Case Study: SAS achieves elastic, real-time omnichannel marketing and 69% lower infrastructure TCO with Confluent

SAS Powers Instant, Real-Time Omnichannel Marketing at Massive Scale with Confluent’s Hybrid Capabilities

SAS, a long-established marketing analytics company, faced serious scalability, performance and operational-cost challenges running self‑supported open source Kafka in-house and needed to migrate workloads to Kubernetes. To address these issues they turned to Confluent, adopting Confluent for Kubernetes (and features like Cluster Linking, RBAC and the Confluent operator) as the streaming foundation for their Customer Intelligence 360 platform.

Confluent implemented a cloud‑native Kafka platform on Kubernetes and used Cluster Linking to migrate clusters with minimal disruption. As a result, SAS can elastically scale on demand with improved performance and visibility, achieved essentially zero‑downtime migration, and reduced TCO substantially — reporting infrastructure savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and a projected 69% reduction in yearly costs while ensuring uptime and compliance.

SAS

Justin Dempsey

Senior Manager