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Databricks says Apache Flink is optional; IBM paid $11 billion for Confluent, the company that sells it
On October 29, 2026 Databricks made Spark Real-Time Mode generally available, writing that it removes the need for Apache Flink, the engine that turns Kafka's event log into live decisions, and claiming to be up to 92% faster than Flink on customer workloads. IBM paid about $11 billion in March for Confluent, the company that sells Flink, and its software growth last quarter leaned on that purchase.
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