Claims Recovery Service was struggling with managing compliance and audits due to inadequate processes. They were using manual processes such as spreadsheets, stored documents, email, and other office tools. The company had to comply with numerous financial rules and regulations, which was a time-consuming process with a high risk of missing something. They relied on documents in hundreds of file folders in multiple network drives, each with its own security permission. The company maintained a list of policies on spreadsheets and Sharepoint sites, but none of the information was linked, making it nearly impossible to update policies or even know they existed. As regulations grew more complex, customer compliance demands multiplied, and the cost of noncompliance grew steeper, it quickly became clear spreadsheets weren’t enough. The company was spending more than $500,000 a year managing compliance.

Before the YMCA of Greater Rochester implemented an employee hotline system, the organization relied on a whistleblower policy to help them encourage employees to report their concerns. But on the heels of high-profile corporate scandals in the early 2000s, the organization realized it needed to formalize its reporting process and demonstrate its commitment to transparency. With more than 3,000 employees in 17 branches, across five counties in western New York, Fernán Cepero, Chief Human Resources Officer and Chief Diversity Officer wanted to ensure that all employees had a voice and felt like they were being heard.

Kamehameha Schools, one of the world's largest charitable organizations, faced a significant challenge in ensuring the safety of its students. With a large number of staff and students, the school needed a system to promptly discover and address any issues of misconduct or potential misconduct. The school's CEO, Jack Wong, emphasized the importance of providing safe and healthy learning environments for students to flourish. To foster safety and transparency, Kamehameha decided to expand its compliance helpline to make it easy for all members of the school community, including students, parents, and staff, to report concerning behavior.

Guthrie, a non-profit, multi-specialty integrated health system serving Pennsylvania and New York states, needed a way to effectively collect, assess, and act on feedback from its stakeholders. The organization wanted to ensure it was providing an environment where stakeholders, both internal and external, felt comfortable expressing their concerns. The challenge was to maintain the legacy of the organization in the pursuit of patient care while also ensuring that stakeholders felt heard and that their feedback was being acted upon.

University Health (UH) had hundreds of policies and procedures that needed to be distributed and attested to across the organization. Prior to implementing PolicyTech, UH was faced with managing hundreds of policies and procedures and tracking various documents without a centralized system to support their needed order of operations. UH is required to have standardized policies and procedures in place for the staff to follow, and continuous control over that process must start at the beginning.

ECHO Health, a company operating in highly regulated sectors, had to ensure its third-party vendors satisfy any related requirements. This involved sending a periodic compliance survey to around 10 vendors who handled a variety of work for ECHO, such as printing or call center services, which involved the handling of regulated information. Those involved in assessing third-party risk at ECHO would rely on tools like spreadsheets, calendar reminders and emailed forms to track vendor compliance. However, to support a recent opportunity for rapid growth, ECHO saw a major increase in the number of third-party vendors necessary for its operations. Each new vendor represented a new need to evaluate risk. The 130-person firm was on the precipice of a major business opportunity. It recognized the growth potential could only be realized with an efficient, scalable strategy to vet and monitor third-party partnerships.

San Diego County, spanning 4,260 square miles with a population of approximately three million, provides a significant number of regional services to local taxpayers. The County's fleet management division supports over 3,800 vehicles and provides similar services for other government agencies. However, in the '90s, the County faced the challenge of merging two separate fleet operations and migrating from a mainframe application to a client-server. They were also challenged to be competitive when compared to the private sector. These unique challenges led the County to seek bids for a new fleet management information system that could address all issues. The County also faced the threat of privatization and was selected to participate in the County of San Diego’s first managed competition program.

The City of Portland’s CityFleet department is comprised of six shops and six fuel stations with a budget of $35.8 million. CityFleet is operated by 76 employees that manage the acquisition, repair, maintenance, parts, and fueling of a diverse fleet comprised of 2,850 vehicles and pieces of equipment valued at over $110 million. The fleet serves all of the bureaus in Portland and in order to keep up with demand, CityFleet estimates that nearly $300K worth of maintenance parts sits on the shelves at any given moment. CityFleet processes over 23,000 work orders a year and the process of filling in missing data and closing them was labor intensive.

