Case Study: Rabobank

Challenges

• In 2015, Rabobank decided to move towards 100% digital and become a real-time, event-driven bank. Creating a better customer experience by providing real-time information was one of Rabobank’s goals.
• Rabobank needed a solution where “things that happen” can be captured from anywhere and delivered to anywhere for processing, as they occur, without consumers and producers knowing about each other's existence.
• They chose Kafka as the engine for their event streaming platform, but quickly discovered it was lacking a number of enterprise features.
• Rabobank needed high availability, data governance, security and selfservice capabilities on top of Kafka. This sparked the collaboration between Axual and Rabobank.

Why Rabobank Choose Axual

• Out-of-the-box enterprise event streaming platform based on Kafka with nearly zero maintenance costs.
• High Kafka availability across their datacenters in Best and Boxtel
• Enterprise-wide data governance. See who has permission, which team owns the data or if the owner has given permission.
• Secure access for teams. Authentication and authorization is all done with mutual SSL.
•  Self-service capabilities allows teams to quickly start streaming via APIs or via the graphical user interface.
• Integration with Rabobank’s CI/CD tooling for automation.
• Support for on-premise and (hybrid) cloud environments.
• Rabobank strategically decided to not develop and maintain their own Kafka platform, but to use a COTS solution. This allows them to focus on their own business while lowering TCO at the same.

“Self-service allows our DevOps teams to create their own topics and sign up applications to those topics. Axual gives them the ability to move quickly and easily. Axual is the digital nervous system at Rabobank facilitating hundreds of DevOps teams and millions of messages per day."

^{Vincent Oostindie | Business Architect}

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Results

• Event streaming is adopted across the enterprise and acts as the digital nervous system of Rabobank’s business.
• Onboarded 150+ DevOps teams. 330+ data streams in production.
• 1 billion real-time messages sent per day.
• Self-service allows teams to move faster, because they don’t have to rely on a central data team.
• Teams are compliant to GDPR and other regulations.
• Estimated $500,000 saved annually in maintenance costs.

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Integrations:

• IBM MQ and IBM Integration Bus
• Websphere 
• Oracle Cloud
• CI/CD tools: Bitbucket, Jenkins and Azure DevOps