Skillsoft, a leading EdTech company, faced a significant challenge when its traffic surged by 400% in a short span of time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company, which serves content to 45 million learners in over 160 countries, saw its traffic double between February and March 2020, and then double again from March to April. This sudden spike in demand had the potential to seriously degrade user experience, which is a key factor in EdTech success. Additionally, Skillsoft was also experiencing growth due to global expansion, particularly in India where the EdTech market is expected to quadruple over the next five years. Already, 20% of Skillsoft's traffic was coming from India, and this number was growing.

RVU, a leading tech company in the UK, owns several market comparison sites and apps. The company has grown through strategic acquisitions, which has led to inconsistencies in tech stacks as each acquired business comes with its own back-end architecture, integrations, and more. This inconsistency posed a challenge to RVU as it sought to provide a secure, single layer of consistency across all its brands. Furthermore, as users have grown increasingly reliant on price-comparison tools, their expectations around security and privacy have also increased. RVU needed a solution that would not only standardize operations across all brands but also fortify all of its brands equally in terms of security and privacy.

Sauce Labs, the world's largest continuous testing cloud for web and mobile applications, faced a significant challenge in protecting its web applications distributed across a hybrid cloud environment with different application stacks. The company's mission is to ensure that mobile applications and websites work flawlessly on every device, operating system, and browser, delivering an impeccable digital experience to users. However, the company was vulnerable to potential attack vectors, including click fraud and abuse of its free trial virtual machine offering. The Senior Director of Product Security, John Kennedy, was in search of a single technology that could defend against these threats and ensure the security of the company's web applications.

SeenThis, a Stockholm-based ad streaming company, was facing a series of challenges. The company, which works with 80 of the top 100 advertisers in over 40 countries, was dealing with an average of 40 billion requests per month from over 1,000 customers. Their proprietary adaptive streaming technology was designed to remove the limitations of conventional ad serving technology, but they were struggling with their existing first-generation CDN, which couldn't provide the necessary configuration for delivering custom content based on different variables. Additionally, their previous logging and monitoring system, which utilized open-source tools like nginx and RabbitMQ on AWS, was becoming slow and unreliable, making it difficult to manage the increasing number of requests. Furthermore, as environmental concerns became more pressing, SeenThis needed more detailed reporting capabilities to evidence their unique mix of performance and sustainability.

SeenThis, a Stockholm-based ad streaming company, was facing a series of challenges. The company, which works with 80 of the top 100 advertisers in over 40 countries, was dealing with an average of 40 billion requests per month from over 1,000 customers. Their proprietary adaptive streaming technology was designed to remove the limitations of conventional ad serving technology, but they were struggling with their existing content delivery network (CDN) which couldn't provide the necessary configuration for delivering custom content based on different variables. Additionally, their previous logging and monitoring system began showing signs of aging by 2018, becoming slow and unreliable. The team struggled to manage the increasing number of requests required to serve its customers. Furthermore, when data transfer reduction emerged as a pressing environmental concern in 2020, SeenThis needed more detailed reporting capabilities to evidence their unique mix of performance and sustainability.

Shoptimize, a pioneer of AI solutions for direct-to-consumer (D2C) retail platforms, was facing challenges in scaling its services. The company needed to provide a seamless online experience for its users, regardless of whether there were 5,000 or 5 million users online. The company was also looking for a next-generation Web Application Firewall (WAF) solution that could offer performance and PCI-DSS compliance at scale. Their previous WAF providers were not able to meet the caching challenge and were too expensive for effective customer onboarding. Shoptimize needed a solution that could offer predictable costs, scale as needed, and integrate with their existing tech stack. They also required a low-latency WAF to block spam traffic and bad bots without slowing down or blocking desirable traffic.

Pronovias Group, a global business group that designs, manufactures, and sells wedding dresses and evening gowns, faced a unique challenge. The company operates six brands, each with its own online portal. Unlike traditional e-commerce portals, these websites serve as a gateway for customer relationships and as a booking point for in-person appointments, linking the online experience with the in-store experience. The challenge was to optimize these experiences and bring them on par with the personalized and exclusive service offered in-store. The online stores required fast and frictionless loading in users’ web browsers. Pronovias Group was looking for a universal solution for all of its brands that would facilitate the daily management of their online presence while allowing them to handle traffic without losing connectivity from anywhere in the world. It was also essential to protect the websites and distinguish between different types of requests to rule out all kinds of attacks.