The City of Chesapeake’s Central Fleet Management (CFM) division, led by Fleet Manager George Hrichak, oversees some 1800 vehicles with an annual operating budget of $9.5 million. The CFM is guided in their work by the division’s mission statement: To provide efficient and cost-effective fleet management services for a safe, economical, and environmentally sound fleet that meets the needs of our customers and which protects the investment of our citizens. In 2002 the City of Chesapeake sought to modernize the technology used by the CFM and seek greater efficiency by moving from an outdated mainframe system to AssetWork’s fully web-enabled fleet management solution; FleetFocus. The transition to FleetFocus provided the City with the robust maintenance and reporting capabilities needed to maintain the fleet’s light and heavy duty vehicles, stationary assets, tools and even the city’s boats.

The state IT organization was struggling with centralizing a large number of virtualization resources that were spread across separately managed vCenter and XenServer clusters. VM sprawl was costing the state thousands of dollars a month in infrastructure and licensing charges, and delays in resource provisioning resulted in a sharp increase of public cloud-based shadow IT environments that put sensitive agency data and security at risk.

Intesa Sanpaolo, a leading banking group in Italy, launched a strategic digital transformation initiative in 2018. The strategy was to embrace a microservices and container architecture, and migrate from monolithic to multi-tier applications. The goal was to accelerate development cycles, shrink application footprints for more flexibility, and improve scalability and reliability. The bank’s IT group was transforming itself into a software company with a bimodal IT model based on modern CI/CD practices. At the center of the initiative was the challenge of running containers managed by Kubernetes. The bank first tested pilot container projects by running them on its legacy virtualization infrastructure. Those pilots have been successful and have been brought into production, but the desire to look for the best solution to manage cloud-native technologies, both on-premises and in the cloud, has pushed research into understanding which technologies to adopt, and how they compare with each other and which are the best uses for each of them.

Over the last few years, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center has expanded to meet the growing needs of the scientific community. To better serve the community, the Center combined previously separate organizations, including a thriving natural history museum, and quickly became a 700-person entity, with 100 resident scientists, 200 guest researchers, and an IT staff of 35 to support these professionals. Additionally, a 30 million Euro grant from the Dutch Economic Structure Enhancement Fund allowed expansion of state-of-the-art laboratories and research collaboration, and the initiation of one of the world’s largest projects for natural history digitization to date. Concurrently, DNA sequencing, 3D, and GIS technologies led to the proliferation of scientists’ data sets. Combined with the trend to analyze relationships between species, the Center required more scalable and powerful compute resources. By the end of 2013, the Center’s IT department had consolidated resources and was ready to address its systems’ constraints to support the next phase of organizational growth.

Voices.com, an online marketplace connecting businesses with professional voice talent, has a rapidly growing user base worldwide. The company prides itself on its fast customer service, with most projects completed within 24 to 48 hours. As such, application performance is critical. However, as the user base continued to expand globally, the Voices.com team needed increasingly robust tools to monitor performance. Their existing solutions, including high-level server monitoring from Rackspace and insight into mobile and desktop performance from Google Website Optimizer, often failed to pinpoint the exact source of performance issues. A PHP-based solution from Zend required a proprietary server solution but in a semi-rigid configuration.

Mural.ly, a collaboration suite that helps creative teams work better together, was facing challenges in monitoring its rapidly growing user base. The company launched in September 2012 and, in just nine months, grew to serve 125,000 users in 161 countries. High performance was critical to its continued success. The company was getting a lot of exposure in tech media outlets, so its traffic came in unpredictable bursts. If the platform was not up and running, first-time visitors probably wouldn’t give it a second chance. In its first few months, Mural.ly experimented with different platform configurations to determine the right environment for accommodating its rapid growth. The company finally settled on Windows Azure Web Sites, a rapid development offering that lets companies create and deploy web apps in seconds using ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js.

