Case Study

SAS.COM

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

SAS has been around for over four decades and has established a strong pedigree inmarketing analytics, assisting more than 80,000 businesses in 150 countries in creating better
downstream experiences for their own customers.
The vision of SAS is to transform a world of data into a world of intelligence by enabling
decisions to be made at just the right moment. The key phrase here is at just the right moment—Headquarters
Cary, North Carolina, USA

which is why SAS depends on a reliable, scalable data streaming foundation.

IndustryAnalytics Software & Solutions

omnichannel marketing based on customer intelligence and ultimately makes large marketing

Challenge
Scalability issues with self-supporting
open source Kafka in-house weremaking it difficult to adjust to changing
demand, and operational overhead andcomplexity were driving significant costs.
Also, migrating the data to Kubernetes
was a major hurdle.
Solution
The upgrade from Kafka to Confluent
for Kubernetes solved scalability andimproved performance while lowering
the total cost of ownership (TCO). And
Cluster Linking made the migration toConfluent for Kubernetes painless tounlock further agility.
Results
Confluent created radical improvement
for SAS in three tangible areas:• Ability to elastically scale on demandwith improved performance

For example, with their popular SAS® Customer Intelligence 360 solution, SAS powers
campaigns more targeted, personal, and relevant at the right time. To optimally serve
customers across industries from healthcare to smart cars to financial services, SAS must
handle data in a way that’s reliable and scalable—in real time.
Confluent acts as the central hub to ingest all customer data events for SAS Customer
Intelligence 360 solution, powering a suite of state-of-the-art marketing software solutions.
Here’s the story of how the company’s IT team unlocked the full value from Apache Kafka®
with Confluent.

Reliable scalability without performance degradation andskyrocketing costs
Some very big companies depend upon SAS to manage huge marketing campaigns that create
a surge of data events. Being hyper-responsive to these customers means being able to scalecampaigns on demand, despite a sometimes unpredictable ebb and flow of data traffic. As
Justin Dempsey, senior manager, SAS Cloud, puts it, “Accommodating the sheer volume waschallenging and negatively impacted the turnaround time on processing incoming events.”
Although the IT organization at SAS was using Kafka, they were mitigating operating systems
and software solutions that had reached an end-of-life state. Inability to scale—and its close
cousin, degraded performance—were becoming problematic with managing open source Kafka
on their own, and that was jeopardizing customer trust. Sherril Barnhill, manager, core services
at SAS Institute, underlines the issue bluntly: “Historically, we were running on open source andwere processing hundreds of thousands of events per second in each Kafka cluster with millionsof events processed per second globally. Addressing performance anomalies and adding scale on• Reduced TCO while ensuring reliable
uptime and compliancedemand for seasonal variation were challenges that we encountered.”• Easy migration to Confluent for
Kubernetes with Cluster Linking“With the containerized approach using Confluent, we now had ongoing vendor
support and were able to meet on-demand scale with no disruption to ourcustomers. The tools and dashboards provided by Confluent also helped us todiscern performance anomalies in real time.”© 2022 Confluent, Inc. | Confluent.io— justin dempsey, senior manager, sas cloud1

Case Study | SAS

Kafka was a good initial fit for enabling a real-time data platform,

deploying mission-critical apps to production, provided further

but open source Kafka on its own wasn’t scalable and reliable

differentiation. “There were some specific factors that Confluent

enough for SAS to use as part of a modern marketing automation

offered that made [competitors] look less appealing,” Dempsey says,

solution. In addition, it lacked visibility and ease of use, and failed to“specifically, the Role-based Access Control using group-based ACLs

provide a means to seamlessly migrate workloads across clusters

provided as part of Confluent’s offering and the maturity of theand environments. SAS had run into limitations because of the sheer

Kubernetes operator, as well as the Cluster Linking component.”

volume of data being ingested. The cost of ownership of Kafka wasballooning, and SAS needed a sleeker solution.

Going beyond the limitations of Kafka“Confluent is how we ingest all of our data events,” says Barnhill.
“They go through Kafka and are transformed from one microservice
to another as they become a part of our ecosystem.” Confluent
enables SAS to go beyond what they could achieve with open source

Confluent beckoned because of its ability to consistently andKafka alone to deliver more targeted, personalized, and immediate

quickly scale both compute and storage on demand, while getting

marketing as part of their solution than ever before. It also ultimately

visibility into performance metrics benchmarks. The completenesssaved the company significant time and money. Infrastructure costof Confluent’s data streaming platform, including enterprise-grade

savings alone totaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

features many organizations consider to be prerequisites when

The Results
The downstream effect of data in motion

Significant TCO reduction

The ability to scale on demand, with optimal performance“In terms of hard costs, Confluent reduced our bottom linefrom the infrastructure cost perspective, reducing licensing
and physical hardware. We reduced our projected yearlycost by 69%. And the months of planning we would haveto put into meetings and seasonal projections are gone, soour management oversight is reduced from a soft-cost
perspective.”“The value-add was to get to a point where we would be
able to consistently and quickly add scale on demand forboth compute and storage, and also provide visibility into
performance metrics benchmarks.”— justin dempsey, senior manager, sas cloudCapturing and acting on customer interactions is the power of real-— justin dempsey, senior manager, sas cloudtime data streaming for SAS customers. It’s what allows them topush a digital coupon to a customer in the moment that customer isImproving the way data is processed and used company-wide has acontemplating a purchase. If it’s not happening at the right moment,

profound impact on resource use. There are both direct and indirect

if performance degrades, if there’s a huge resource constraint

ways that Confluent reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO).

