Organisations across India are increasingly investing on data streaming to drive innovation, accelerate AI adoption, improve business agility, enhance customer experiences and address challenges related to data accessibility and management, as per a recent report.
The Confluent report noted that 86 per cent of IT leaders consider data streaming a strategic or crucial investment in 2024. Additionally, 91 per cent acknowledged the critical role of data streaming platforms in achieving their data-related goals.
“Organisations are simplifying data access and reusability by developing data products that can be made using a data streaming platform. Data products are live, refined, fully governed, and ready-to-use data assets that are instantly discoverable, contextualised, trustworthy, and reusable for many use cases. They allow organisations to reuse data across a variety of use cases to save costs and time, which makes building new applications much faster and easier,” Rubal Sahni, Area Vice President and Country Manager for India at Confluent told BW Businessworld.
The survey revealed that 95 per cent of Indian respondents have seen returns ranging from 2x to 10x on their investments in data streaming. This range of ROI seems to have risen from 2x to 5x that the Confluent report noted last year.
“Real time data streaming is expected to grow in India at a steady pace with the growth of digitalisation in India and more businesses introducing digital services. Data created at the edge will grow at an exponential rate. Businesses would need to process this data and use streaming services to feed to other applications and also offer enhanced consumer experience,” said Rajiv Ranjan, Associate Research Director at IDC.
Financial Services Leads Data Streaming Adoption
The financial services industry, particularly BFSI, constitutes the largest customer base for data streaming solutions in India.
“The BFSI sector’s adoption of data streaming technology is driven by its need for reliable, high-speed, and traceable data—capabilities that platforms like Kafka excel at providing. These features are essential for real-time transaction processing, risk management, and customer service improvements,” Sahni explained.
Four of India’s top private banks are already leveraging either open-source Kafka or Confluent’s solutions, stressing the critical role of data streaming in this sector. The public sector in India is also reportedly emerging as a key focus area for data streaming adoption.
