Romac Industries, a leading manufacturer of pipe products and tools for the waterworks industry, was facing challenges with its legacy multivendor IT environment. The existing infrastructure, a mix of servers and storage arrays from Dell and EMC, had become too expensive and complex to administer, maintain and scale. The company's inefficient tape-based backup and recovery tools posed a risk of hardware failures or disasters disrupting revenue-critical applications for hours or days. Russell Turley, IT Manager for Romac, initiated a technology refresh program to improve the performance and reliability of the company’s IT systems.

Simac, a Belgian IT solutions integrator and services provider, was facing challenges with its legacy data center—a mix of HP servers and NetApp storage systems—which had become too costly and complex to manage and scale. Provisioning customers and troubleshooting problems was a time-consuming, resource-intensive proposition involving many distinct, low-level administrative interfaces. Simac planned to move its IT operations to a colocation facility to support its growing business. Deciding the time was right for a technology refresh, Steven De Prins, Cross Domain Architect for Simac, selected SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure as the platform for the company’s next-generation IT architecture.

The Special District Risk Management Authority (SDRMA) was facing a storage capacity issue. They had been using Nutanix technology, but ran out of storage and could only expand by adding new nodes, which was frustrating to the IT team. The storage utilization challenge had stumped SDRMA until they found SimpliVity. After vetting the platform’s disaster recovery, backup, and deduplication features, SDRMA and iFish Group chose SimpliVity’s hyperconvergence solution.

The iFish Group was in the process of a capacity purchase/upgrade of their existing infrastructure which led to an overall platform review. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be manageable, but not ideal. The company was looking for a solution that could simplify their infrastructure and improve performance.

Somerset College, an educational institution in Australia, was facing challenges with their existing infrastructure. The management of multiple solutions and vendors was manageable, but not ideal. This led to a capacity purchase and upgrade of their existing infrastructure, which in turn led to an overall platform review. The college decided to evaluate and ultimately select HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure to address these challenges.

Southbank International School, an international independent school for 3 to 18 year-olds in the heart of London, was facing challenges with its outdated IT server architecture. The school's aging IT infrastructure was becoming increasingly unreliable, costly, and slow. The school relied on a mix of legacy server and storage systems distributed across three campuses, serving approximately 1000 users. Many of the systems were over ten years old and simply could not meet the performance demands of contemporary applications. Administering the fragmented environment was a resource-intensive, time-consuming undertaking involving several distinct management systems. Deploying new applications—allocating compute and storage resources—took days. Even worse, hardware failures were frequently disrupting core classroom applications. The school relied on manual data backup and recovery processes. It took hours or days to restore services as disks were copied, transported across campus and swapped out.

Surrey Place Centre was facing significant challenges in managing multiple solutions and vendors. The organization was also under a mandate to implement disaster recovery and improve backup/recovery. The management of multiple solutions and vendors was found to be a significant burden, leading to the need for a more streamlined and efficient solution.

Synernet’s legacy IT implementation—a mix of HP servers and capacity-constrained Dell EqualLogic storage arrays—was too costly and complex to maintain and scale. Expanding capacity, introducing new applications or troubleshooting problems was a time consuming, error-prone process involving a number of distinct, low-level administrative interfaces. And to make matters worse the company was unable to achieve its disaster recovery objectives with its unidirectional data replication solution; once services failed over to the DR site, Synernet could not effectively revert back to the primary production site.

Red Bull Racing, a competitive force in Formula One racing, relies heavily on IT for everything from business processes to vehicle design to onsite track support on race days. With proprietary, F1-specific applications generating significant amounts of data, the team needed a solution for its growing storage needs for the virtualized estate. The team's legacy infrastructure was slowing down performance. A mix of traditional virtualized servers plus virtual desktop infrastructure resulted in roughly 500 VMs spread across disparate hardware, creating a disjointed and heterogeneous environment. With 50 TB of data, infrastructure sprawl was becoming a costly liability, and software engineers using virtual desktops were noticing performance lags.

Redpagos, a regional fintech company in Uruguay, was facing growing business requirements that prompted the need for new infrastructure. The company's vision was to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty, and to grow market share by creating compelling new benefits for franchisees. However, the existing infrastructure was not sufficient to support the increasing transaction volumes and protect the company from outages, malware, and natural disasters. The company's IT infrastructure could only accommodate a tenth of its total workforce with virtual desktops, which was not enough capacity to support a work-from-home model. Furthermore, the company's databases house sensitive customer information, and the legacy cloud environment was inadequate due to potential regulatory concerns and customer data privacy concerns.

Western Canada Lottery Corporation (WCLC) operates lottery and gaming activities on behalf of several provinces and territories in Canada. The non-profit organization's mission is to deliver increased revenue back to governments, which requires efficient budget planning and insights to understand players and optimize sales. However, WCLC's legacy stack was not ideal for gaming operations. Infrastructure had grown along with business needs through siloed purchases, leading to lifecycle management issues, where parts of the environment were off support or nearly there. To meet growing customer expectations, the organization needed to increase its systems' performance.

