Michelin has partnered with data streaming pioneer Confluent to power its global inventory management system. By using Confluent Cloud, Michelin was able to quickly scale its real-time inventory system to meet global demand and reduce operational costs by 35%. This partnership marks a significant step for Michelin’s transformation from a tire manufacturer to a leader in data-driven services and customer experiences. According to Yves Caseau, Michelin’s Group Chief Digital and Information Officer, the cloud-native data streaming platform helped Michelin to unlock data and stream it in real-time, supporting use cases like customer 360, e-commerce, microservices, and more.
Initially, Michelin turned to Apache Kafka, an open-source data streaming platform, to power its real-time data requirements. However, as Michelin expanded Kafka’s footprint across the business, the platform became increasingly difficult to scale and manage. A full-time team was needed to maintain the complex, distributed infrastructure, leading to increased costs and risks. Also, the open-source technology did not provide a clear path to the cloud, which held Michelin back from transitioning off of monolithic, on-premises systems.
By partnering with Confluent, Michelin was able to address the challenges of Kafka operations and accelerate its journey to the cloud. With Confluent’s fully managed Kafka service, Michelin built a centralized data streaming hub on Microsoft Azure, reducing costs, achieving faster time to market, and improving uptime. Confluent’s cloud-native platform greatly reduces the operational issues of self-managed Kafka, and with a 99.99% SLA, the Michelin team can offload operations and have peace of mind that mission-critical data streaming workloads in the cloud are resilient and highly available. Michelin expects widespread adoption of data in motion across a number of new use cases, as the business continues to experience a high ROI on Confluent projects.