A US-based global leader for storage and information management services wanted to kickstart a large-scale digital transformation initiative across its Line of Business (LoB) service oering. The goal was to process and respond to real-time events faster by moving away from its legacy IT systems to meet changing, complex logistics needs.

Integrating with our highly scalable messaging and streaming platform, the company could boost its customer experience and track user interaction, real-time.

Results

• Increased operational visibility & eciency
• Enabled real-time decision making
• Reduced operational complexities
• Boosted product innovation cycles to offer newer solutions
• Built business agility with an event-driven architecture
• Created a unified platform or a single source of truth for data integration and transformation
• Platform worked with over 100 enterprise data sources, streaming over 2 million events an hour
• Developed a highly scalable streaming platform to process stream of events as they occur

Business Challenge

For the company that stores and protects billions of valued assets, including critical business information, sensitive data, cultural and historical artifacts, kick starting a digital transformation was crucial to stay relevant in a rapidly digitizing world.

Since it provided solutions like information management, secure storage, data centers, and cloud services, their existing legacy systems could not match the needs of the new world. They could not handle the significantly complex logistical needs with IT systems, designed and built for traditional sales and delivery.

The other aspect of this challenge was the data messaging, storage, and streaming needs. With the data they collated on multiple platforms, it became difult for them to share and collaborate across various enterprise platforms. They also had multiple teams to handle tiered level of data, which sometimes led to operational ineciencies.

Transformation Story

The business needed a transformative approach to track user interaction data in real-time to improve customer experience. They had to make integrations across LoBs seamless, while handling increasing data volumes, variety, and new digital services. They needed solutions with unique interfaces that could process and respond to real-time events as they happened.

The company partnered with us to solve this issue and build a messaging and streaming platform as a part of their digital transformation initiative. We, at Cambridge Technology, evaluated various technical real-time messaging platforms and zeroed-in on Apache Kafka® from Confluent Enterprise.

The platform allowed integration between dierent sources and synced systems like Salesforce, Oracle Enterprise Solutions, Service Now, and custom applications with associated databases (MS SQL Server and Oracle Database). They could use this unified messaging platform with multiple legacy messaging solutions (like Sonic ESB, RabbitMQ, Active MQ), connecting dierent sources and target systems. This also allowed them to be closely-aligned with their goal of personalizing the user experience of its products.

“While we switched to a real-time event driven platform, it was also critical for us to modernize the legacy messaging platforms at the same time. That’s exactly what the solution helped us with, and that too, seamlessly.”
– Sr. Architect, Enterprise Solutions, for the company.

Additionally, to facilitate and accelerate future transformations, our architecture experts built a modern, distributed, and high-capacity integration platform by leveraging the power of the cloud and Apache Kafka. Since Apache Kafka allows asynchronous communication between applications and microservices with real-time, event-based streaming and persistent storage of events, this became the common ground for a broad range of development projects and rapid innovation.

Results Story

Simplified Integrations

One of the most significant benefits that the enterprise got from the solution was a unified platform for its data integration needs. Instead of managing several solutions for messaging, ETL, and data integrations, the client could now manage data messaging, storage, and streaming needs, all under a single roof.

Since the platform’s design is highly scalable and delivers high throughput and performance, they could also remove a lot of unnecessary overheads. Most importantly, it was secure and reliable, a critical design element for the company that is a custodian of customers’ digital and physical assets.

With this platform, the company monitored all event-driven data pipelines and metrics, while getting alerts and notifications, triggered on reaching the configured threshold parameters.

Operational Simplicity

The streaming platform, powered by Apache Kafka, emerged as a central nervous system for the enterprise. There was now a strong technology backbone that enabled the design and development for newer customer-facing applications along with warehouse distribution center’s operational applications. The event-driven architecture further helped to attain agility by allowing data integration and transformation with over 100 enterprise data sources — the platform was now capable of streaming over 2 million events an hour and growing!

It condensed several operational complexities like managing diferent teams and technology stacks for each custom integration. It also cut costs, enabled managing higher number of processes, and significantly reduced reporting cycles. The company could now see the data in near real-time with ready analytics to help them make faster decisions, instead of waiting for almost two days in the past.

The Future Is Now

With the Apache Kafka-based real-time enterprise platform, the company strengthened its digital transformation journey and kept pace with rapidly-changing demands. It enabled them to develop new business models and solutions faster with data being managed seamlessly, which helped them boost their customer experience too.

With real-time customer analytics, they could also over newer products on-demand, boosting product innovation cycles. It enabled the company to identify business outcomes and define metrics to measure success

The transformation helped the company move towards an event-driven paradigm to enhance its business agility, and put it well on track to become future-ready