The Golden State Warriors were looking to create a next-generation stadium that would deliver unparalleled fan experiences. They wanted to build connectivity and intelligence into the facility, turning data into a business driver. The team had to rethink its approach to technology when they bid farewell to their former home in Oakland after 47 seasons. The pre-existing network at the Oakland Arena was a constant challenge, leading the team to envision their ideal state and what they wanted to provide. The construction of the Chase Center in San Francisco gave the team the opportunity to make their vision a reality and evolve what's possible for an event arena. However, the pandemic put a halt to all activities at the Chase Center, forcing the team to navigate a way forward that may be even better than what they originally imagined.

Oracle Red Bull Racing team is in a constant race against time to develop and optimize their cars for each of the 22 races in the Formula One season. The team has to make thousands of changes to the car's design between races, each of which needs to be simulated, manufactured, and tested. The team also has to work within new Formula One design regulations and established cost caps, making efficiency a top priority. Furthermore, changes in F1 rules limit the number of aerodynamics testing hours each team can run per week, making it crucial to optimize every second and achieve peak application performance.

TSPL, a coal-based thermal power plant located in Banawala village in Mansa district of Punjab, India, was facing issues with its traditional client-server environment. The applications were being served on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) connections from across thousands of kilometers away at Vedanta's central data center at Jharsuguda, one of the most industrially developed districts in the state of Odisha, India. Due to the remote location and connectivity issues, TSPL users often faced application latency or downtimes resulting in loss of productivity. Occasional maintenance issues of local desktop infrastructure added to the problems. TSPL decided to revamp its IT ecosystem to address the issues of IT availability and manageability.

Maverick Transportation, one of the largest flatbed transportation companies in the U.S., was seeking more efficient ways to distribute current information, reports, and metrics throughout the enterprise. The company faced challenges such as compliance with government regulations, safety concerns, ongoing fleet maintenance requirements, and a notoriously high driver turnover rate. In an industry where margins are slim, the ability to carefully scrutinize all aspects of its business was crucial to Maverick’s success. However, Maverick’s existing reporting tools made it difficult to combine operational and financial data, hindering the company’s ability to closely monitor key activities. The company embarked on an initiative to expand its financial reporting package and evaluated several reporting and business intelligence (BI) vendors.

Life sciences companies must contend with a vast base of information and figure out how to analyze it effectively to manage sales, marketing, and distribution activities. As companies within the pharmaceutical industry seek best-practice tools and techniques in an effort to compete, demand for MiPortal® is growing – in Australia and throughout other parts of the world as well. Mercurial saw the opportunity to bring a unique set of BI capabilities to the pharmaceutical marketplace, and then to expand into other verticals as well.

The Ministry of Public Administration of Mexico (MPA) was facing a challenge of low quality in public works projects related to roads, schools, parks, and other public facilities. The agency identified a need for a more comprehensive way to audit and control public works projects. They decided to create a business intelligence (BI) and data integration environment that could link several public information systems, create a consolidated and trusted source of project information, and present results on demand through interactive reports and dashboards.

Moneris Solutions, a leading credit card technology merchant-processing company in Canada, wanted to provide value-added services to its merchants by allowing them to view their debit, Visa, and MasterCard transaction data online. The company also wanted to empower its employees with self-service access to vital information. The challenge was to use business intelligence (BI) to create a self-service web application so customers can obtain a customized view of card payment activity, and access consolidated statements and reports via the Internet. The company also aimed to deploy self-service applications in various internal departments.

Mount Sinai Medical Center, a 1,200-bed facility on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, needed to devise a metrics-based business that holds physicians accountable for performance and quality. They wanted to restructure the reporting environment to improve the accessibility of critical information. The challenge was to resolve information-management and data-quality issues to enable consistent reporting results. They also needed to identify and share Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) via graphical, self-service reports.

Murphy-Hoffman Company (MHC) was facing challenges with its manual B2B processes, particularly in the exchange of common business documents such as purchase orders and parts catalogues. The purchase-order process was governed by an RPG program, which built a flat file and sent it to Caterpillar, one of its leading parts suppliers, via FTP. Caterpillar parsed the file and used e-mail to relay individual orders to its dealerships. Each Caterpillar supplier had to manually rekey the purchase-order information and fulfill the order, and MHC often lost track of the order status details. In other instances, MHC representatives had to phone Caterpillar to request parts from inventory, keeping customers waiting for as long as 20 minutes to determine availability. MHC wanted to use XML and Web technologies to streamline the parts-ordering process by automating the exchange of purchase orders and related business documents.

Neways, a company that designs, manufactures, and sells personal care, household, and nutritional products, faced the challenge of standardizing global reporting systems and processes. The company needed to provide business analysts with a self-service BI environment and deliver critical business information to a large, dispersed network of independent distributors. The structure of the organization created unique challenges for Neways’ IT team. Internally, business analysts needed self-service reports to help monitor finances, anticipate trends, and predict results based on current insight. Externally, Neways’ enormous and globally dispersed user base of independent distributors needed access to real-time production data to support sales efforts and track qualification for monthly bonuses.

