MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 5, 2024 — Confluent Inc. Announced 2024 Data Streaming Report: Breaking down barriers to business agility and innovationThe report details how organizations can use data streaming to innovate, accelerate AI adoption, increase business agility, enhance customer experiences, and overcome data accessibility and management challenges. Based on a survey of 4,110 IT leaders across 12 countries, the report shows the pivotal role data streaming plays in helping enterprises realize the full potential of their data.
Responsiveness is key to success in today's dynamic business environment. Slow, inconsistent, stale, or unmanaged data is an impediment to success because it is unreliable and can lead to incorrect decision-making. It is essential to leverage continuously streaming data to discover customer learnings, improve business operations, and gain insights that enable organizations to act efficiently and quickly. In fact, 86% of respondents cited data streaming as a strategic or critical priority for their IT investments this year.
“Many organizations have data siloed across different systems and applications, preventing them from finding and leveraging one of their most important business assets: their data,” said Shaun Clowes, chief product officer at Confluent. “Data streaming acts as the central nervous system for an enterprise by connecting systems and applications to provide easy access to real-time data that can be used to inform decisions, improve business processes and customer experiences.”
Key takeaways from the report include:
Data Streaming Platform Accelerates AI Adoption
GenAI is a top priority for many enterprises, but for AI models to produce accurate and relevant results, data must be trustworthy, in the right format, and as real-time as possible. Search Augmentation Generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular pattern for building GenAI-enabled applications by connecting generic LLM models to domain-specific data and enabling fine-grained access control to minimize hallucinations. Data streaming enriches RAG-enabled workloads with trusted contextual data by leveraging continuous streams of real-time data from the systems that underpin the business. Data streaming can efficiently transform data into the right format to be used by vector databases for AI applications.
- Over the next two years, 74% of state investments in GenAI are on track to increase.
- 63% of respondents said that data streaming platforms are broadly or significantly facilitating AI advancements by building the real-time data foundation needed to power these efforts.
- 90% of respondents said their data streaming platform tracks the data ingested into models for governance purposes.
Data streaming simplifies data product development, promotes reusability and reduces costs
As organizations look to expand and simplify the access and reusability of their data, more and more are considering organizing their data into data products. Data products are live, refined, fully governed, and ready-to-use data assets that are instantly discoverable, contextualized, trusted, and reusable across many use cases. Data products enable organizations to reuse data across a variety of use cases, saving costs and time.
- 91% of IT leaders are investing in data streaming platforms to achieve their data goals, including creating data products.
- 72% say they would see significant benefits from adopting a data products approach.
- Notable benefits of data products include:
- 98% said data products are attractive or valuable in enabling them to share data more confidently across business units.
- 91% perceive more meaningful cost allocation or billing based on usage metrics.
- 90% are calling for stronger risk management.
A data streaming platform prevents data silos and solves data access challenges
Addressing data access and management challenges head on is essential for businesses to maximize their success in a data-driven world. The 2024 Data Streaming Report shows that data streaming platforms can help organizations address many of the challenges of data access, including uncovering siloed data that impedes real-time, data-driven operations.
A data streaming platform serves as the central nervous system of your enterprise, connecting applications and systems to make data available in real time, whenever and wherever it is needed, allowing your business to focus on accelerating innovation instead of navigating a maze of point-to-point connections.
- 76% of IT leaders cite five or more data-related challenges impacting their organization, including siloed data and governance issues.
- The most common problems that data streaming can solve are:
- 93% say data streaming helps eliminate data silos in most or many situations
- 88% say data streaming helps them access existing data
- 86% say data streaming helps them discover existing data
- 84% say data streaming helps solve governance-related problems
Data streaming brings big benefits to business investments
As businesses strive to do more with less, proving the ROI of technology investments becomes even more important. This report shows that data streaming is paying off across every industry, and that organizations of all sizes are realizing value, despite limited resources.
- 84% of IT leaders say that data streaming investments will yield a 2x to 10x return.
- 95% of respondents said data streaming has improved or expects to improve cybersecurity and data-driven operations.
- The use of AI/ML has improved or is expected to improve product and service innovation by 90%.
View report details
The report is based on a survey by Freeform Dynamics and Radma Research that received responses from 4,110 IT leaders familiar with data streaming from companies with more than 500 employees. Respondents were located in 12 countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US.
Respondents work across a variety of industries, including technology, financial services, government/public sector, manufacturing, healthcare, media/entertainment, non-profit, professional services, research/education, retail, transportation/logistics, travel/hospitality, and utilities/telecommunications.
Download the 2024 Data Streaming Report here.
About Confluent
Confluent is a data streaming platform pioneering an entirely new category of data infrastructure for moving data. Confluent's cloud-native products are the foundational platform for moving data, designed to be the intelligent connective tissue that enables real-time data from multiple sources to be continuously streamed throughout an organization. With Confluent, organizations can meet the new business imperative of delivering rich customer experiences on a digital front-end and moving to sophisticated, real-time, software-driven back-end operations. For more information, visit: translation:.
Source: Confluent
