IT-Informatik, a provider of SAP solution hosting and cloud services for medium-sized companies, aimed to boost retention and win new business by creating highly competitive and flexible offerings. However, its complex hosting environment made it difficult to set up client environments cost-effectively. With existing systems at or near capacity, IT-Informatik looked for ways to expand the scope, performance and capabilities of its hosting and cloud services. The company realized that if it could accelerate the deployment of new SAP application environments, it could onboard new customers more rapidly and respond faster to clients’ changing business needs.

The Lefdal Mine in Norway, once a source for olivine, has been sitting empty for decades. The owners of the mine, a group of local residents and farmers, were looking for a way to utilize the massive underground space. The idea to transform the mine into a datacenter came about seven years ago. The natural security of the existing structure, Norway’s cool climate, and surplus hydropower made it an ideal location for a green IT environment. However, the transformation of the mine into a datacenter presented several challenges. These included the need for a reliable and green energy source, efficient cooling systems, and a scalable and flexible infrastructure that could accommodate the rapid growth in datacenter capacity.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) was facing challenges in managing its operations effectively in a challenging environment where accurate data retrieval was required for faster decision-making and effective policy-making. The organization was struggling with keeping projects on track and under tight budgetary control due to lack of tight control over people, processes, and finances. ICAR wanted to improve upon this by driving greater transparency and more effective reporting. The organization recognized that more efficient information and financial management was paramount to its progress and sought to modernize, automate, and integrate transactional and reporting processes to improve transparency and efficiency.

The Iraq Stock Exchange (ISX) was facing a significant challenge in maintaining the security of its online trading platform. The ISX needed comprehensive database monitoring and greater visibility across its online trading infrastructure to rapidly detect security threats and protect online trades. The existing manual security monitoring processes were not sufficient to meet these needs. The ISX needed a solution that could provide near-real-time visibility into database activity and its infrastructure, and use sophisticated sense analytics to baseline normal behavior, detect anomalies, and uncover threats.

Iskra Mehanizmi, a manufacturer of electromechanical products, sought to diversify its product range by moving into the automotive sector. This strategic decision led to an increasingly complex supply chain, which the company’s legacy information systems were struggling to manage. The company's transition from specializing in one particular range of products to being involved in three quite different industry sectors complicated their extended supply chain. Their in-house IT system, running on an Oracle database platform and HP servers, was not equipped to handle the processes required by the company’s new business ventures. Extending this solution would have meant considerable development work, prompting the IT department to look for a new solution.

JCC Payment Systems designed an ambitious strategy to service all SEPA transactions on Cyprus. The company wanted to ensure that its bank and creditor customers in Cyprus could obtain the benefits of the streamlined payment process. After top-level discussions with banking industry leaders, it was decided that JCC would act as the central SEPA transaction hub for the whole of Cyprus. However, the company faced a tight deadline set by the European Commission to achieve its goal.

The justice ministry in central Europe was facing challenges with its existing manual and paper-based processes which were slow and prone to human error. The IT systems infrastructure largely comprised disconnected systems and data silos, thus limiting data access and collaboration and, ultimately, compromising the value of the data available to stakeholders. The ministry sought a solution to automate its relation technique, consolidating all case file and judicial data, streamlining administrative workflows and improving collaboration. The objective was to both improve efficiency and enable better decisions.

Kronopol, a subsidiary of the Swiss Krono Holding AG and a world leader in the wood-based products industry, was facing a challenge with its growing databases that supported the company’s SAP applications. The IT team was spending increasing amounts of time maintaining and administering these databases. The growing data volumes were also affecting business-critical functions such as daily backups. Kronopol needed a solution that would support the data explosion resulting from business growth, while keeping IT spending lean. The company was looking for a solution that would not only address its immediate data management needs and cut storage costs, but also offer a strategic solution to help manage long-term data growth.

A new unit of a Latin American engineering firm was struggling with unreliable financial reporting, which prevented it from understanding the true profitability of its products. The lack of accurate data made it difficult for the unit to identify inefficiencies, remove unprofitable products, and understand the real profitability of its product lines. This situation was hindering the company's ability to compete effectively on a corporate-wide level. The firm's IT department decided to replace multiple independent systems in the new unit with integrated solutions.

Latrobe Community Health Service (LCHS) was facing challenges in managing its expanding data volumes and complying with stringent reporting requirements for healthcare. The company’s IT team needed to increase the flexibility, reliability, and speed of data backup and recovery. The non-profit healthcare provider’s programs generate a massive volume of highly sensitive patient data daily, the handling and protection of which is heavily regulated. Moreover, some data is required to be retained for as long as 20 years. Full-system backups that routinely took up to 36 hours amplified that risk. Beyond risk mitigation, data protection also affects Latrobe’s competitiveness as the company pursues government funding.

The communications company was facing a mature marketplace with declining margins for traditional revenue-driving products such as voice and SMS. The rise of small and agile mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) intensified the threat of once-loyal customers defecting. The company wanted to drive profitability by attracting increased spend with innovative products. However, the company's legacy systems increased lead times for new products substantially, especially compared to recent entrants with fewer and more modern business systems.

