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As data volumes continue to increase, organizations no longer have the freedom to move at their own pace. They need to capture data streams as soon as they are generated to be more responsive and act in real time. But, the question is, how effective can data transmission really be from a commercial point of view?
According to a new survey Of 2,250 global IT and engineering leaders, companies in the early stages of adopting streaming data are already seeing or expecting 2X to 5X returns on their investments. This reaps the benefits of increased IT and business efficiencies, improved customer experience, faster operational decision-making, and increased product or service profitability.
The survey, commissioned by the data transmission company Confluent and led by free form dynamics and Radma Research between February and March 2023, not only highlights what companies can achieve in today’s first digital age with data transmission, but also brings to light certain obstacles that may affect the adoption and execution of such projects. This is important as data transmission becomes more widespread in all sectors.
Correlation between maturity of data transmission and positive results
Confluent categorized respondents into five groups based on the maturity of their data streaming stack. The so-called Tier 1 respondents (7%) had data streaming experiments in pre-production, Tier 2 (20%) had projects implemented for non-critical applications, Tier 3 (63%) had implementations for some critical systems, while that levels 4 and 5 (9%) had several deployments in production for critical systems with flows managed as a product.
While most of the respondents were found to be in the first three stages, the survey results showed that even as beginners, they get a high ROI from data transmission. Specifically, 64% of organizations at Level 2 and 78% at Level 3 said they are achieving or anticipating a 2X to 5X return.
What’s even more interesting is the fact that a small percentage of respondents from both groups (3% from Tier 2 and 8% from Tier 3) also reported 10x or more ROI. This is important as the general trend suggests that ROI grows as adoption and breadth of activity become more widespread and integrated. Even in the survey, 63% of those that qualified as Tier 4 organizations said they are achieving or anticipating 5X to 10X ROI.
Driving efficiencies, support systems
Along with high returns, the survey also found that streaming data is driving efficiencies in key business functions. Up to 76% of IT leaders said their organizations are already seeing significant or emerging benefits when it comes to increased IT and business efficiencies; 74% said they are seeing an improved customer experience; and 73% mentioned faster decision making and increased product or service profitability.
Notably, a large number of respondents (72%) also said they are using streaming data to power business-critical applications. Specific use cases detailed in the report include improving cybersecurity, monitoring IT infrastructure, improving customer experience, automating internal processes, and helping with business decisions.
Still, obstacles remain
As data transmission becomes more pervasive, computers are also facing certain adoption challenges, just like any other growing technology.
In the survey, 74% of IT leaders said fragmented projects, uncoordinated teams and budgets can be a major challenge or obstacle, while 72% cited a lack of relevant skills, inconsistent use of methods and integration standards and legacy systems as the problem area. .
To address these gaps, Andrew Sellers, a people technologist in Confluent’s CTO office, suggested establishing a common operating model with data governance as a priority.
“This will allow people to produce data and support it with an infrastructure that ensures the data is easy to discover and highly reliable for others to consume,” he said. “As a result, developers can focus exclusively on building differentiated applications instead of struggling with data infrastructure or relying on a core data engineering team for bespoke data transformations. Such an organization creates incredible business value in an efficient way.”
Other well-known players in the streaming data and analytics market include AWS Kinesis, Cloudera DataFlow, Hitachi Vantara Lumada Edge Intelligence, IBM Streaming Analytics, Informatica Ultra Messaging, Kinetica Active Analytics, Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics, and Oracle Event Processing.
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