Network 10, a major Australian television network, faced a significant challenge in delivering a seamless live stream of the Melbourne Cup, Australia's premier horse race and the network's biggest sporting event. The race is not only broadcast on free-to-air television but also offered as a live stream from the company’s website. The challenge was to ensure uninterrupted delivery of the live stream at a time when traffic levels reach the highest point of the year. The selection of the underlying platform was critical to achieving this. Network 10 aimed to provide a first-class experience to all viewers, with top-quality audio and video delivered without interruption or buffering. The network also needed to prepare for any spontaneous spikes in traffic and troubleshoot any issues that may arise during the event.

New Relic, an observability platform, was in need of a partner that could scale with them and ensure high-level data availability, scalability, and performance. The company's core data platform ingests data from around the world and makes it available in near real-time. The availability of this data is crucial for New Relic's customers, as they rely on it for important functions such as alerting and monitoring. If the data doesn't reach New Relic's systems, these functions won't trigger or appear, causing significant issues for their customers. New Relic was also looking to improve performance and was in search of a partner that could provide a service that was performant, scalable, and reliable.

Maritz, a holding company providing a range of services to Fortune 500 companies, faced a significant challenge in enhancing its security posture to support PCI DSS requirement 6.6. Several of its business units accept credit card information, necessitating annual reporting on PCI DSS compliance. The company decided to implement a web application firewall as an additional layer of security for its PCI environment. However, with numerous business units and applications, each with different technology stacks, Maritz needed a single product that could be deployed across all current and future hosting environments, whether physical or virtual, on-premises or cloud-based. The company had previously used an open-source solution that required extensive manual effort to operate, so they were looking for a solution that offered ease of use, automated blocking, and simple deployment.

GIPHY, a platform that serves billions of stickers, clips, and GIFs daily to its global user base, faced the challenge of delivering content seamlessly, reliably, and cost-effectively. The platform's content enhances conversations across various social media and communication tools, including iMessage, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok. The challenge was to ensure a speedy, lag-free search experience for GIPHY end users. Additionally, GIPHY needed to protect its platform from malicious traffic and reduce traffic to origins for cost savings. The company also required data logs to drive analytics and future content development, and needed to maintain agility in the development of platform enhancements.

api.video, a European-based company that provides video encoding, delivery, and hosting services, faced significant challenges in scaling its video delivery via its Content Delivery Network (CDN). The company was using a niche CDN provider, CDNetworks, for its two data centers in Canada and Europe. However, the provider was unable to meet the growing demands of api.video. The company faced issues with poor cache performance under full load, especially during live streaming events. This issue was so severe that it restricted product access and hindered the company's scaling efforts. Additionally, the CDN provider only made logs accessible once per day, which made quick mitigation of any abuse impossible. The company also faced issues with opaque routing within its old CDN, which was suboptimal and offered no control. Furthermore, api.video wanted to leverage future features that the previous CDN provider would not allow due to lacking features or mandated policies. These features included supporting custom domains, domain referrer restrictions, the ability to control request log data, and support for the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework and built-in optimizations for video use cases.

Atresmedia, a leading communication group in Spain, has been expanding its streaming package since its launch, which is a key line of business for the company. The company has turned to live streaming for broadcasting important events, such as sports finals or elections, which have high ratings. Users expect an experience similar to that of broadcast television, with no delays and zero latency. To cater to the increased traffic levels generated by live events, it was crucial for Atresmedia to prepare its entire infrastructure and partner with a CDN to support it, ensuring zero downtime, even if they experienced a tremendous spike in the number of users. The main challenges of live streaming that Atresmedia wanted to address were avoiding latency, improving the quality of the user experience, offering a reliable and scalable architecture that is able to absorb large and unpredictable traffic spikes, reducing the costs associated with live streaming, and having greater control in order to make autonomous, quick changes through API or UI.

The Zaryadye Concert Hall, located in Moscow, is a unique project that has been recognized as one of the best concert venues globally. The challenge was to design and construct a concert hall that would seamlessly blend into the landscape of the Zaryadye Park. The hall was to be placed on an artificially created hill in the park, and it was crucial that it became an organic part of the park. The design also had to accommodate a transparent glass 'bark' with solar panels, a pedestrian zone, and an amphitheater that seats 1500 people. The hall was to be covered with a hill, and the hill was to be covered with the 'bark'. A special microclimate was to be created under the 'bark', where trees and herbaceous plants were to be planted. The design process was complex, involving changes to the shape of the 'bark' and the relocation of the entrance. The hall's internal architecture was also challenging, with requirements for excellent acoustics for classical music concerts and the ability to accommodate modern projects of various genres.

Brandfolder, a digital asset management platform, was facing challenges with its content dissemination feature, the Smart CDN. The company was initially performing eager image transformations, which involved creating different renditions of an image as soon as it was ingested. While this approach could potentially speed up request response times, it significantly increased the ingest time, causing delays for customers. Another challenge was the process of adding watermarks to images. Each image was individually watermarked by Brandfolder and stored until it needed to be served. This process was not only time-consuming but also increased storage costs. Furthermore, the company was looking to update their thumbnailing process, which involved generating thumbnails for all assets in their system. The existing process was creating bottlenecks and hindering scalability.

kommadesign, a young and visionary company based in Viborg, Denmark, specializes in providing retail solutions, product design, conference design, and trade fair design. With over 15 years of experience, the company has worked with international brands such as adidas, Timberland, Menu, Sony, egetæpper, and vifa Denmark. However, operating in a highly competitive business environment, kommadesign faced the challenge of maintaining quality control over their processes and effectively utilizing their resources. The company needed to offer their national and international customers the best solutions and highest quality at the right price. To achieve this, they developed a four-phase model for their assignments, which required a tool that could facilitate the process from idea generation to implementation.

KOZ Architects, founded by Christophe Ouhayoun and Nicolas Ziesel in 1999, had been using 2D design software for their architectural projects. However, they found the process of designing a project in plan, then modeling it for communication, and making a specific model for thermal simulation to be inefficient and time-consuming. This challenge was particularly evident in their 'Tête en l’Air' project, which involved rehabilitating a social housing unit and creating 15 new wooden buildings. The project required a high level of detail and precision, which was difficult to achieve with 2D design software. Furthermore, the collaboration with carpenters, who think in 3D from concept to execution, highlighted the limitations of their existing 2D design tools.

Axon, a leading self-defense company, operates Evidence.com, a platform that handles a constant flow of digital evidence from various law enforcement and public safety agencies across the globe. The platform is used to manage digital evidence in a secure, scalable, and efficient way, allowing agencies to focus on the use of the data rather than the burden of managing it. Given the highly sensitive and personal nature of this information, security is of paramount importance. However, traditional Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) were not compatible with Axon's modern architecture and couldn't be effectively deployed in production blocking mode. Axon's security team built their own detection rules and evaluated multiple WAF technologies, but were not satisfied with any of the legacy solutions available on the market. They found themselves spending too much of their operational resources maintaining their homegrown web application security solution, which didn’t provide robust blocking capabilities and was only as good as the rules written for it.

Prezi, a cloud-based presentation platform with over 100 million users, was facing a significant challenge due to its tremendous growth. The company was seeking to replace an existing, labor-intensive tool with a new web application firewall (WAF) to provide automated, accurate protection for their web applications. Previously, Prezi used an open source IDS/IPS solution. As a cloud-based platform, Prezi’s primary goal was to have a WAF with enterprise-grade detection and response capabilities. They needed a solution that could automatically and reliably detect attack patterns on web traffic without the noise (hundreds of notifications to matches on RegEx signatures) and provide integrations to gain advanced insights.

Duo, a leading cybersecurity company, was seeking to enhance the security visibility of its authentication platform and websites without introducing additional security or operational risks. The company's platform supports billions of authentication requests globally every week, and it was crucial to secure this traffic without negatively impacting the user experience or introducing additional security risks. Duo's previous experiences with hardware and cloud Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) had introduced single points of failure and had difficulties integrating into the path of traffic, prompting the need for an alternative approach.

MadeiraMadeira, an online marketplace specializing in home products and furniture, faced the challenge of improving online access for shoppers and providing reliable uptime. The company needed to expand its capacity to handle surges in website usage, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when online traffic volume increased significantly. The company also faced difficulties in handling large volumes of images for its 2.3 million products. The process of compressing, resizing, and editing multiple images was time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, MadeiraMadeira was looking to implement a multiple cloud strategy and tackle the offline market with a digital mindset.

LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform, was facing challenges in the fast-paced software development lifecycle. The company needed to balance the competing needs of speed and security. Speed was essential to improve products and keep users engaged, while security was necessary to ensure deployments did not cause disruptions or drive users to competitor apps. The company also needed to ensure that features could be rolled out without friction, or they risked their product's position in the app store rating. Additionally, LaunchDarkly required a solution to protect user experience in case of a disaster, without having to roll back code.