The leading real estate developer wanted to increase its share of its domestic real estate market by taking on additional builds each year without increasing headcount. The company was facing challenges with its manual, paper-based processes which were time-consuming and increased the risk of misplacing key approval documents. This reduced the company's ability to ensure that materials reached construction sites in a timely manner. The company decided to replace as many manual processes as possible with automated, integrated business processes.

Love and Quiches Gourmet strictly controls its food products, generating thousands of lot numbers during manufacturing. Every item in each step of production carries full lot identification, from raw materials such as eggs, to batches of cake batter, to storage and shipment of finished products. However, the organization used various software applications to manage its highly involved manufacturing process and manual, error-prone spreadsheets to track lot numbers. The business lacked one integrated system that could process orders and track raw materials. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a recall, manual tracking made it difficult to trace an ingredient’s origin and then identify the affected batches and finished products. As a result, Love and Quiches Gourmet chose the most costly solution: discarding any products that could possibly contain a recalled ingredient. The lack of an integrated system also hindered the auditing process and made it difficult to capture production costs. Love and Quiches Gourmet always passed its FDA audits; however, because records resided in multiple applications, the auditing process was excessively time-consuming. The same issue applied to production costing, making it difficult to aggregate the data to a granular level.

The major utility organization aimed to expand its services to new regions in its domestic market while continually enhancing customer services. To achieve these goals, the company wanted to ensure that it could onboard and manage new suppliers and customers without impacting service quality. The company decided to upgrade its SAP solutions – used by thousands of employees across the business – to the latest versions. The organization targeted a fresh IT infrastructure to support the new requirements.

Mankind Pharma, one of the fastest-growing pharmaceutical companies in India, was facing challenges due to poor visibility and integration across its extensive operations. The lack of a unified way of controlling and monitoring business activity made it difficult for decision-makers to gain the trusted insight they needed to optimize operations and plan strategy accordingly. This was holding the company back from making the most of growth opportunities in India's booming pharmaceuticals market. For instance, onboarding new carrying and forwarding agents took several weeks, by which time valuable opportunities to expand might be missed.

Masterpet, a New Zealand-based pet food and supplies company, has experienced significant growth and expansion over the past decade. This growth has necessitated a shift in the company's business model, from a small, family-operated business to a larger, corporate-led entity. This transition has presented a number of challenges, particularly in terms of managing change within the organization. As Masterpet grew, it became clear that managing the change process was a leadership issue that needed to be addressed at each level of the organization. The company needed to maintain the agility and family-driven values that made the business a success, while driving the necessary corporate changes to deliver efficient and optimum business expansion opportunities.

Mizuho Bank, Ltd.’s aging system lacked the flexibility and support necessary to meet its goals of delivering an improved customer experience through its services and enhancing business continuity while decreasing IT costs. The bank wanted to make better use of advanced risk management capabilities and offer industry knowledge to help develop new products and offerings and expand to non-Japanese overseas customers. Another priority for Mizuho was establishing a platform that provided stability and continuity while creating new, innovative Internet and mobile services at a low cost and within a short development and deployment window.

Navneet Education Limited, the publishing arm of Navneet Group, aimed to expand its operations across its domestic market in India. However, the company lacked an accurate, comprehensive view of its operational costs, which limited its ability to allocate the necessary investment to pursue growth opportunities. The manufacturing, sales, and accounting functions of the publishing business operated independently of one another, making the process of gathering data for group financial reporting complex and time-consuming. This process involved collating information from across the business held in multiple different spreadsheets and emails.

Nuance Communications, Inc. is a company that specializes in voice recognition, natural language understanding, reasoning, and systems integration. They aim to create technology that makes it easier for humans to interact with computers. To run live customer-interaction environments for its clients, and to refine the speech models that power them, Nuance relies on high-performance computing (HPC). They compare spoken words against a language model that is a statistical representation of all the data previously collected. As well as using HPC to enable real-time understanding of speech, they continually fine-tune their underlying language models to improve their speed and accuracy. To deliver on its promise of facilitating human-computer interactions, Nuance must ingest, store and analyze huge—and ever-growing— volumes of speech data in real time.

NetApp Customer Success Services (CSS) provides around-the-clock support for customers using NetApp comprehensive storage and data management solutions. To assess and solve technical issues, the NetApp CSS team needs to acquire specific information from their customers. The key artifact needed is the core file – a log that is created when a program encounters an error and terminates unexpectedly – which is then analyzed to discover the root of the problem and develop a diagnosis and repair plan. Previously, NetApp used a web-based upload site (HTTPS) to upload clients’ core files. However, the upload site could only support transfer of files up to 4 GB in size; anything larger would fail. This became a critical problem when customers presented core files of up to 130 GB. As a last resort for high-priority cases, NetApp occasionally retrieved core files by sending a support engineer to the customer site to physically load the data onto a drive. But this method was expensive, time consuming and did not meet the stringent security that NetApp requires.

