IBM experienced another software blow with the departure of data streaming subsidiary Confluent CEO and co-Founder Jay Kreps.

Kreps announced his resignation on LinkedIn, writing: “After almost 12 years, I’ll be stepping back from my role at Confluent and handing over the reins to our chief product officer Shaun Clowes. Confluent was founded to change how companies use data, and against all odds, it has. And we’re not done! There is an ambitious roadmap for what’s next and I’ll watch from the sidelines with a lot of pride and a little FOMO (fear of missing out) as the team achieves that.”

The announcement comes after IBM closed its $11 billion acquisition of the firm earlier this year. Confluent was founded in 2014 by the original creators of the Apache Kafka open source distributed streaming messaging system: Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao. The trio no longer hold C-suite roles at the firm, with Narkhede having left her CTO role in 2020 to stay on as board member.

According to his LinkedIn, Rao is listed as co-founder at the company, having yet to assume a managerial position at the firm. It is unclear whether Kreps will stay on at Confluent in any capacity.

Confluent is used to provide real-time event streaming to support business functions via various public and private cloud options. It claims more than 6,500 customers, including work with more than 40% of the Fortune 500.

Partners to date include Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft, and Snowflake.

The firm has also been lauded by Forrester Research as a top streaming data platform provider in various “Wave” rankings.

Confluent expands IBM’s software empire, where it sits as part of the Data group. Upon the acquisition, IBM noted that Confluent’s open-source history ties-in with past acquisitions Red Hat and HashiCorp, and that the deal would help boost IBM’s hybrid cloud-focused AI services.

Kreps’s exit comes as IBM’s most recent earnings saw a software shortfall that was put down to a shift in customer spending from specific parts toward AI-focused hardware components outside of IBM’s traditional offerings.