Michelin selects Confluent to drive their transformation right into a “data-first” firm.

By leverage Confluent cloudMichelin was capable of quickly scale its real-time stock system to satisfy world demand whereas decreasing operational prices by 35%.

This can be a main step in Michelin’s evolution from a producer that makes and sells tires to a frontrunner in data-driven providers and buyer experiences.

“Confluent performs a important function in accelerating our journey to turning into a digital and data-driven enterprise,” mentioned Yves Caseau, Group Chief Digital and Data Officer, Michelin. “As we speak’s prospects demand wealthy, personalised experiences, and enterprise operations should be optimized to remain forward of the competitors. We use Confluent Cloud as a important piece of our knowledge infrastructure to unlock knowledge and stream it in real-time with use instances like 360 ​​buyer, e-commerce, microservices and extra.”

Michelin challenges with self-managed Apache Kafka 

As one of many largest tire producers on the planet, Michelin groups want fixed entry to up-to-date data. For instance, correct updates on the standing of uncooked and semi-finished supplies are wanted to make sure success in world provide chains and logistics operations.

And, Michelin mobility options, comparable to predictive data for tire alternative and route suggestions for gasoline optimization, depend upon frequent updates. To energy its enterprise with real-time knowledge, Michelin initially turned to Kafka’s open supply knowledge streaming platform.

Kafka gave Michelin a real-time view of its enterprise with the flexibility to gather, retailer and course of knowledge as steady streams. This was a big enchancment over legacy purposes that supplied each day or hourly updates utilizing batch processing.

Nonetheless, as they expanded Kafka’s footprint throughout the enterprise, Michelin groups discovered Kafka more and more troublesome to scale and handle.

It required a full-time crew to have a tendency the Kafka clusters and preserve their complicated, distributed infrastructure, which drove up each prices and dangers. Additionally, open supply know-how didn’t present a transparent path to the cloud, which prevented Michelin from the corporate’s mandate to maneuver away from monolithic on-premise methods.

Discovering cloud-native agility with Confluent

“Given in the present day’s financial pressures, many firms face the problem of decreasing prices whereas staying forward of the competitors and buyer expectations,” mentioned Erica Schultz, president of Subject Operations, Confluent. “We’re proud to assist firms like Michelin obtain success on each fronts. With a really cloud-native knowledge streaming platform that goes above and past Apache Kafka, we assist offload the price and threat of self-managing Kafka, whereas aiding real-time data-driven choice making and operations.”

With Confluent’s absolutely managed Kafka service, Michelin addressed the challenges of Kafka operations and accelerated its journey to the cloud. They constructed a centralized knowledge streaming hub with Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure that helped:

• Cut back prices – Michelin estimates a 35% financial savings with Confluent in comparison with on-premise operations, because of the cloud-native platform that tremendously reduces the operational problems with self-managed Kafka.
• Get sooner time to market – Confluent helped Michelin save roughly eight to 9 months of time to market because of Confluent’s hundreds of thousands of hours of expertise driving Kafka in cloud manufacturing for patrons.
• Enhance uptime – With Confluent’s 99.99% SLA, the Michelin crew can offload operations and have peace of thoughts that important knowledge streaming workloads within the cloud are resilient and extremely obtainable.

Michelin expects widespread adoption of knowledge in movement throughout quite a few new use instances because the enterprise continues to expertise excessive ROI on Confluent tasks.