Confluent with headquarters in Palo Alto, California, was established by the developers of the Open Source Solution Apache Kafka. The company offers a leading event streaming platform, which enables companies to easily access their data in the form of real-time streams and therefore maximize the value of their data.

Every byte has a story to tell, according to Confluent. In a data-dependent company, the movement of data, analysis, and the distribution of data is just as important as the data itself.

With the Confluent platform, data from different systems can be transferred into a real-time data pipeline. Confluent is focused on the further development of the streaming platform that enables companies to easily access real-time streams with business data.

While Confluent largely deals with platforms of distributed systems, BOS approached Confluent to show how mainframe data can be integrated into the event streaming concept.

The tcVISION solution of BOS already offered a complete interface to Kafka, so the implementation of any mainframe data into the event streaming platform could be successfully demonstrated.

As of the beginning of 2019 B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH is now a “Verfied Standard“ partner of Confluent.

With tcVISION, BOS offers one of the leading data integration solutions for the realization of data exchange solutions, data synchronization, distribution and replication, and migration in heterogeneous environments. The “minimal impact“ Change Data Capture technology for various mainframe, LUW, and Cloud based data sources accelerates the construction of modern real-time enterprise data architectures.

It includes the entire data exchange including extracting the data from the source, the data transformation for processing at the target, and the direct apply into the targets without buffering.

Kafka is completely supported as output target by tcVISION, including an authentication by Kerberos and a protected data connection via SSL. tcVISION streams data to Kafka via JSON or AVRO.

The partnership with Confluent allows for users of the streaming platform to quickly and easily integrate data from enterprise applications on mainframes and distributed systems into the streaming platform in realtime, and to access these real-time streams with business data.

tcVISION facilitates real-time analytics and BI solutions as well as the modernisation of applications and the connected relocation of data and applications. Also the effort for the implementation as well as the realization of the Confluent Streaming Platform with the integration of real-time data from mainframe and distributed systems is significantly reduced and can be realized in a short time.

Users have, among others, the following advantages:

  • The costs for data exchange are reduced to a minimum through the concentration on change data by tcVISION.
  • Replication of mainframe data to Big Data allows real-time analytics.
  • The use of mainframe resources is reduced as much as possible in order to save mainframe know-how and MIPS.