Five Stages to Streaming Platform Adoption

Recommendations for Business Executives

At Confluent, we’ve worked with a number of organizations that have architected themselves around event streaming platforms, to the extent the platform has become fundamental to how the business operates.

These organizations range from digital natives to more traditional companies across Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Telecom, Healthcare and Government.

In fact, we’ve seen adoption in any industry in which data is critical, which of course is every industry.

Indeed, this year’s Apache Kafka® report found that 94% of organizations plan to deploy new applications or systems using Kafka as their event streaming platform.

And two-thirds [67%] plan to deploy between 1 and 10 new applications or systems.

Use cases for event streaming platforms vary from improving the customer experience, to facilitating new business models, to driving increased efficiency and/or mitigating risk.

Regardless of the use case, through working with many of these organizations, we have synthesized some common themes of streaming maturity and have identified five stages of adoption, as shown in Figure 1.