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Confluent transforms streaming data into enhanced customer experiences

CONFLUENT'S APACHE KAFKA^®i solution helps organizations deliver seamless, real-time experiences.

March 26, 2025

One of the most significant challenges facing organizations today is delivering frictionless experiences customers have come to expect from companies with real-time data capabilities. From identifying fraudulent transactions as they happen to facilitating transportation bookings and even offering predictive recommendations, customer expectations are high—and contingent upon data that is constantly in motion.

Confluent is a real-time data streaming platform that combines Apache Kafka^® and Apache Flink^®ii to help organizations capture value with cloud-native data streaming. Founded in 2014 by the original creators of Apache Kafka^®—an open-source stream processing framework used for real-time data processing and integration at scale—Confluent reimagined and re-architected Kafka for the cloud, combining it with Microsoft Azure services, security, management, and billing to offer an out-of-the-box, secure streaming solution for businesses to capture data in motion.

Confluent is a longtime Microsoft partner and has won several Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards. The organization's Azure interoperation offers customers a Kafka experience that is elastically scalable and globally available.

"Our tight interoperation helps our customers connect real-time data with Kafka pipelines faster to power analytics and applications built with Azure services," said Paul Mac Farland, Confluent's Senior Vice President of Partner & Innovation Ecosystem. "Confluent aligns Kafka adoption with a dynamic data streaming maturity model akin to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, positioning Kafka as the central operational hub for businesses, whether on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud. This way, businesses can establish a globally scaled event-driven architecture, making data an asset across diverse applications."

Meeting customer demands while staying cost-effective

For almost 150 years, a major global automotive parts manufacturer has been an innovation-first powerhouse. In recent decades, the customer evolved from a singular focus on tire manufacturing for vehicles ranging in size from bicycles to space shuttles into a data-driven services organization, delivering solutions as diverse as predictive insights on tire replacement and fuel optimization route recommendations.

Yet, while this customer relies on data for all lines of business, they found that batch reporting with data at rest was unreliable, costly, and didn't allow for real-time reactivity. Their system often offered outdated reporting on inventory, affecting their global supply chain, logistical operations, and ultimately, their customers.

They decided to adopt a Kafka framework on-site to leverage real-time data. They quickly found, however, that open-source Kafka is not only challenging to implement, but also requires full-time maintenance and infrastructure management. This resulted in difficulty scaling and no Kafka support for their path to the cloud.

An IT Architect and CTO of one of the customer’s service lines explained, "One of the challenges with Kafka was its operational complexity. We had to allocate a lot of our valuable technical resources and expertise to babysit it and keep it running. Nor is it a cloud-native data system, so it could not scale and handle the volumes of data that we needed to process."

Confluent chart showing data streaming processes with Azure

"Our tight interoperation helps our customers connect real-time data with Kafka pipelines faster to power analytics and applications built with Azure services."

—Paul Mac Farland, SVP of Partner & Innovation Ecosystem, Confluent

Finding a path forward with a cloud-native Kafka solution

The customer turned to Confluent in 2021 to develop a cloud-native Kafka solution to address their IT and business needs. Over nine months, Confluent and the customer assessed migration needs, launched exploratory use case projects, and determined a path forward.

Together, Confluent and the customer decided that the online order management system, which was at the heart of their supply chain, needed to be migrated from its on-premises orchestrator to the cloud. Doing so would transform their batch infosystem from a silo into a data-in-motion stream that could feed and inform all parts of the business in real time.

Confluent worked with the global manufacturer to bring a tailored solution to Azure based on the customer’s preferences. An IT Integration Architect for the customer explained, "Azure is our top preferred cloud partner, and we wanted to select a cloud Kafka infrastructure provider that would fit our own choices. The fact that Confluent allowed us to adhere to our own multicloud decisions was really important for us."

As a result of this migration, several key departments now use Confluent to free up data across the business, including supply chain, customer service, manufacturing, and research and development.

"Azure is our top preferred cloud partner, and we wanted to select a cloud Kafka infrastructure provider that would fit our own choices. The fact that Confluent allowed us to adhere to our own multicloud decisions was really important for us."

—IT Integration Architect, the customer

Real-time data translates to resilient, cost-effective decisions

Migrating to the cloud has meant time and cost savings for the customer. They anticipate saving 35% of their on-premises operations cost by moving to the cloud. Their resilient, highly available architecture has also reduced the total cost of ownership while delivering 99.99% uptime.

"Confluent plays an integral role in accelerating our journey to becoming a data-first and digital business," said the Group Chief Digital & Information Officer for the customer. "Today's customers demand rich, personalized experiences, and business operations must be optimized to stay ahead of the competition. We use Confluent Cloud as an essential piece of our data infrastructure to unlock data and stream it in real time, with use cases like customer 360, e-commerce, microservices, and more."

Confluent's Kafka solution is not just reimagined for the cloud, it also removes operational burden so the customer and other partner organizations can focus on delivering real-time solutions for their diverse array of customers.

"Our solution helps organizations achieve greater data accessibility, fostering continuous ingestion, processing, governance, and sharing of data as a readily available and trustworthy product," Mac Farland said.

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