Confluent: Confluent data streaming to debut in NZ via Microsoft DC hook-up

US data streaming platform provider Confluent has teamed up with Microsoft to make its Confluent Cloud available in Microsoft's New Zealand data centre region. The move provides regulated and government bodies with data sovereignty assurance and mana raraunga for organisations holding and managing Maori data.The partnership will provide Azure customers in NZ with access to cloud-native data streaming to help build real-time applications and reinvent employee and citizen experiences.Confluent A/NZ regional director Simon Laskaj told Reseller News the timing of regional service rollouts were determined by customer demand. Prominent New Zealand customers in the public sector, financial services, banking and insurance wanted to to go live urgently within Microsoft's local data centre."Typically the timing of a region is determined by a couple of things," Laskaj said. "The number one thing it is determined by is whether we have the customers - do we have the customer demand?"In this case we have some very prominent customers in public sector and also in financial services - banking and insurance - that want to go live uregntly within the local Azure data centre and intend to use Confluent to support that."Laskaj was unable to immediately cite customers without their permission.The company also boasts global partnerships with AWS and Google to deliver not just data sovereignty but security and data resiliency. The Microsoft deal, however, marks its first entry into New ZealandConfluent's general manager and VP of product management, Mike Agnich, said Confluent should be understood as core cloud data infrastructure driving the business significantly for Fortune 1000-scale organisations."We have deep global partnerships with AWS, Azure and Google," he said.However, not all regions were created equally."Not only does the region need to be lit up, not only do we need to have customers there, but it has to be a significant region with multiple availability zones and not all of them are built that way," Agnich said.Given that, Confluence liked to "aggressively follow" such openings.The platform's origins lie in Apache Kafka, an open source distributed event store and stream processing platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation.However, its technology goes beyond those open source capabilities to provide corporate, government and not for profit users with a single source of truth.Laskaj said the rollout addressed the needs of global and regional system integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte, Cap Gemini and Datacom as it helped connect data "from left to right".Agnich said recent partnerships with Snowflake and Databricks have provided native integrations with Confluent, driven in part by demand for agentic AI development.Confluent is also expanding its regional channel partnerships to address localisation and data sovereignty opportunities.Confluent was founded by Apache Kafka pioneers Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao.