HSS Hire, a leading tool and equipment hire company in the UK, needed to upgrade its database infrastructure to incorporate transaction encryption functionality for secure credit card transactions. The company had developed an online platform, HSSlivehire.com, which tied into an early version of the Actian X hybrid database. However, as the platform grew, so did the demands on the database. The company faced the challenge of not having designed its core database with online payment in mind. To provide an environment that was 100% secure for accepting credit card transactions through its website, HSS needed to upgrade its database. However, the company lacked the internal IT resources and expertise to perform the database upgrade.

Pinnergy, a diversified energy services company, was struggling with an outdated, manually-driven invoicing process. Invoices moved from the dispatch system through customer signoff and then had to be entered into customers’ online electronic data interchange (EDI) systems. This process was tedious and involved significant duplication of effort and data, increasing the potential for errors and disputed invoices. As Pinnergy’s business grew, order management became more complex, with more customers and a higher volume of transactions moving through multiple applications with various data formats to support and no common standard for data exchange. The invoicing process became a bottleneck, resulting in high cost per transaction and high accounts receivable aging.

AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd. is the United Kingdom’s leading distributor of pharmaceutical and healthcare products and services to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors. With more than 4,000 employees, 19 distribution warehouses in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and more than 2.6 million products delivered daily, the company relies on an enterprise-class IT infrastructure to support its large-scale logistical operations. At the same time, in its highly regulated and constantly-changing market, AAH must also maintain the agility to respond quickly and efficiently to emerging business requirements. The company’s role as an intermediary between suppliers and end customers brings additional complexity to the challenge; each business application used and each link in the value chain must perform optimally to maintain competitive advantage.

Algonquin College, based in Ottawa, Ontario, offers over 100 courses of study to more than 30,000 full-time and part-time students. The college's mission statement includes incorporating technology to improve service delivery and exceed client expectations. Advanced technology drives services for students, faculty, and employees, providing them with wireless and web-based access to curriculum, self-service, and student information. In 1993, when developing its technology-based services, Algonquin knew it needed to invest in a high-performance, transaction-oriented database that would scale. They chose Ingres, and today, the college continues to run mission-critical student and faculty applications on Ingres open source technology.

Askews Library Systems provides libraries around the world with complete services including selection support, buying, cataloguing, physical preparation for lending, promotional support, and management reporting. The libraries market within which Askews provides these services has become increasingly sensitive in recent years as economic pressures cap and in some cases depress spending. Four other companies compete with Askews in the £90m-a-year UK market, where contracts are awarded by competitive tender. Over the past decade, these pressures led the 130-yearold Askews to embrace state-of-the-art technology and process automation, including using the Web to market globally and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to serve customers world-wide. In addition, the company undertook the development of a bespoke e-procurement system.

In the depths of the 2008-2009 economic downturn, Autometrics faced a significant business challenge. The recession had hit the automotive and travel industries hard, and Autometrics felt the pinch. The company needed to completely reinvent itself to survive. Autometrics had access to a phenomenal array of U.S. auto industry data from sophisticated third-party sources, that, when combined with auto manufacturer data and intelligently analyzed, could help predict buyer behavior and deliver real impact to manufacturers’ and dealers’ bottom lines. However, many potential clients were not only reluctant to give up their internal data but also reluctant to trust it to a cloud environment.

Badoo, a global networking site, was facing challenges in understanding the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and assessing the impact of their reach. They were using a hard-coded, custom-built analytics solution that was limited in functionality and could not provide the level of detail needed by the marketing and finance teams. The previous solution lacked the ability to perform detailed analytics and could not provide actionable insights based on events occurring among their user base.

BBP AG is a software and solution vendor specializing in the integration of interbank applications. The company's middleware, IGTplus, connects financial institutions to payment transactions, securities trading, and processing systems. BBP offers this middleware on an in-house or ServiceBureau basis for a range of financial networks including SWIFTNet, the trading, clearing and settlement systems of the SIX Group, as well as FED and CHIPS. The company serves more than 200 financial institutions, making it the largest SWIFT SB in the world. Product reliability, security, and control are top priorities for BBP. The company must be able to guarantee continuous interbank connection availability and 24x7 access to their business-critical application, along with unshakable security and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

British Friendly, an income protection mutual company, was running an outdated version of the Ingres database (v2.6) for their M2000 insurance application. The company wanted to upgrade to Ingres v9.2.3 to benefit from the database’s new functionality and new hardware. However, they only had one administrator to manage the M2000 insurance application and lacked the internal resources needed to both upgrade to v.9.2.3 or continue to monitor the Ingres database to ensure their applications and associated systems continue to run smoothly. Furthermore, the company needed to ensure that their internal risk levels were not compromised by upgrading their internal systems.

China Telecom, managing a customer base of 250 million ADSL subscribers, was facing a significant challenge with its existing database system. The company's applications relied on the ADSL subscriber database to provide real-time access to hundreds of thousands of account objects. The subscriber database was deployed on a relational database management system (RDBMS), which required a high-performance server that was expensive to maintain. The system was proving too cumbersome over time to keep up with the company’s growing customer base. The company needed a solution that could handle as many as 480,000 queries and 1,000 update transactions per second at peak times, with database performance and reliability being top priorities.

The CIV, a subsidiary of the Dutch Police and a center of excellence for football hooligan management, was created in 1986 after particular heavy riots and violence related to football. The CIV needed to find a way to track previous football related violence, maintain a record of trends among offenders, and keep a database of all known football hooligans. As a result, it created the Hooligan Tracking System (VVS in Dutch) to gather information regarding incidents of violence, hooligans’ backgrounds, effects of actions, previous convictions, and trends in behavior. Cost management is key to any IT project in the public sector. The ability to integrate and allow access to the system was central to its success as a national and pan-European knowledgebase. As Hooligans travel through Europe for games, the VVS also understood the important of supporting multiple European languages, using Dutch and English as the default languages.

The challenge faced by Comsoft was to ensure highly available access to the database for business-critical applications. In 2009, German Air Traffic Control (DFS) counted more than 2.9 million flights according to Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the airspace of the Federal Republic of Germany alone. Air traffic management deploys cutting edge technology to control and regulate whether planes are maintaining the necessary safe distance from one another in controlled airspace, that they are on the right course and flying at the correct altitude and speed. It uses special air traffic management systems, instrument landing systems, and radar and navigation systems to enable fast and accurate processing of huge data volumes, thus ensuring the smooth flow of traffic. The wealth of different data processing systems in Europe, has led EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, to take steps towards harmonizing European Air Traffic Management.

Today’s emerging HPC applications must handle complex and large volumes of data, which if not managed appropriately, may result in a serious performance bottleneck. CRL (Computational Research Laboratories Ltd.), a TATA Group company, was looking for a database engine running on a highly scalable Linux cluster. The company needed a solution that could offer sustained performance of complex analytics in the face of increasing data and seamless performance-oriented scalability of elastic database services underpinned by a tensile computing infrastructure.

Cypress Semiconductor Corporation is a diversified supplier of high-performance, integrated circuits for network infrastructure and access equipment. The company’s manufacturing processes are intensive in both scale and precision, as its billion-dollar wafer fabrication plants conduct and log dozens of intricate manufacturing processes. If its machinery sits idle, the company has serious production problems. If the measurement specifications are off by a fraction of a millimeter, that’s trouble, too. “If you botch a wafer lot by executing a wrong step or mismanaging precision controls, you’ve literally destroyed a million dollars worth of wafers,” said Robert Price, DBA Manager at Cypress. “If any aspect of the system goes down, it will cost you.” This need for reliable, consistent performance has led Cypress to demand absolute perfection from its databases and related services. Simply put, if its systems can’t keep pace with its requirements, the company’s productivity comes to a costly halt.

The German Energy Management Act prescribes that a smart meter for power and gas, which is read at least every 15 minutes to provide tariff information, is mandatory for every new building or every energy-conserving renovation. The data volumes that are aggregated in modern power meters and transmitted to utility companies surpass the previous amount of data by a factor of 35,000. Utilities need an appropriate IT infrastructure to manage and process such data volumes if they opt for an in-house smart meter solution. While larger utilities can afford this, it represents a huge investment for smaller energy providers such as local public utilities.

The Department of Education and Training in Western Australia (WA DET) was facing a challenge with its back-end computing environment. The department managed a range of administrative activities to support programs delivered by 11 colleges and 8,000 staff throughout the state. The systems collectively managed over 1 million student records with 120,000 students processed through the state’s training systems annually. However, regional locations had to manage their own back-end environments, which imposed an expensive support burden on WA DET staff and vendor support engineers. Proprietary Unix server environments, often built on a variety of hardware models of differing ages, had to be managed remotely, along with the complex applications they were running. With many DET colleges hundreds of kilometers apart, it had become too expensive and cumbersome to maintain this computing environment.

Deutsche Familienversicherung AG (DFV AG), a leading insurance company based in Germany, was facing challenges with the growth of data in the insurance sector. The speed and stability of a database had become major factors, especially when it came to analyzing and reporting on corporate figures and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. As its master data had grown considerably over the years and also increased in complexity, DFV AG was looking for a stable and future-proof database that would also easily accommodate further growth. As part of its strategy, DFV AG uses commercial Open Source solutions for Business Intelligence (BI) and ETL. Representing the third technology layer in the IT stack, DFV sought to find a reliable database software solution that would then fit in with the existing IT infrastructure and hardware environment.

Echelon is a pioneer and world leader in control networks and embedded control networks, which connect machines and other electronic devices. They needed an embedded database compatible with the object-oriented application model. A predecessor of LNS was introduced in 1991, using procedural code and an embedded record oriented/ relational data storage toolkit. As object-oriented programming began to emerge, the team realized that using object-oriented programming was the most productive way to add features and power to the system. At the same time, the team realized that the record oriented storage toolkit was an obstacle to object-oriented development and a big usability problem because it exposed the embedded database structure to their broad OEM programmer community.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Telescope, stationed at Noordwijk (The Netherlands), is constantly bombarded by infrared radiation, high-energy particles from solar eruptions and other events in outer space. The telescope, which is carrying the largest telescope ever flown, collects an average of six to seven gigabit raw telemetry data every day. The data is managed in an onboard storage facility and downloaded during a daily three-hour window to one of two satellite stations on the ground. The data is then transmitted to the ESA satellite control center in Darmstadt, Germany, and forwarded to the scientific control center in Madrid, Spain. On previous ESA missions, the teams responsible for the in-flight instruments had to use a multitude of tools to analyze critical instrument data extracted from various files.

Emerson Network Power, a global leader in supplying business-critical power solutions, was in the process of centralizing their IT helpdesk in Manila. The goal was to seamlessly integrate the Australian operations with Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Emerson used the Infor Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution ‘MK’ as the central hub for information, distribution, and reporting. MK was built on Ingres Database and was integral to the daily operations of Emerson. The cost of downtime per business day was estimated at $1 million AUD. It was essential that a 24x7 disaster recovery resource was available to respond to any situation in a timely manner. Additional local support would be required to properly manage IT networks, systems, and databases for Australia. Due to the consolidating nature of the project, interoperability issues would become visible, and Emerson’s handling process would need continual development and improvement. To take all this work in-house would require hiring a minimum of three full-time employees which was considered an unworkable timeframe. Emerson needed a partner that could provide both the skill sets and knowledge base to service the Ingres database underlying the MK application, and provide a 24x7 support service with the highest level of support and continuity.

The challenge was the rapidly growing number of users simultaneously accessing the same TV programs and channels via Internet. In this application domain, the database must provide fast access to rather complex data, easy integration into an ever evolving application code, and support massive concurrent access from potentially millions of consumers. The Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IPTV Ecosystem was in need of a database system that could handle these demands efficiently.

The Federal Railroad Administration is expecting railroad freight traffic to double by 2020. However, the U.S. railroad infrastructure cannot be expanded to keep pace with this demand. Railroads are confronted with meeting this demand in some other way. GE Transportation Systems, the global technology leader and supplier to the railroad industry, is addressing the problem with RailEdge® Movement Planner, an object-oriented software system incorporating the Versant Object Database. GE Transportation’s customer, Norfolk Southern Railroad, operates 2,500 trains per day over a 21,000-mile system serving every major container port in the eastern United States. Norfolk Southern expects to increase railroad capacity, velocity and efficiency with no new tracks, to increase average network train speed 10 to 20 percent, and to save millions of dollars in capital and expense.

Geological Data Design (GDD) was facing the challenge of efficiently collecting, managing, and analyzing large volumes of exploration and mining data. The data collected during the day from various field instruments, GPS, and cameras often integrated into a very large database, in some cases hundreds of millions or even billions of records. This made it difficult for geologists to quickly analyze large volumes of sample data for complex scenarios such as project timings, cash flows, and profitability with greater sensitivity levels.

GROUPE ADEO, a leading international home improvement retailer, was dealing with huge data volumes aggregated across the group's datamarts due to its extensive market presence. The company had hundreds of stores, multiple retail concepts, thousands of product references, and millions of sales translations made every day. Despite the company's experience of using Business Intelligence across this wide range of data, GROUPE ADEO was looking for an agile analytical database to complement its existing environment. The companies in the group needed a more affordable and user-friendly solution.

The Chemicals Regulations Directorate (CRD) of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was in the process of splitting its two main websites into two separate IP addresses. The first, public-facing website was to be moved to a third-party hosting provider. However, CRD needed to find a hosting provider who could provide a managed environment for its second secure site that also included the management of Actian Ingres and OpenROAD. As a result, CRD needed more than just a simple hosted Windows environment. A number of criteria had to be taken into account: the future of the existing in-house environment provider was unsure, the approach to outsourcing the secure website had to be low risk as the whole area of support for hardware and environment was under review, and the managed service had to be controlled yet flexible enough to allow CRD staff access when necessary.

Indra Sistemas, a global technology company, was tasked with building the control centers for Spain’s AVE high-speed bullet train system. The company needed a database that could handle the complex and demanding architecture of the integrated high-speed train control system (IRC). The system was designed from a global perspective, integrating information and control from each of the elements that make up a high-speed rail line. The architecture used by Indra includes three areas of management allowing for different degrees of accessibility and control of the line. The Real-time System Control Framework consists of over 30,000 objects in memory and 30 classes, with 80 TB of information eventually flowing into Oracle’s relational database on the corporate level.

INIT is a leading supplier of Intelligent Transportation Systems and Electronic Ticketing Systems for public transportation. Their application components place significant demands on concurrency, availability, and runtime performance. They were looking for a database technology that could efficiently store and retrieve complex real-time data in 24/7 operation. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle complex networked data and real-time requirements. The solution needed to be scalable, flexible, and capable of transparent data distribution and replication.

ISS Switzerland, a leading integrated facilities services company, was in need of a robust ERP back-office solution to support their payroll/HR, accounting, invoicing, and financial reporting needs. In the highly competitive market of facilities management, the company required a strong ERP system that would allow local management to run their business optimally. Additionally, the local entity needed to ensure that it could report its financials back to their corporate business in a timely manner and meet all the financial reporting requirements on an international level. After an exhaustive tender process where ISS Switzerland evaluated many other solutions, the company chose to work with Syslog and implement their ERP solution: Syslog ERP.

Medical Data Vision (MDV) develops management support software for hospitals and private health clinics throughout Japan. The MDV analyzer is an Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) service that collects and shares medical data from hospitals across Japan. The MDV analyzer aims to improve the quality of medical care by analyzing and sharing medical results with Pharmaceutical companies for epidemiological studies, market research and further drug development. MDV’s previous EBM required an upgrade due to slow performance. “Our previous application used another column type database and performance was taking up to 30 seconds for a report on 2 years of data,” said Hirai-san. “This was unacceptable, so over a 2 month period we evaluated 5 other high performance databases to see which offered the best performance.”

Lynx Services, a market leader in auto glass claims management, required a high availability, transaction-processing oriented database solution that would enable it to process claims for its clients 24x7. The solution needed to be reliable, easy to use, and able to scale as the company grew. The company manages more than 3 million claims each year, processing three types of claims for insurance clients – auto glass claims, first notice of loss claims, and auto physical damage claims. The company needed a database that could handle this volume of transactions and provide high availability and quick transactional processing.