Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease-of-use, scalability, security and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real time. Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia, Confluent is headquartered in Palo Alto and London with offices globally. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Platform at www.confluent.io/download.

Humana is Improving Health Outcomes with Event-Driven Architectures

August 24 - 4:00PM PDT

Humana is at the forefront of an industry-wide effort to improve health outcomes while keeping costs in check through improved interoperability.  Levi Bailey, Associate Vice President, Cloud Architecture, will share Humana’s vision and how an event-driven architecture, built with Kafka and Confluent, powers the interoperability platforms at the heart of the company’s digital transformation.

Levi Bailey is an Associate Vice President of Cloud Architecture at Humana. Humana is a health insurance company whose focus is on achieving our member’s best health.

His background includes over 15 years in the technology sector across multiple industries including Finance, Healthcare, and Retail. Levi’s career has varied across roles such as Software Engineer, Software Architect, and Technology Leader. His background includes being the Lead Engineer on multiple teams that built Credit Union software systems from the ground up and being the Solution Architect designing best in class sales solutions for the Credit Card Processing industry. Levi has extensive experience with building and managing large enterprise systems in both data center and cloud environments.

Levi has spent the last 5+ years in the healthcare sector working to transform the industry through interoperability and analytics to enable improved outcomes for patients. He currently leads teams that are focused on creating platforms to enable interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem to impact patient outcomes at the point of care.

Levi focuses on impacting people’s lives in a positive manner and uses his job to do that with his associates and with the consumers that use the solutions his teams deliver. Levi believes that health is the most important factor in everyone’s lives and is driven to improve the healthcare system so people get to live their best lives.

Originally from Myrtle Beach, SC, Levi lives in Sellersburg, IN with his wife and two children.

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Building Momentum at Lowe’s with Event Streaming - Jun Rao in discussion with Bhanu Solleti (Lowe's)

August 24 - 4:00PM PDT

In this Q&A keynote, Confluent co-founder Jun Rao and Lowe’s Domain Architect Bhanu Solleti will discuss the central role that Kafka and real-time event streaming play at one of the world’s largest home improvement retailers. At Lowe’s, Kafka and Confluent Platform form the core of an event-driven architecture that connects systems across cloud platforms, data centers, and brick-and-mortar stores. This architecture, along with enterprise-ready solutions like replicators and connectors, are helping Lowe’s improve time-to-market and respond quickly to shifting store hours, increased curbside pickup, and a range of other new business imperatives that have emerged during the pandemic.

"Bhanu Solleti is primarily responsible for roadmap, strategy & new Integration technologies adoption at Lowe’s. 15 years of experience in managing, delivering integration solutions using a wide variety of integration technology stacks. Worked for many top clients like Apple, News.au, Cadence in solving the integration problems & providing business value. One of the early adopters of Kafka at Lowe’s in 2018
& was responsible for the architecture & Implementation of Kafka Platform at Lowe’s. Currently Kafka plays a key role in supporting all critical omni channel use cases like Order Capture to Fulfillment while connecting Lowe’s applications across Datacenters, Cloud and Stores in a decoupled manner.

Today’s Data is in Motion, and Citi is Moving With It - Jun Rao (Confluent) in discussion with Leon Stiel (Citigroup)

August 25 - 9:00AM PDT

Join Confluent co-founder Jun Rao as he talks with Leon Stiehl of Citi about why and how Kafka is at the epicenter of seismic change in the way big banks and financial institutions think about data. Gone are the days of end-of-day batch processes and static data locked in disparate silos.  Today’s data is in motion, and Citi is moving with it. Enterprises need to see their business in near real time; they need to respond in milliseconds not hours; and they need to integrate, aggregate, curate, and disseminate data and events within and across production environments. Learn how Citi is tackling these challenges, using event streaming to drive efficiencies and improve customer experiences. 

Leon Stiel serves as a Director at Citigroup and is responsible for the Electronic Market-Making IT program globally. He specializes
in equities and shared services innovation with a focus on reactive backend architectures and blockchain. Before joining Citigroup,
Leon spent nine years at Credit Suisse as the US and global tech lead designing and implementing technology to resolve complex
management challenges related to trading and risk systems. At Credit Suisse, he was recognized as the IT Americas
“Raising the Bar” winner for his contribution to developing talent through mentorship. As the former CTO at AM Investment Partners,
he leveraged his subject matter expertise to directly manage the design and implementation of core technology infrastructure including
options trading algorithms, order management, risk, and trade reporting – from the ground up. He graduated from
Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor’s degree emphasizing art, computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics.

Apache Kafka - The Next 10 Years

1August 24, 9:00AM PDT 

Let's begin a very unusual Kafka Summit by reflecting about change. Changes we've seen in the software engineering world and changes we've seen in Kafka. We'll also talk about things that don't change - like great software design and architecture. We'll dive deep into two huge changes that are happening in the Kafka community right now - and the possibilities they open for the future.

Gwen is an engineering leader at Confluent, managing the Cloud-Native Kafka team. She has 15 years of experience working with code and customers to build scalable data architectures, integrating microservices, relational and big data technologies. She currently specializes in building real-time reliable data processing pipelines using Apache Kafka. Gwen is an author of “Kafka - the Definitive Guide”, "Hadoop Application Architectures", and a frequent presenter at industry conferences. Gwen is also a committer on the Apache Kafka and Apache Sqoop projects. When Gwen isn't coding or arguing about protocols, you can find her pedaling on her bike exploring the roads and trails of California, and beyond.

Kafka ♥ Cloud

August 25 - 9:00am PDT 

In this talk, Confluent co-founder and CEO, Jay Kreps will cover the rise of two trends:
1. The rise of Apache Kafka and event streams
2. The rise of the public cloud and cloud-native data systems
... and the problems we need to solve as these two trends come together.

Jay Kreps is the CEO of Confluent as well as one of the original co-creators of Apache Kafka. He was previously a senior architect at LinkedIn.

Kafka in the Cloud – Transformative Journeys at Nuuly and Expedia

August 24 - 9:00AM PDT

It’s likely that your organization is doing more in the cloud now than ever before. Chances are that if you’re not already running some or all of your event-streaming use cases in a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment, you will be soon. At this panel, Chirag Dadia, Director of Engineering at Nuuly joins Ravi Vankamamidi, Director of Technology at Expedia Group for a Q&A with Confluent co-founder Jun Rao to share their transformative journeys with event streaming on a fully managed, cloud-native, Kafka-powered platform. In addition to covering the cost-effectiveness of reducing operational burden with Confluent Cloud*, the two will discuss the advantages of more reliable and efficient operations, new opportunities made possible by getting to market faster, and what increased speed-to-market has meant to their businesses and their bottom lines.

The Tyranny Of Data

August 25 - 9:00AM PDT

Data is essential. It’s the lifeblood of our business, and without it we’re lost. 

The problem with data though, is all too often we can end up working for the data, rather than having the data work for us. 

So much of the systems we build are about managing data properly. Storing it safely, getting it where it needs to be. Making sure it is held safely, or that it is manipulated in the right way. The nature of the data we manage can end up constraining our applications in a host of ways.

Rather than making data the constraint in our system, we need to find ways to better unlock the value it has for our organisations. In this keynote, Sam will look at how to reimagine the use of data to make sure the data works for us, not the other way around.