"On top of the features and capabilities of the platform, partnership has played a key role in our decision to use Confluent…The Confluent team…made sure we had all the information and tools we needed to make our event-driven transition successful."
John Bibal II
Director of Data Engineering, Globe Group
The Globe Group is a leading digital solutions provider and full-service telecommunications company focused on accelerating digitization and connectivity in the Philippines. Its Director of Data Engineering, John Bibal II, and his team are responsible for building high-performance, automated, and operationalized data pipelines that fuel the company’s real-time use cases.
The Challenge: Batch limitations and governance requirements
The Globe Group faced a few noteworthy challenges prior to adopting Confluent:
Its batch capability could not support ingesting network probes. This led to data loss that impacted analysis and models.
It needed to drive targeted marketing campaigns with real-time data to improve campaign conversion rates while lowering costs.
It needed to improve its approach to data governance and enable self-service data access within the organization.
The Globe Group chose to move to an event-driven architecture fueled by Confluent Platform, which would allow it to process data in real-time and provide up-to-date, actionable insights and reports to its business users.
The Solution: Confluent for real-time insights and self-service governance
The company chose Confluent for its ability to maximize Apache Kafka® with key features such as:
Confluent Replicator, which allows users to easily and reliably replicate topics from one Kafka cluster to another
ksqlDB, the database purpose-built for stream processing applications
Confluent’s Stream Governance, for easy self-governance of streaming data pipelines, providing self-service data, and creating org-wide data standards
The Globe Group also valued Confluent’s role as the original creators of Apache Kafka, which provided assurance that it was partnering with Kafka experts to support its teams throughout their event-driven journey.
Goodbye batch, hello real-time processing!
Using Confluent, the Globe Group has moved to an event-driven architecture capable of separating events from the campaign itself. This has enabled Globe to build more microservices and replace their batch-based systems with real-time processing, and now run highly targeted marketing campaigns on top of Confluent. The company can now decouple and scale at the same time, saving on costs in the process.
”With Confluent, it was easier for the team to set up, configure, and scale to support the increasing volume and throughput of the source systems we’re generating. This allowed us to build more microservices that are processing and aggregating data to deliver fit-for-purpose topics,”
—John Bibal II, Director of Data Engineering
Governing streaming data pipelines with ease
For the Globe Group, data governance plays a crucial role in establishing a common understanding across the company regarding what data can be accessed, by whom, and how it should be processed and consumed.
“Data governance is needed from the very beginning of building our streaming data pipelines, all the way down to accessing, processing, and using the data,” explained Bibal II.
With Confluent’s Stream Governance suite, the Globe Group implemented a role-based access paradigm to establish guardrails and guidelines for secure data access. Now, the company is able to ensure that the right individuals have appropriate access privileges while maintaining necessary data security measures.
An AWS partnership paves the way to success
“On top of the features and capabilities of the platform, partnership has played a key role in our decision to use Confluent. By being a supportive partner, the Confluent team—from account manager down to solutions architect, marketing, and customer success teams—made sure we had all the information and tools we needed to make our event-driven transition successful,” said Bibal II.
The Globe Group migrated from Confluent Platform to Confluent Cloud running in AWS, a fully managed, cloud-native data streaming platform, to further reduce infrastructure spend and offload day-to-day Kafka maintenance to Confluent’s managed service.
The Results: Money saved and more time for innovation
“The cost savings we expect to achieve by moving to Confluent Cloud will come from three different areas. First, is the infrastructure cost, which basically becomes part of our Confluent subscription. We won’t need to think about how to scale as we collect more data and process more microservices. Second, there will be a reduction in the manpower cost to support our streaming infrastructure, since the bulk of these tasks will be outsourced to Confluent. And third, we expect to avert potential revenue loss by reducing platform outages and disruptions,” said Bibal II.
Additionally, the Globe Group anticipates business benefits as a result of its team’s ability to redirect focus to mission-critical projects and innovation. “By setting aside the need to oversee platform operations, our data engineering team can spend more time on things that matter, such as building data products that can support our goal for personalization at scale,” said Bibal II.
What’s Next: Data mesh is on the horizon
Looking toward the future, the Globe Group is committed to embracing the concept of data mesh and recognizes its potential to revolutionize their data management practices.
“Data mesh, or data as a product, resonates with me as a way to decentralize data ownership and untangle interdependencies— making data more accessible and understandable for end users,” said Biball II.
By implementing a data mesh architecture, the Globe Group aims to democratize their data and scale data streaming efforts to meet growing demand for real-time use cases. They envision Confluent playing a pivotal role in this initiative, acting as the central nervous system and point-to-point platform hosting various data domains.
“The number one thing that Confluent has done for our business is partner with us to bring our real-time capability to where it is now,” Bibal II concluded.
