IBM's $11B Confluent Acquisition: What It Means for Kafka Users

IBM paid $11 billion for Confluent in December 2025. This is IBM's third major infrastructure acquisition: Red Hat ($34B, 2019), HashiCorp ($6.4B, 2025), and now Confluent.

I've watched this pattern before. If you run Kafka in production, this affects your roadmap—not because Kafka disappears, but because the commercial ecosystem just consolidated under a single enterprise vendor.

We started evaluating alternatives the day the acquisition was announced. Not to leave Confluent, but to understand our options.

VP Engineering at a fintech company

What IBM Actually Bought

IBM did not buy Kafka. Apache Kafka remains open source, governed by the Apache Software Foundation. IBM bought:

• Confluent Cloud: 6,500+ customers, 40% of Fortune 500
• Commercial tooling: Schema Registry, ksqlDB, Control Center
• Enterprise contracts: Multi-year support agreements, compliance certifications
• The Kafka brand association: Most enterprises equate Confluent with Kafka

The AI narrative in IBM's press release is secondary. The real value is recurring revenue from infrastructure that enterprises cannot easily replace.

The Pricing Question

IBM paid a 34% premium. That money has to come from somewhere.

Acquisition	Year	Outcome
Red Hat	2019	Prices stable initially, gradual increases in enterprise tiers
HashiCorp	2025	BSL licensing caused community friction
SoftLayer	2013	Absorbed into IBM Cloud, lost competitive edge

Expect:

• Year 1-2: Pricing stability. IBM honors existing contracts.
• Year 3+: Gradual increases, especially for governance and security features.
• Bundling pressure: Incentives to integrate with IBM Cloud and watsonx.

What Changes for Your Architecture

If You're on Confluent Cloud

Audit your contract terms now. Pre-close was the best time to renegotiate, but renewal cycles still offer leverage.

Assess your lock-in depth:

• Schema Registry has proprietary schema linking features
• ksqlDB is not part of open-source Kafka
• Control Center is proprietary monitoring
• Kafka Connect is open source, but the managed connector ecosystem is Confluent-specific

If You're Self-Managing

You're in a stronger position regarding vendor risk. But be honest about operational cost. Do you have dedicated Kafka expertise, or is it one engineer's side responsibility?

Evaluating Alternatives

Platform	Consideration
Redpanda	Kafka-compatible, simpler ops. Also VC-backed, potential acquisition target
AWS MSK	Vanilla Kafka. No Confluent features, but cloud lock-in
Self-managed	Full control, full operational burden

There is no perfectly safe choice. Every alternative has its own risk profile.

The Talent Exodus Pattern

IBM acquisitions follow a predictable cycle:

Year 1: Autonomy and retention bonuses. Confluent operates independently. Key engineers stay for vesting.

Year 2-3: Integration begins. IBM processes take over. Enterprise sales cycles lengthen.

Year 3+: Retention bonuses vest. Departures follow.

This happened with Red Hat. It's still functional, but the pace of developer-experience innovation slowed. Red Hat became enterprise-grade reliable, not cutting-edge innovative.

Confluent's value was always in its people: Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, and the core Kafka committers. Neha Narkhede left in 2020. More departures typically follow vesting cliffs post-acquisition.

Strategic Recommendations

For engineering leaders: Establish vendor-neutral abstractions. Applications should connect through stable access layers like Conduktor Gateway, not directly to vendor-specific endpoints.

For platform teams: Audit your Confluent-specific dependencies. List every feature without an open-source equivalent. That's your lock-in surface.

For executives: Budget for 10-20% annual price increases starting year 3. The question isn't "should we leave Confluent?" It's "how do we maintain architectural flexibility?"

The Multi-Provider Reality

Most enterprises already run multiple Kafka environments. One unit inherited Confluent Cloud through an acquisition. Another runs MSK. A third has on-prem Kafka predating the cloud migration.

The acquisition reinforces why multi-provider management matters. Organizations that succeed will:

1. Apply consistent governance across all Kafka environments
2. Provide unified access controls and observability
3. Enable infrastructure changes without application rewrites
4. Maintain optionality as the vendor landscape evolves

The acquisition validates that streaming is critical infrastructure. Every major player wants to own it. Whether it's good for Confluent customers depends on how well you've insulated your architecture from vendor decisions.

Book a demo to see how Conduktor helps teams manage Kafka across Confluent, MSK, and self-managed deployments.