Case Study: University of California, San Diego achieves faster time-to-value for core business processes with Confluent

UC San Diego Reduces Time-to-Value for Core Business Processes with Integration Layer Built on Data In Motion With Confluent

UC San Diego faced a sudden need to move operations and learning online during the pandemic, but its legacy IT stack lacked the agility and real-time data capabilities to respond quickly. As part of its Enterprise Systems Renewal (ESR) initiative, UC San Diego chose Confluent (with Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform components such as ksqlDB and Confluent Control Center) as the core of a new iPaaS event‑driven architecture to eliminate friction in core business processes and accelerate time‑to‑value.

Using Confluent as the middleware backbone, the university built activity hubs and streaming pipelines with Confluent-supported connectors, delivering a mission-critical testing app in two weeks and a production-ready solution within a month (about 12× faster than before). Within nine months they ramped to ~100 middleware workloads and 150+ streaming workflows, now processing roughly 90 million records per day, cut development time and costs by 80%, reduced storage spend via in-stream filtering with ksqlDB, and enabled cost-effective reuse by other campuses (operational cost ~$20K/month versus an estimated $100K/month to rebuild). Confluent’s platform and monitoring tools helped drive these measurable improvements in time‑to‑value and scalability.

University of California, San Diego

Scott Lee

Enterprise Architect