BMW Group streams data globally with Confluent

BMW Group, a world-leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles, operates 31 plants in 15 countries with a global sales network spanning 140 countries. To maintain its competitive edge and drive innovation, BMW Group recognized the need to harness the abundance of real-time data generated across its operations, from manufacturing processes to R&D activities. The challenge was to make this data readily available to teams across the global business, enabling them to develop and deploy innovative solutions. BMW Group turned to Confluent to build a robust, scalable, and reliable data streaming platform that could handle the demands of its vast, global operation.

Initially, BMW Group deployed open-source Apache Kafka to replace its old batch model for data processing. However, the self-managing nature of Kafka proved to be an operational burden, requiring costly and specialized maintenance. BMW Group needed a way to seamlessly integrate all its data—generated by machines, sensors, and other sources—and make it accessible in real-time as a self-service product across the business. By partnering with Confluent and Microsoft Azure, BMW Group harnessed their data streaming capabilities and offers these to hundreds of different teams and applications across the organization. Confluent provides an easily accessible platform that enables the effortless exchange of data between all applications and systems.

The migration from self-managed Kafka to Confluent Cloud allowed BMW Group to shed the operational burden and cost associated with running Kafka. This move enabled the organization to mitigate the risk of only having a small group of internal Kafka specialists within the IT infrastructure team, delivering a fully managed solution where 7x24x365 Kafka expert support is included, even in business-critical use cases. BMW Group now has dozens of clusters, hundreds of connected applications, and over one billion events produced per day—all with Confluent functioning as the central nervous system for this continuous river of critical business data. Highly scalable teams at BMW Group are onboarding multiple new applications and use cases every week.

BMW Group's strategic partnership with Confluent has yielded significant benefits, transforming its data landscape and enabling a new era of innovation. By leveraging Confluent Cloud, BMW Group has achieved:

• Accelerated Innovation: Enabled continuous IoT innovation by processing immense data from tens of thousands of sensors.

• Reduced Operational Burden: Eliminated manual provisioning and data infrastructure management through elastic scaling.

• Ubiquitous Real-Time Data Access: Provided easy, continuous access to real-time data, empowering DevOps teams and eliminating the need for manual interface setups.

• Improved Business Insights: Gained better insight into data across business units, driving informed decision-making and faster business acceleration.

• Seamless Business Integration: Connected existing apps and data systems, including SAP, on-premises and in the cloud, creating a unified data architecture.