Ticketfly is a rapidly growing company that provides a data-driven ticketing and marketing platform for professional event promoters and venues in the United States and Canada. The company's growth has brought its own set of challenges. As the company gears up for another summer concert season, it is aware that its system will undergo an immense amount of stress. To prepare for that, the company needs to achieve a 10x increase in site performance. For Ticketfly, site performance is far from a vague ideal — it’s a business imperative. Event attendees are looking to spend their discretionary time on a first-rate experience and they have zero tolerance for slow or unresponsive systems in any part of the process. If Ticketfly messes up, it's bad for them, but it's even worse for the venues. They provide key support to those venues. Their success is linked to Ticketfly's. And the more popular Ticketfly gets, the more insight it needs to maintain the highest levels of performance.

Zapier, a company that enables non-technical users to push data between hundreds of web applications, was facing a challenge in automating and provisioning servers for optimal performance. The company's environment consisted of 50 Linux servers on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Django application split across several servers, and a backend consisting of a dynamic number of celery task workers fed by messages published to a RabbitMQ cluster. They also maintained a number of internal web services on nginx in front of Gunicorn and Node.js processes. Redis handled simple key and value stores, with logging handled by Graylog2 and ElasticSearch. However, they realized that no level of automation would be sufficient without an effective monitoring solution in place. They needed a tool that could provide immediate alerts when something was breaking and could be easily implemented into their environment.

CURE.org, a non-profit organization that provides treatment for children with physical disabilities in the developing world, was facing challenges in managing its website, which is the primary channel for fundraising and communication. As the organization expanded its operations worldwide, the website began to experience bursts in traffic that were challenging to manage. They were also experiencing random outages that were infrequent and short in duration, but they couldn’t reproduce them or understand the issue. In addition, they launched their first native iOS app, CUREkids, and needed to accurately monitor its performance.

GiftCard.com was on a very aggressive growth path, experiencing 100 percent year-over-year growth from 2011 to 2012. This growth presented a serious challenge from an IT perspective, especially considering that the company does a large percentage of its business during the year-end holidays. The company was concerned about scaling to meet anticipated demand during the final quarter of 2012. A few key performance issues were the source of particular concern. Customers often call 1-800-GIFT CARD® to make orders, and the speed of the admin website was having an impact on the overall customer experience. Having slow admin systems means that customers need to stay on the phone longer. For years, the IT team had heard complaints about the speed of admin screens — the average load time was around eight seconds — but they couldn’t identify the source of the problem.

Rumble Entertainment, a gaming company, was facing challenges in diagnosing performance issues in their applications. The company was using open source tools for monitoring their applications, but the process was inefficient and time-consuming. They lacked easy access to historical data and had limited error monitoring capabilities. The company considered developing an in-house tool for monitoring applications, but it would require significant time and resources, which they could not afford to spare. The company needed a solution that could provide real-time data in an easy-to-consume format and track application latency.

New Destination Travel was looking to upgrade its Microsoft ATP environment. They were specifically interested in a higher catch rate of phishing, DLP and full-suite protection. For years, the company relied on Microsoft ATP for security in its Microsoft 365 environment. However, they were troubled by how many phishing attacks reached the inbox. Day after day, a new campaign was visible to users. Beyond that, they needed a better way to search and quarantine or destroy messages. With Microsoft, the process was clunky. As a busy IT admin, Roy needed a simple, fast, and effective solution. Finally, Roy needed a better inbound and outbound DLP solution. As a travel agency, they deal with a lot of credit card numbers to book their customers’ travel. That means they need to be extra careful in ensuring those numbers don’t get into the wrong hands.

Delta Dental is a dental insurance organization that needs to ensure its computing platforms are secure and comply with strict security & compliance practices. They are bound to ensure the safety of client data and need to be sure they are compliant with HIPAA, NIST & CIS Standards. With the growing need for compute capability and the development of advanced customer-centric applications, Delta Dental has adopted a hybrid cloud approach, adding AWS services to enable rapid application development and bolster their traditional data centers capability. Rapid development and the ability to deliver new services come with the risk of increasing the attack surface of these systems. To ensure ongoing compliance in both the AWS and data center environments, Delta Dental needed a solution that could give them real-time visibility, enable on-demand compliance status reports, and provide the tools for rapid remediation.