Niemann Foods Inc., a regional retail store operator with approximately 100 stores in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, was battling for market share in the Midwest with a number of national and regional retail operators. With $650 million in annual sales, Niemann’s goal was to be a $1 billion company. This aggressive growth strategy drove the company’s senior managers to purchase Information Builders WebFOCUS, a business intelligence (BI) and analytics environment that delivers vital information to people at every level of the organization. The company was looking to develop an operational reporting environment that tracks sales activity, gross profits, and the movement of products. The retailer’s pervasive vision for end-user reporting entrusts business users with manipulating data, rather than requiring the IT department to continually develop reports in response to each request.

North American Lighting (NAL) was using a legacy reporting system to monitor its continuous manufacturing operations. However, when the legacy system was retired, the company saw it as an opportunity to standardize on a more versatile reporting system. The challenge was to consolidate disparate reporting tools to reduce costs and increase the number of report developers. The company needed a system that could deliver real-time data about shop floor operations as the pace of production accelerated. The IT department was tasked with migrating more than 150 legacy reports into the new environment and creating more than 100 new reports.

The North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company (NCFB) was facing several challenges. The company was using a manual process of writing COBOL batch programs to move data from one platform to another. This process was labor-intensive and consumed mainframe cycles, making the mainframe unavailable for ad hoc query and reporting activities. NCFB wanted to make claims and payment information available via the Web and reduce the load on mainframe information systems. The company also wanted to work with compressed DB2 data. To address these challenges, NCFB decided to build a data warehouse that could be periodically refreshed from the mainframe DB2 data. The warehouse, residing on a Microsoft Windows NT platform, would always be available for live queries, thus sparing the mainframe the arduous task of fielding ad hoc requests.

nVision Global, a leading provider of services for freight bill auditing and payment, logistics management, and claims processing, was looking to implement sophisticated analytics that incorporate interactive graphs and map-based reports. The goal was to provide customers with detailed information on shipping routes, rates, logistics, and carrier contracts. The company wanted to create a secure, web-based dashboard that lets customers view their logistics information online through a SaaS model. However, the existing reporting was limited and required extensive staff support. nVision wanted to take these services to the next level and make clients self-sufficient by adding more analytical functionality, better drill-down capabilities, and a more elegant user experience.

OFS Brands, a leading supplier of contract furniture, was facing a challenge with its reporting process. The company used to send standard reports to its sales force via email. However, these reports were not interactive and did not allow for ad hoc queries, data visualization, or drill-downs. If a sales representative needed specific information, they would have to request the IT department to develop a custom report. This process was not efficient and put a heavy load on the IT department. The company wanted to give the sales team more control and reduce the custom reporting load on the IT department.

Oxford Properties Group, a global commercial real estate owner, developer, and manager, needed to upgrade its business intelligence (BI) infrastructure to simplify the demands of managing its properties. The company required advanced reporting and analysis capabilities to support its plans for global expansion. The challenge was to develop an enterprise BI solution that could deliver information from a data warehouse or production system across multiple platforms and databases. The company also needed a system that could infuse information into the daily activities of busy property managers.

Ozburn-Hessey Logistics (OHL) was facing a challenge in providing its customers with timely and accurate reporting about its performance across all its lines of business. The company had a different customer-facing web application for each of its four lines of business: freight forwarding, customs brokerage, warehousing/e-fulfillment, and transportation. Each application had a separate URL and required a unique log-in procedure. This made the reporting process time-consuming and cumbersome. OHL recognized that multiple websites and manual reporting did not represent a world-class experience. They wanted to provide customers with a user-friendly, one-stop portal that could deliver comprehensive performance information for all lines of business.

Paradies Lagardère, a retail chain operating in airports across the U.S. and Canada, was looking to streamline its business operations and merchandising procedures. The company wanted to unlock information trapped in its legacy systems and enable advanced data analysis, reporting, and forecasting. The goal was to acquire an enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution that could provide consistent and timely insight into corporate performance, create more accurate forecasts, and help store managers maximize the effectiveness of promotional and merchandising strategies.

Parker Hannifin Corporation, a leading diversified manufacturer of motion and control technologies, was facing a challenge in deriving focused, customized reports from data stored on the corporate mainframe. The company had committed itself to a corporate-wide Win Strategy – a comprehensive continuous-improvement program based on a three-tiered foundation: premier customer service, strong financial performance, and profitable growth. However, measuring the results in a quantitative way wasn’t easy as IT professionals had to supply continually updated information about the many tasks and transactions contained in the Win Strategy metrics. The company needed to create an integrated, enterprise-wide reporting environment that allows users to easily obtain customized reports based on focused subsets of data from the corporate mainframe, and other data sources in the future.