Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform Can Save Over $2.5M vs. Self-Managing Apache Kafka

If you’re reading this, it’s likely because you are leveraging (or considering) Apache Kafka^® in your organization—especially as it has become the de facto standard for data streaming. Adopted by over 70% of the Fortune 500, Kafka has been tapped to anchor modern data architectures and power rich, digital customer experiences and software-driven business operations in real time.

However, fully realizing value on your own with open source Kafka is a multi-year journey requiring significant investment. Building and maintaining a reliable, secure, and scalable Kafka deployment in-house comes with significant costs and burdens—ones that only grow over time. Capacity needs to be planned, clusters sized and rebalanced, failover and scaling processes designed—not to mention the additional tooling required as Kafka usage scales including connectors, high availability, enterprise-grade security, data governance, and more.

Most modern organizations do not want to be in the business of managing data infrastructure, but many struggle to quantify the challenges and risks they face in order to make the case to offload this burden. We commissioned Forrester, a trusted name in market research, to deliver a Total Economic Impact study that quantifies the cost savings and benefits your business can achieve when you offload the burden of self-managing Kafka to Confluent’s cloud-native, complete, and fully managed data streaming service.

“The top consideration for moving to Confluent Cloud was
scalability. And the second was to relieve our engineers from operation and maintenance duties.”
— Manager of data engineering, Internet TV services

Forrester identified TCO savings of nearly $2.58 million for businesses that used Confluent instead of self-supporting open source Kafka in-house. Their research included interviewing multiple customers with experience using Confluent, understanding their costs and challenges with managing open source Kafka on their own, and then aggregating their experiences and benefits to determine the true value that Confluent can help organizations realize. ​​

Source: The Total Economic Impact™ of Confluent Cloud, a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ survey commissioned by Confluent.

All told, Forrester determined that using Confluent Cloud delivered an overall 257% return on investment (ROI) with a payback period of less than six months.

Forrester identified key savings across the following categories:

• Development and operations cost savings of over $1.4 million. Forrester found that Confluent customers significantly reduced the number of FTE hours spent by platform & development teams on building and operating open source Kafka environments, thanks to Confluent Cloud’s:
  • Fully managed service that eliminates operational overhead while ensuring 99.99% availability to avoid business disruption
  • Enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities
  • Rich, pre-built ecosystem of fully managed connectors
  • Robustness in delivering and processing streaming data across hybrid and multicloud environments

  “After switching to Confluent Cloud, the engineering workload on maintenance and operations reduced almost down to nothing, compared to our prior state. We used to have at least two dedicated engineers to monitor, maintain, and upgrade.”
  -Head of data engineering and integration, e-commerce firm

• Scalability and infrastructure cost savings of over $1.1 million. Forrester found that Confluent customers derived significant savings from Confluent Cloud’s built-in elasticity, particularly to automatically and reliably scale to support ever-growing demand as workloads increased in size and complexity.
  • Confluent Cloud abstracts away infrastructure costs and relieves customers of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on over-provisioned and sub-optimal infrastructure.
  • Additionally, customers were able to maintain high availability even as workloads grew, because Confluent offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee without bearing heavy failover and redundancy requirements and low-level infrastructure management in-house.

Source: The Total Economic Impact™ of Confluent Cloud, a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ survey commissioned by Confluent.

In summary…

Creating a reliable, secure, and scalable Kafka platform in-house is costly and burdensome—especially as your streaming needs grow. Not to mention the risk you bear of business-disrupting downtime with increasingly mission-critical streaming applications and pipelines that power digital customer experiences and software-driven business operations across your organization.

Fortunately, as Forrester has determined, Confluent’s cloud-native, complete, and fully managed service—with built-in connectors, security and data governance, stream processing, and global availability for all of your data streaming needs—can bring your business savings and benefits of up to $2.58 million, while freeing your team to focus on efforts that differentiate your business rather than managing the underlying data infrastructure.

And you have the peace of mind of knowing all of this is underpinned by Confluent’s industry leading support and services from the original creators of Kafka with over 1 million hours of Kafka experience, which includes operating over 15,000 clusters in Confluent Cloud.

If you’re ready to learn how you can eliminate the burdens and risks of self-supporting Kafka and understand the full benefits your organization can achieve, read the Forrester study and reach out to us to get started today.

Why tackle this all on your own? Your teams have better things to do.

Read the Study