Arirang TV, a leading global broadcaster in Korea, faced challenges in providing high-quality video streaming to its overseas users, who represented 85% of total web visitors. The poor network environment made it difficult for these users to watch videos properly. Moreover, the rise in popularity of various devices changed the environment for watching broadcasts, increasing demand for ‘Full Contents Review’ and the expected level of quality. Arirang needed to create an environment where viewers could watch programs smoothly on PCs, mobile devices, and smart TVs, not just via satellite.

Square Enix, a leading gaming company in Japan, was facing challenges in providing a stable network infrastructure for online gaming. The company was using several CDN vendors concurrently to ensure service continuity. However, using multiple CDN vendors was costly, and the company was looking for ways to reduce these costs. They formed an interdepartmental professional team with the goal of reducing CDN costs. Every year, the Square Enix CDN team compares current vendors and other vendors including those outside Japan. To provide gamers with the best environment that uses cutting-edge and high-quality service, vendors are compared and replaced annually.

In 2014, Xero was experiencing strong growth and needed new technologies to support their next wave of growth. They needed technologies that would enable fast scalability, fast infrastructure deployment, and automated security. Xero solved the first two challenges by moving their IT infrastructure from a traditional outsourced datacenter environment to a public cloud environment— Amazon Web Services. However, finding a security system that was fully automated and could keep up with their fast-paced DevOps environment was a challenge. Most IT security products on the market would not perform efficiently in such an environment. Xero’s lead security architect, Aaron McKeown, wanted to provide Xero’s DevOps teams with a set of strong security controls that could be baked into their DevOps processes, not bolted on after the fact.

P. Flanigan & Sons, a Baltimore-based contracting company specializing in transportation-related construction projects and materials, was seeking a replacement for spreadsheets to streamline their estimating process. The company initially purchased estimating software from another supplier, but the system proved difficult to use. After a 30-day trial, they opted out. The company needed a solution that was easy to use and could provide a comprehensive view of all costs associated with a job. They also required a system that could meet the specific bid structure requirements of large general contractors while maintaining their own established ways of preparing bids.

Pace Construction, a company based in St. Louis providing heavy highway, bridge, and asphalt services, was previously using Hard Dollar (now InEight) to estimate and bid their jobs. However, they were unsatisfied with the system for a number of reasons. The system was described as 'overkill' with many extraneous packages that were not needed, and features like custom reports, which were needed, were not included. The implementation of user suggestions was slow, and there was no way to access information if they decided to switch to another estimating system.

R.D. Johnson Excavating Company, based in Lawrence, Kansas, was facing challenges with their traditional pencil and paper method of estimating projects. The company specializes in excavating, grading, paving, utilities, and materials. The manual method of estimating was not efficient and lacked strategic planning. The company was looking for a solution that could streamline their bidding process, especially for repetitive bids such as utility work and street work projects. The company also wanted a solution that could handle large scale projects with ease and keep track of each item that they bid.

The University of Washington's Civil and Environmental Engineering program aims to prepare its students for real-world construction-related professions. A significant part of this preparation involves familiarizing students with actual tools used extensively in heavy construction, such as the B2W Estimating Software. The challenge lies in effectively integrating this software into the curriculum and ensuring that students gain valuable experience with it. The university also aims to expose students to the estimating concepts and workflows behind the tool.

Arup, a global firm of over 14,000 specialists working across 90-plus disciplines in more than 34 countries, was facing issues in the quality and accuracy of drawings and the consistency of manual document markups for design review. The lack of standard markups within manual review processes kept stakeholders occupied with document management as opposed to adding value to projects by focusing on design and execution. Review timeframes were also bloated due to the reliance on email for the heavy project collaboration, as some projects involved stakeholders working in remote offices across the globe. Certain projects also yielded issues for Arup when it came to the quality of as-built drawings and scans.

Ballymore Group, an Irish developer, was tasked with the construction of two towers near London’s Canary Wharf, a project known as Wardian London. The project was complex and large-scale, involving the installation of about 4,000 balconies—40 per floor—across the two towers. The challenge was to track these individual balconies throughout the construction lifecycle, from preconstruction to turnover. In addition to a tight schedule, Ballymore wanted to gather data incrementally to improve their processes going forward. The project required a solution that could provide real-time information sharing between the field and office, and help keep track of progress by commenting, marking up, and logging activity.