Jeremy Custenborder

Jeremy Custenborder @ Confluent

On Selling Kafka + Kafka Streams
Kafka wins on throughput. Few if any messaging systems have the  throughput capacity of Kafka
Kafka is also a great audit log of what's happening in the business. Auditing gives you the freedom to do whatever you want to do with it
Everybody has messaging. Messaging is solved for. You need to differentiate from messaging.
Data Products
You need to get away from dumb pipelines and start talking about data products. Dumb pipelines are a low value, fight for the bottom. That's the ultimate differentiator between Kafka and ETL systems like Fivetran
If there is an individual data point in which the value of acting on it decreases over time, that can be scaled and there is potential for a real-time data product there.

Costco is a great example of a company that is able to use their data to create data products that provide value to their value chain
Draw inspirations of real-time data products from other companies and industries that have documented their success
Productize feeds of data to generate real time recommendations and insights into the business
Kafka Streams
Kafka Streams materialized views allow you to compute on write instead of computing on read.
Time window aggregates are also very useful. See what happen within a time window and draw insights from it.
Moving from "Compute on read" to "Compute on write"
The maturity of democratizing data
Data catalogues and itemized data items
Selling Confluent
Expertise, we've done this before. We have the Special Ops team of Kafka (PS)
We can help you establish the patterns you need to be successful. You'll have experts on call
When done on your own, you're going to pay the operational costs. The time, the effort, and the pain of making the mistakes we could have seen coming a mile away
You should be spending your engineering effort on things that matter.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

On Sales Engineering
You're there to inspire an organization on what's possible with your technology
You do this by telling stories
Talk about what success other companies were able to achieve
The best idea is their idea, where they talk 80% of the time

IoT
One of the fundamental problems with IoT is gathering metrics. Metrics are table stakes

Data landing is a CTA. Data is your signal

Make data an internal project for teams

Figure out what has changed/what is changing and create a data product around that

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer/your customers' customers. What insights are helpful for them to make their life better

Jeremy Custenborder @ Confluent

Todos