The Rise of Streaming Data Architectures: What You Need to Know

Key takeaways:

1. Real-time data is critical for exceptional customer experiences. Customers expect immediate responses and personalized interactions, and streaming data architectures help you meet these expectations.

2. Integrated and scalable architectures drive business agility. By consolidating the data of disparate systems when leveraging streaming data architecture, you improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and adapt to new technologies.

3. Real-time data unlocks actionable insights and competitive advantage. Organizations leveraging real-time data can make faster, data-driven decisions, optimize processes, and accelerate time-to-market.

Your ability to deliver seamless, personalized, and timely experiences is key to success in our modern customer-centric landscape. In fact, McKenzie reports that 71% of customers expect this kind of personalization, and 76% feel frustrated when they don’t receive it.

As consumer expectations evolve, you must not only adapt but innovate to remain competitive.

Streaming data architectures have emerged to meet these demands, offering real-time insights and personalized interactions that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The Changing Dynamics of Customer Expectations

Research from PwC highlights that nearly 80% of American consumers prioritize speed, convenience, knowledgeable support, and friendly service in their interactions with businesses.

But, these expectations bring a caveat: customer patience is finite. A single negative experience can cause 17% of customers to disengage, and this number spikes to 59% after multiple poor encounters.

With the costs of customer acquisition far exceeding those of retention, it’s essential to minimize churn and foster positive relationships.

How do you meet these high expectations? With seamless access to all relevant customer data. This will be your foundation to success – but, this is often easier said than done.

Challenges in Data Management

Which systems are you using to manage your data today?

If you’re like many modern organizations, you may be managing data across an increasingly complex landscape of on-premises platforms, cloud services, and legacy systems – and facing challenges in doing so.

According to the 2023 Gartner Cloud End-User Behavior Survey, 81% of respondents use multiple cloud providers. And a survey by Microsoft revealed that 86% of organizations plan to increase spending on hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure.

While these systems provide flexibility and scalability, they also pose significant challenges for integrating, normalizing, and analyzing data. Ultimately, traditional pipelines can’t scale to address your customer needs, which results in challenges like:

• slow, batch ETL processes
• resource-intensive data processing
• separate business and IT metadata

To tackle inefficiencies, delays, and barriers to innovation – and ultimately deliver superior customer experiences, you need to navigate these complexities and ensure your data architectures enable real-time, actionable insights.

That’s where the concept of data streaming pipelines comes into play.

Streaming Data Architectures: Benefits and Capabilities

Streaming data architectures unify your disparate systems, enabling the real-time flow of information across your organization. These architectures prioritize:

1. Real-time data availability: Ensuring that data is accessible and actionable the moment it is generated.
2. Scalability: Supporting both incremental growth and sudden spikes in data volume.
3. Flexibility: Adapting to evolving technologies and business needs without requiring constant reengineering.
4. Metadata-driven governance: Leveraging metadata to understand, troubleshoot, and optimize data processes.

Together, these elements empower you to build resilient data pipelines that provide the foundation for a modern customer experience.

When you’re ready to fully embrace streaming data architectures to meet the evolving demands of your customers, there are some key capabilities that will enable you to deliver the services you need. Be sure that you select solutions with these five top capabilities:

1. Resilient and fault-tolerant replication

In a 24/7 digital world, even minor disruptions can erode trust and revenue. Streaming data pipelines ensure reliable and uninterrupted data flow, supporting real-time analytics and customer interactions.

2. Scalability and performance

Whether accommodating gradual growth or handling seasonal spikes, scalable architectures ensure consistent performance – even, for example, amid end-of-quarter sales surges or promotional campaigns. Your business gains the ability to manage all of it effortlessly, without compromising user experience.

4. Design once, deploy anywhere

Agile data pipelines allow you to quickly deploy new applications, services, or customer touchpoints across environments.

Perhaps you have a use case in one environment for just a few months, and then need to apply it to a different system – being able to seamlessly pivot and deploy in another environment without needing to redesign the data pipeline is critical for your modernization journey. By reducing the time needed to integrate and analyze data, you can capitalize on market opportunities faster.

4. Data when and where you need it

Streaming data solutions empower you to deliver data instantly, wherever it’s needed, enabling real-time use cases like application migrations, customer service improvements, or new insights. This capability ensures confidence in services, enhances user experiences, and drives operational agility.

5. Personalized customer experiences

All of these capabilities amount to the personal customer experiences that have become so essential for business success. Real-time data availability enables you to tailor interactions based on current customer behaviors and preferences, which continuously delivers value.

Real-World Successes with Streaming Data Architectures

Businesses across industries have been successfully implementing streaming data architectures to drive tangible improvements in customer engagement and operational efficiency.

Here are two success stories that demonstrate this impact:

1. Citizens Bank: Modernizing Digital Banking

Citizens Bank aimed to become a digital banking leader by leveraging cloud technologies to enhance customer experiences. However, siloed data systems hindered their ability to gain a unified view of their customers across channels. As a result, they were missing opportunities for relevant, real-time upsells and updates and enhanced customer satisfaction.

By replicating unstructured hierarchical mainframe data to a Confluent Kafka environment on AWS, Citizens Bank integrated diverse data sources. This enabled real-time analytics, streamlined application development, and reduced mainframe workloads. The results included:

• faster time to market for customer-centric initiatives
• improved customer experience, resulting in less churn
• 80% reduction in MIPS usage, for a 6% overall reduction in mainframe operational costs

French Luxury Goods Conglomerate: Optimizing Supply Chain Insights

A global luxury goods retailer faced challenges in consolidating data from various on-premises and cloud systems. Their existing ETL processes were fragmented, limiting their ability to analyze supply chain and sales data at scale.

They set out with the goal of developing a more efficient supply chain that could swiftly respond to market trends and seasonality.

Implementing a streaming data architecture allowed them to replicate mid-range systems data to Google BigQuery in real time. This transformation provided unprecedented insights, enabling:

• supply chain efficiencies that increase revenue and reduce costs
• better data-driven decision-making through the use of improved analytics
• data democratization, so business users can measure KPI results in real time

Feeling inspired? Ready to make an impact with streaming data architectures at your organization? The time to start is now.

The Future is Real-Time

For modern businesses, every millisecond matters. That’s why streaming data architectures have become a business imperative, and not just a technological advantage.

By enabling real-time insights, personalized interactions, and operational agility, these architectures empower you to exceed customer expectations and stay ahead of the competition.

As you embark on this journey, the key to success lies in a strategic, customer-focused approach. By investing in the right technologies and partnerships, you’ll transform data into your most valuable asset, unlocking new levels of innovation and growth.

With decades of unrivaled domain expertise, comprehensive offerings – including expertly-curated and up-to-date datasets, – and proven business impact, Precisely is ready to meet you where you’re at today and build a stronger foundation for the future.

Learn more in our eBook: Streaming Legacy Data for Real-Time Insights.