SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements about us and our industry that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including statements regarding our future results of operations and financial condition, business strategy and plans, and objectives of management for future operations, are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “contemplate,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “target,” “toward,” “will,” “would,” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the following:
We caution you that the foregoing list may not contain all of the forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Forward-looking statements are based on our management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including risks described in the section titled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Other sections of this Annual Report on Form 10-K may include additional factors that could harm our business and financial performance. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risk factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for our management to predict all risk factors nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ from those contained in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We cannot assure you that the events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this report or to conform these statements to actual results or to changes in our expectations. You should read this Annual Report on Form 10-K and the documents that we reference in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and have filed as exhibits to this report with the understanding that our actual future results, levels of activity, performance, and achievements may be materially different from what we expect. We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements.
Where You Can Find More Information
Investors and others should note that we may announce material business and financial information to our investors using our Investor Relations website (investors.confluent.io), our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), webcasts, press releases, public conference calls, and blogs published on our website. We use these mediums, including our website, to communicate with investors and the general public about our company, our products, and other issues. It is possible that the information that we make available on our website may be deemed to be material information. We therefore encourage investors and others interested in our company to review the information that we make available on our website.
We also use our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. The information we post through these social media channels may be deemed material. Accordingly, investors should monitor these accounts, in addition to following our SEC filings, webcasts, press releases, public conference calls, and blogs published on our website. This list may be updated from time to time. The information we post through these channels is not a part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. These channels may be updated from time to time on our investor relations website.
In addition, statements that “we believe” and similar statements reflect our beliefs and opinions on the relevant subject. These statements are based upon information available to us as of the filing date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and while we believe such information forms a reasonable basis for such statements, such information may be limited or incomplete, and our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all potentially available relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely upon these statements.
Confluent is on a mission to set data in motion. We have pioneered a new category of data infrastructure designed to connect all the applications, systems, and data layers of a company around a real-time central nervous system. This new data infrastructure software has emerged as one of the most strategic parts of the next-generation technology stack, and using this stack to harness data in motion is critical to the success of modern companies as they strive to compete and win in the digital-first world.
Our way of life has shifted to a digital-first paradigm, and the digital realm has become the new competitive battlefield in the global economy. In order to compete and win in today’s world, organizations must continually innovate on software systems that are increasingly critical to how they do business.
Being digital-first is not just a matter of adding an application or automating an existing process. It is an end-to-end reimagining of business. It means creating rich, digital front-end customer experiences as a primary way of interacting with customers. It means transitioning to real-time, software-driven back-end operations as a business. In retail, this is the difference between accurate inventory tracking across multiple channels to ensure a consumer can have an up-to-date snapshot of what is actually in-store, versus leaving a consumer disappointed on arrival when the product that they thought was available is out-of-stock. In manufacturing, this is the difference between harnessing a real-time flow of data from IoT sensors to deliver predictive maintenance and reduce downtime, versus episodic, manual inspections of equipment.
This is a matter of life or death for companies. Tech disruptors are delivering rich, digital customer experiences and setting the standard for customer expectations. Businesses in every industry are in full mobilization to rebuild their businesses around the new experiences made possible with software and data. Organizations that get it right can experience stronger growth and improved customer loyalty and gain significant competitive advantage. Conversely, organizations that fail to deliver a real-time customer experience that is intuitive, informed, and reliable can expect frustration, dissatisfaction, and churn.
These innovations in front-end customer experiences and back-end business operations reflect a larger technology trend—the fundamental shift in the role of software in the modern organization. Today, software is no longer simply used as a set of applications to increase employee productivity (such as email and expense reporting). Instead, software is directly orchestrating customer experiences and operations that run the business. It is not just that companies are using more software—in a very real sense, they are actually becoming software.
Several waves of technology innovation have driven this changing role of software. Cloud has re-imagined infrastructure as code, making it easier than ever for developers to build applications. Mobile has extended enormous amounts of computing power to fit in the palms of our hands, making usage of technology ubiquitous in our lives. Meanwhile, machine learning is extending the scope and role of software to new domains and processes.
However, in order to complete this transition, another fundamental wave is required. The operation of the business needs to happen in real-time and cut across infrastructure silos. Organizations can no longer have disconnected applications around the edges of their business with piles of data stored and siloed in separate databases. These sources of data need to integrate in real-time in order to be relevant, and applications need to be able to react continuously to everything happening in the business as it occurs. To accomplish this, businesses need data infrastructure that provides connectivity across the entire organization with real-time flow and processing of data, and the ability to build applications that react and respond to that data flow. As companies increasingly become software, they need a central nervous system that connects all of their disparate software systems, unifying their business and enabling them to react intelligently in real-time.
Because of this, we believe that it is no longer enough for an organization to innovate based on the current paradigm of capturing data, storing it, and then querying or analyzing it. Organizations need a strategy, and a foundational data platform, to operate their business in real-time based on data as it is being generated in the moment. This idea of “data in motion” is at least as critical to the operations of a company as “data at rest,” and we believe the new generation of winning organizations will be defined by their ability to take action on it.
Traditional database technologies were not designed for data in motion, but architected for stored data at rest. Despite significant developments in the scalability and speed of analysis in both traditional and more modern databases (such as NoSQL, time-series, and graph databases), they remain limited to data-at-rest use cases and cannot harness data in motion. The leading open source offering for data in motion, Apache Kafka, was originally created by our founders at LinkedIn in 2011 and brought to the mainstream a new paradigm of data processing. However, this was only the beginning. Confluent was founded to create a product that could make data in motion the central nervous system of every company in the world.