happening—all of these things ultimately affect the downstream
experience. In addition, with specific compliance and SLA agreementswith customers in place, SAS needs to ensure that campaigns will

Open source Kafka is free to use, but it often costs more to selfsupport in-house in the long run. In terms of direct costs, it often
requires significant resource investments, including additionalreliably scale, in real time, without any sacrifice in performance.

engineering staff to run and operate the complex manual processes.

In the past, preventing these issues required resource-heavy

And Kafka often requires the purchase of additional infrastructure

predictive analysis that took months and months, increasing

to deploy and operate at scale for critical business use cases. With

the company’s costs and talent resources. The IT team turned

Confluent, because the IT team can more efficiently provision

to Confluent because it allows them to handle an enormous

resources, SAS can instead spend more on innovation and strategic

and fluctuating load of streaming, real-time data without any

initiatives rather than managing the underlying infrastructure.

performance degradation, and automatically scale up or down, onConfluent also reduces costs associated with paying people todemand, without having to do a lot of complex calculations. With

oversee patch schedules and maintenance windows.

Confluent as the central nervous system of a streaming data

Indirect costs can be just as deadly to the bottom line: downtime,

ecosystem, SAS can guarantee real-time analytics and enable usersof the platform to react to customers immediately and continuously—
without risk of failure. Even as customer campaigns fluctuate wildly,
scalability is consistent, and uptime and compliance are assured.

Kafka outages, and the ensuing loss of customer trust. Downtime
often means lost revenue, reduction in customer confidence, diversionof valuable resources, data loss, and more. Confluent’s ability toreduce the risk of downtime dramatically alleviates these indirect
cost hits as well.

© 2022 Confluent, Inc. | Confluent.io2

Case Study | SAS

A much easier migration thanks to Cluster Linking“Cluster Linking played a critical role in making the shift
to Confluent for Kubernetes and our more cloud-nativesolutions a success, with no downtime and minimaldependencies.”— justin dempsey, senior manager, sas cloud

because it streamlined the anticipated migration from the oldKafka infrastructure to the new. During the cross-divisional effort
between SAS Cloud, R&D, and other SAS teams, they developed an
approach using Cluster Linking to enable them to have effectively
zero downtime. Dempsey’s team was able to leverage Cluster Linking
to seamlessly migrate existing clusters, enabling the team to build a
private cloud Kafka service on their Kubernetes distribution of choicein order to properly power their customer 360 use cases.

To enable real-time data for their Customer Intelligence 360 suite,

By deploying on Confluent for Kubernetes, SAS was able to realize

SAS wanted to deploy Kafka on their private cloud environment

some of the benefits of cloud—scalability, ease of operations,based on AWS EKS. But deploying Kafka on Kubernetes is a complex,

and global resilience—while still on their private infrastructure.

challenging operation. Dempsey says, “Our transformation to aThis enabled a smooth migration of Kafka clusters with minimal

cloud-native, agile SaaS solution required a large-scale migrationdowntime and business disruption.

from open source Apache Kafka, which was complex and challenging
to self-support.”
Cluster Linking, a solution to easily link Confluent clusters
together to form a highly available, consistent, and real-time
bridge across environments, was a critical aspect of the project

What’s Next for SAS?
With Confluent as the backbone of their next-gen Customer

Confluent will also help support and accelerate their journey to cloud,Intelligence 360 platform, SAS has been able to more effectively

with the ability to expand from AWS into Azure. With Confluent’s

provide visibility for its customers to find insight into their customer

Oracle CDC connector, SAS will be able to reliably and cost-

data—which products they’re searching for, whether they’re opening

effectively offload event data from Oracle Database to Confluent.

emails, when they click on links, when they use a catalog code or

And later this year, Dempsey’s team plans to explore Tiered Storage

purchase from a physical store—the moment they happen.
Also, one of the biggest wins has been the ability to radicallyto further optimize costs, with additional focuses on security,auditing, and governance controls coming too.

improve customer experience with an ad hoc testing environmentthat enables rapid innovation. SAS will continue to create radicallyintuitive marketing experiences for downstream customers and end
consumers with R&D efforts supported by Confluent, which is key toenabling the test environments and space in which they can continue
to experiment and innovate.

Learn More About SAS
https://sas.com

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© 2022 Confluent, Inc. | Confluent.io3