineering skills directly influences partner hiring, training, and certification priorities.

To support this transformation, Confluent has introduced:

“The Data Streaming Engineer certification validates that you’ve got the basic technical skills in streaming and stream processing.”

For ISVs, MSPs, SIs, and cloud-native partners, this certification signals the new baseline for talent in the modern data ecosystem.

Confluent’s USD 200 Million Partner Investment: Strengthening the ecosystem

Confluent’s broader partner strategy is reinforced by its commitment to accelerating AI-ready, data-driven innovation across all partner tiers. As Rohit Vyas, Director of Solution Engineering, Confluent India, explains, the company’s USD 200 million global partner investment is designed to strengthen every layer of the ecosystem through deeper integration support, co-development, marketing enablement, and enriched technical resources.

Vyas highlights how this investment impacts different partner groups. For ISVs, “integrations mean product or solution enhancement,” supported by APIs, SDKs, and connectors that embed real-time data streaming into their products, turning static applications into intelligent systems that fuel better AI models and faster insights. He adds that ISVs also gain access to sandbox environments and co-development opportunities that accelerate product maturity.

For MSPs, integrations act as “service accelerators,” with automation frameworks, dashboards, and pre-built connectors enabling them to deliver advanced managed services—from data observability to cybersecurity. Co-development fuels new revenue streams, supported by “tailored sales playbooks, co-branded campaigns, and Business Investment Funds (BIF) and Marketing Development Funds (MDF)” to boost market visibility.

For CSPs, Confluent’s marketplace model and compliance frameworks expand the value of hybrid cloud, enabling trusted, high-performance streaming infrastructure essential for workloads such as generative AI and edge analytics.

Across all tiers, Vyas underlines Confluent’s commitment to coupling technical enablement with field alignment, certifications, and governance support to help partners build the real-time foundations that modern AI workloads demand. “With AI and agentic AI on the rise, India is a critical growth hub for Confluent,” he emphasises, noting that data streaming is no longer just a technology layer, “but a strategic backbone for an intelligent, resilient, and trusted digital economy.”

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