Strategic partnerships don’t work without trust. And in the data streaming world, trust begins with transparency.

In this episode, Elena Cuevas, Sr. Manager of Cloud Partner Solutions Engineering at Confluent, joins Joseph Morais to unpack what it takes to collaborate with hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. From managing competitive overlaps to future-proofing enterprise data architectures, Elena shares her battle-tested strategies for driving alignment across complex stakeholder ecosystems.

You’ll learn:

• How to collaborate effectively across competitive cloud partnerships 
• Why transparency builds trust and drives adoption in partner-led sales
• What  shift left unlocks for streaming data governance
• How Confluent supports GenAI use cases with real-time data 

Whether you're working with a cloud provider or building your own ecosystem, Elena’s playbook will change how you think about partnership, transparency, and long-term scale.

About the Guest:
Elena Cuevas currently leads the Cloud Partner Solutions Engineering team at Confluent, where she and her team focus on strengthening technical relationships with cloud providers.

Prior to joining Confluent, Elena spent several years at Google, working directly with some of the company’s largest Google Cloud customers in both pre-sales and post-sales capacities.

She is passionate about helping members of historically underrepresented communities see that a path in STEM is within reach if they choose to pursue it. Elena has served as an #IamRemarkable facilitator, an instructor for the Computer Science Summer Institute, and is a frequent speaker at universities and high schools.

Guest Highlight: 
“Sometimes we talk about competing and about one or the other, but we do better things when it's ‘and’, and not an ‘or’.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(07:55) - Data Streaming in a World of Clouds 
*(14:25) -   The Playbook: Winning Strategies
*(23:25) -    Voices from the World of Data Streaming
*(28:30) - Quick Bytes
*(31:15) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Elena’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ecuevasc
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io