[BjoernKW]

Far from it. CSV is by far the most common data exchange format for ERP, CRM and business systems in general. EDI is another. Good luck communicating with SAP ERP or NetSuite without good old-fashioned SOAP. Judging from the documentation none of these seems to be supported by Confluent.

SOAP and CSV are not sexy. They have plenty of shortcomings. However, those are the formats that are used in the real world today (and for some time to come).

Stream processing is a very useful design pattern but like any design pattern it should be used carefully and only where appropriate (see: Microservices).

If I were to build a new complex ERP from the ground up I'd be remiss not to use something like Kafka or Confluent for data processing.

If I want to communicate with legacy systems though that's an entirely different matter. The same applies when targeting SMBs. You'd have a hard time explaining to small business owners why they suddenly need a newfangled stream processing architecture while their old "Export CSV and load that into Excel" process worked just fine.