We have used Kafka for seven years.

IBM streams gives you many OOTB features that can boost the time-to-market, especially when it comes to reporting and monitoring for example. 

Confluent is recognized as one of the leaders in this space and the main reason for this is related to the complete vision of the platform also the large number of connectors. This gives the edge and competitive advatnage.

Back in 2009 when we started using Streams, there was nothing else like it and the alternative of implementing the capability from scratch would have been a very substantial undertaking.

Since then, many commercial and open source offerings have entered the space with various levels and durations of acceptance. Depending on the requirements of the application, some of them may be an appropriate alternative.

However, for my clients and use cases, Streams provides a unique combination of stability, reliability, capability, and performance. Although, I now have more potential alternatives for performing some of the overall processing pipeline, I still depend on Streams to handle much of the 'heavy lifting'.

We used BigInsight and Hadoop in our research area, but our clients needed a real time-solution.

No previous solution was used.