Case Study: BMW Group achieves scalable, zero-downtime real-time IoT data streaming with Confluent

Revving Up IoT Use Cases with Real-Time Hybrid Cloud Data Architecture

BMW Group needed to make real‑time data from its 31 production plants and global sales network available to teams across the business, but its self‑managed Apache Kafka deployment lacked the scalability, reliability, and simplicity required for a 24/7 global operation. To remove the operational burden and enable ubiquitous access to IoT and transactional streams, BMW Group partnered with Confluent and adopted Confluent Cloud as the enterprise‑grade, fully managed Kafka service.

Confluent implemented a central, cloud‑based data streaming platform that ingests shop‑floor IoT data, provides streaming ETL and Infinite Storage, and integrates with SAP, OPC UA, Azure, and other systems. The move to Confluent Cloud eliminated manual provisioning, delivered elastic scaling and 7x24x365 support, and produced measurable impact: dozens of clusters, hundreds of connected applications, and over one billion events per day with zero‑downtime streaming, faster project timelines, and weekly onboarding of new use cases with Confluent as BMW Group’s real‑time data backbone.

BMW Group