Jimdo, a company that powers over 20 million websites worldwide, was facing stiff competition from other website creation companies with massive marketing budgets. To stand out, Jimdo realized they needed to focus on quality product innovation and unparalleled customer service. However, they were burdened with complicated and time-intensive workflows and operations, which hindered their ability to innovate. They also faced the challenge of ensuring their websites were secure, fast, and scalable, regardless of the customer's device or location. Another significant challenge was the resizing of images on their customers’ sites to ensure they looked great on all devices. This was a key aspect of their business as many websites rely on beautiful photos to help sell their products and services.

JW Player, a leading platform for video delivery and intelligence, was facing a significant challenge in managing its rapidly increasing traffic. The company, which serves some of the biggest names in media, has seen its traffic grow exponentially as video strategy becomes central to business strategy. The company was dealing with a 900% increase in requests per second, scaling from 4,000 requests per second in 2019 to 40,000 requests per second in 2021. This growth was driven by both market expansion and pandemic-driven demand. The challenge was to maintain high availability and fast time-to-first-frame (TTFF), which are critical metrics for end-user engagement. Additionally, JW Player was grappling with rising origin costs and the need to simplify their tech stack.

LaunchDarkly, a pioneer in the field of Feature Management, was facing a challenge with its software development kit (SDK) in polling mode. The company was experiencing initialization rates of over one second in several locations worldwide, which was negatively impacting page-load times. This was due to the need to run logic at the origin for their flag management service, and some regions were simply too far away to be highly performant. This latency issue was a concern for clients with global customer bases, who were hesitant to use feature flags for certain use cases due to the potential for excessive latency. LaunchDarkly needed a solution that would bring their feature flagging service closer and faster to their customers, without compromising on security, performance, or resilience.

MBMO Architects, a leading studio in Sydney, has been involved in several significant projects, including the major redevelopment of the Sydney Adventist Hospital (San), Notre Dame University Clinical Education Centre, and various mixed-use residential and student accommodation developments. The challenge for MBMO was to maintain their commitment to early project involvement and collaboration with all stakeholders while delivering excellent design and commercial outcomes. The Sydney Adventist Hospital project, in particular, was a $200 million redevelopment, which required a high level of collaboration and technological support to ensure a successful outcome. The project involved seven sub-projects, including a 13-storey clinical tower, a multi-deck car park, a new entry building, and a student accommodation building, among others. The project's success was crucial for the hospital, which is Sydney's largest and oldest private hospital.

The architecture and design studio Maese Luis 24 (ML24) was tasked with designing 'Residencial Poniente', a complex of 166 residential units in Córdoba, Spain. The challenge was to create a building that would fit into two contrasting realities: the existing urban environment dominated by vehicles and wide roads, and a new, user-friendly reality that the architects would create from scratch. The scale of the building was enormous, requiring the architects to think on a similar scale when planning the façades. The building was also a stack of small units that were repeated and multiplied, necessitating a custom workflow. Prior to this project, the studio had spent a year studying and analyzing various BIM software on the market.

The Akbank Academy Recreation Center (AARC), located on the Akbank Şekerpınar Campus on the outskirts of Istanbul, was faced with the challenge of revitalizing the existing bank headquarters. The goal was to create a mixed activity program that would make office work more attractive for the campus's 2,800 employees and improve their quality of life. The program was to include a variety of activities such as sports, culture, recreational facilities, and a mini market, which were otherwise difficult to accommodate in the immediate environment. The project was prestigious for Akbank, but it was also fraught with challenges. The design phase was under a tight schedule, and the architects had to deal with constant revisions, negotiations with numerous decision-makers, and obtaining permissions from local authorities. These issues persisted even during the construction phase.

Archicad, a software by Graphisoft, has been a popular tool among architects for over 30 years. However, many users are not fully aware of its capabilities, particularly the CineRender integrated visualization engine incorporated since version 18. This engine allows the entire project design cycle to be accomplished within one software program. Despite not aiming for 100% photo-realistic rendering, the engine offers a range of effects and options that can significantly enhance the quality of architectural renderings. The challenge lies in unlocking these less-studied functions and new opportunities to create stunning renderings.

Bamble Junior High School in Stathelle, Norway, was in need of a new building that would reflect the innovative philosophy of its architects, Spinn Arkitekter. The challenge was to design a sustainable, all-wood building that would serve as a place for learning, play, and life, while also being competitively priced. The architects needed to use efficient processes to achieve this goal. Additionally, the school building had to be welcoming and sustainable, reflecting the firm's commitment to using all-natural materials. The design also had to incorporate complex patterns on the exterior, a signature of Spinn Arkitekter's school designs. The dispersion of Spinn's offices across four locations added another layer of complexity to the project, necessitating a digital workflow that would allow for seamless collaboration.