Apache Kafka

Confluent shared its second annual Apache Kafka report this week, which demonstrates a surge in the use of Kafka. The survey also reveals that companies are implementing Kafka for “more accurate and faster decision making, reduced operating costs, improved customer experiences, and reduced risks,” according to the survey.

“The results from this year’s Apache Kafka survey show a lot of momentum for Kafka adoption in the community and industry, even in just the past year. We’re thrilled to see so many companies taking advantage of streaming data and using Kafka as the streaming data backbone,” said Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO at Confluent.

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that is used for building real-time streaming data pipelines and applications. Key findings from the survey include that 86 percent of respondents reported the number of their systems that use Kafka is increasing. Additionally, the survey found that Kafka is broadly being used in the cloud, and this year, organizations are using Kafka for things like stream processing, data integration, and data pipelines, as well as microservices.

Gemalto finalizes acquisition of 3M’s Identity Management business
Gemalto closed the acquisition of 3M’s Identity Management Business this week, which rounds out Gemalto’s Government Programs by offering added biometric technologies and more secure document features.

“With the acquisition of 3M’s Identity Management Business, Gemalto makes a strategic move by in-sourcing biometric technology. Combining our market access, technologies and expertise will enable Gemalto to further accelerate the deployment of trusted national identities and to offer strong end-to-end biometric authentication solutions throughout the digital economy”, said Philippe Vallée, Gemalto CEO.

ASCI adds new automation capabilities
Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) is expanding ActiveBatch’s support of Hadoop by adding new features to improve workflow performance. ActiveBatch Extension for Hadoop provides production-ready content for components of Hadoop, it provides an HDFS Event Trigger, and it gives users advanced scheduling and automation functionality.

“By using pre-built actions, along with the ability to trigger events in real-time, IT managers have more time to take on interesting mission-critical challenges,” says Jim Manias, vice president at ASCI. “The amount of data is a roadblock, but so is the variety of systems. ActiveBatch already contains hundreds of integrations for a wide range of third-party applications to enable true end-to-end automation. Now with the addition of production-ready content for Hadoop, we continue to help developers focus more on function and less on coding.”

ASCI also added major updates to ActiveBatch Version 11, which includes new managed file transfer capabilities, a new FTP File Trigger, and support for Changesets.