Discover how enterprise event streaming accelerated STC Kuwait’s digital transformation

Background: Meet STC Kuwait, the country’s biggest 5G network provider and a major Middle Eastern telecommunications company

With 2.4 million customers as of 2024, STC Kuwait is one of the region’s largest telecommunications companies and a digital powerhouse focused on emerging technology, advanced analytics, and 5G networks. Intent on improving the customer experience, a huge part of STC Kuwait’s base is enterprise customers, from industry leaders to government departments. When we first heard about their RFQ for a best-in-class event streaming platform, they were preparing to transform Kuwait into a leading hub of finance and business by bringing innovation in information and communications technology (ICT) to a rapidly growing audience.

Challenge: Helping STC Kuwait achieve greater business agility and accelerate its digital transformation with Apache Kafka 

In STC’s initial RFQ, the company was seeking a Kafka-based enterprise event streaming platform to modernise its applications and accelerate its company’s digital transformation. Aside from gaining speed and agility, they also wanted to simplify how they connected, integrated, streamed, and processed data. The platform would have to be scalable to handle the new demands of a growing customer base, and agile to help them quickly react to a rapidly expanding and accelerating market. Additionally, STC wanted its team to steadily become self-sufficient in Kafka so that its internal engineers could maintain and scale the platform in the future.

Solution: In partnership with Confluent, we helped STC Kuwait implement the latest version of Confluent’s enterprise event streaming platform

With Confluent Platform 6.0 and support from our engineers, STC Kuwait deployed a scalable, secure, and resilient Kafka architecture and upskilled their technical staff. In partnership with Confluent, we helped them introduce Confluent’s latest features, including up-to-date enterprise security, ready-made connectors, and REST Proxy nodes. Confluent 6.0 also gave STC Kuwait freedom of choice between an on-premises, self-hosted solution and a fully managed cloud service, with professional-level support and training included in the Confluent Platform package.

Along the way, we created two independent environments, one for production and one for development, that could easily integrate the company’s systems, simplify their analytics, and speed up their digital transformation. We also took STC’s specific capacity requirements into account, carefully balancing their data across brokers, following best practices for Confluent Platform, ensuring high availability and resilience across their components, and recommending specific RAM and OS Disk sizings for each Kafka node type. We knew that as a telecommunications company, they needed high-performance clusters to process high volumes of messages with little to no time delay, so we built them a solution with low latency.

Results: STC Kuwait built a solid technology foundation for a Kafka central nervous system 

By the end of our partnership, STC Kuwait had integrated its Huawei Convergent Billing System and its advanced analytics engine, SAS Real-Time Decision Manager. With the Confluent Platform enterprise license, STC now had access to additional commercial features, such as a comprehensive Kafka control center and 24/7 enterprise support. They could also stream events and flexibly deploy additional analytics to uncover real-time patterns and trends in the market. Essentially, enterprise event streaming would allow STC Kuwait to translate its data into insights, helping the company continue to innovate in emerging technology, analytics, and digital customer service.

With the Kafka solution deployed, STC Kuwait could now provide its enterprise clients with Customer 360, a personalised digital experience. The Confluent platform also gave STC an unrestricted event streaming database, elastic performance, and enterprise-grade security for their clients. And with multi-region clusters, the company had a newfound degree of resilience, helping it move steadily towards a Kafka central nervous system—a one-stop hub that would help the company manage and monitor critical enterprise events, information, and data.

Learn More: Find out about our Kafka enterprise event streaming services and support

Hey there! We’re OSO, a leading provider of Apache Kafka consulting, development, and support services. We’ve worked on multiple joint projects with Confluent, and we’re well-versed in Confluent Platform, enterprise event streaming, and Kafka integrations. We also offer advisory support and training to help your technical team upskill and incorporate Kafka into your business. No matter your project, it’s easy to set up an intro call to chat about your requirements.

Just drop us a note at enquiries@oso.sh.

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