PATRIZIA Immobilien AG, a real estate company with around 600 employees in over ten countries, was facing challenging market conditions. The company wished to retain focus on customer service and added value, but complex IT systems were diverting energy and effort from the core business aims. As the company expanded geographically and won new business, the SAP and system administration workload grew significantly, drawing valuable IT staff away from positive business development roles. The senior management team realized that IT systems operations might be better handled by an external service provider, enabling its internal IT team to focus on pro-active business analysis and support. The key objectives were to improve customer service by increasing system availability, reduce business risk by improving system resilience, and cut operational costs.

Pentair, a global water, fluid, thermal management, and equipment protection company, was evolving from a holding company to a diversified industrial manufacturing company. This evolution necessitated a change in the way it managed its operations, and to gain greater insight over the data and processes used in each area of its businesses. In 2009, Pentair’s HR function began working towards this global standardization objective. The HR team saw an opportunity to replace a number of localized systems and spreadsheet-based processes with a single, integrated solution based on Oracle PeopleSoft Human Capital Management software. In 2012, while the HR standardization initiative was underway, Pentair also completed a merger with Tyco Flow Control, and the company doubled in size overnight. It grew from a $4 billion to a nearly $8 billion sales company, and from 15,000 to 30,000 employees.

Heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting represent the largest energy costs for businesses; worldwide buildings consume 42 percent of all electricity. Understanding the detailed usage patterns of these services within buildings and having the ability to manage these services more efficiently will deliver cost savings to the bottom line very quickly. Eighty percent of buildings are already constructed; affordable building management systems need to be built around flexible and configurable hardware that can be retrofitted. The cost of such integrated solutions has historically been high and not integrated into small or medium sized building developments, as it was difficult to justify the additional expense. This left many commercial buildings with no efficient way to manage their operational costs related to heating, cooling and lighting.

Prevea Health, a multispecialty physician group, adopted the patient-centered medical home care delivery model to improve the health and satisfaction of patients. However, they faced challenges in automating population health management and patient engagement. Their system did not scale well, and care management processes were largely manual, with limited automation and rudimentary registries. They needed a solution that could help them manage their populations more effectively and efficiently. They also needed a solution that could integrate smoothly with their Epic EHR system.

R+V Versicherung AG, a leading insurance provider in Germany, was aiming to build the “Insurance of the Future.” The company wanted to provide streamlined insurance services across Europe, with low operational expenses and commercially attractive premium rates. However, their existing business management solutions were not capable of providing a global, enterprise-wide view of finances and workflow processes. The company wanted to understand its own operational performance in more detail, manage finances more efficiently, and introduce automation of standardized processes wherever possible. Over the years, R+V had built up a range of heavily customized dedicated applications to manage premium collections, and its technical landscape was gradually becoming more complex, with variations at each office location. In a rapidly shifting insurance marketplace, which is also subject to new and constantly changing regulations, application complexity hindered R+V’s ability to respond to business needs.

Racold Thermo, a leading manufacturer of water heaters in India, was facing fierce competition in the rapidly growing water-heating industry. The company wanted to optimize its sales and distribution activities to capture a larger market share and increase profitability. However, the lack of integration between its many branches was hindering its ability to gain deep insight into sales and control over manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution operations. The company needed a solution that would provide a clear view of market demand and customer buying habits to shape its sales strategy effectively. The limitations of its existing business planning applications necessitated new tools and technologies.

Unilever Europe, a well-known consumer products giant, had expanded in a siloed fashion, by country and division. This resulted in a loose federation of business groups and geographies operating across 24 countries, all using multiple ERP systems. With so many different finance and accounting processes under three separate leadership teams, the result was a complex, inefficient organization that impeded growth. In 2005, Unilever Europe's leadership team made a strategic decision to integrate the company’s multiple business units into a single, unified Pan-European organization, but needed to implement the systems and framework to enable this goal. The diversity of cultures, policies and language across Europe further complicated the challenge, as did the varying levels of technology across the company’s business units, which ranged from advanced to outmoded paper-based systems.

Resene Paints Ltd., a multinational paint manufacturer, developed a cloud-based online tool to help customers accurately and efficiently estimate paint volumes for large-scale construction projects. The manufacturer’s small IT department sought a simple, cost-effective solution for publishing onsite data to the application’s cloud-hosted database. They needed a solution that would not only be efficient but also reduce the ongoing costs for the offering, including development, licensing, and support.

Royal Canin, a leading global supplier of pet food, was looking to improve customer service and launch a digital transformation for online sales channels. However, a series of mergers and acquisitions had left the company with disparate IT systems and business processes, making it difficult to launch new initiatives quickly across its global market. The company was facing delays in implementing major changes across its worldwide network due to the need to incorporate each new process in a multitude of IT systems. This was compromising their ability to react rapidly to changes in the market, threatening to dull their competitive edge.

SES Platform Services, a subsidiary of world-leading satellite operator SES, operates one of Europe’s most modern broadcasting centers and provides a comprehensive range of services that include content management, archiving, preparation for playout and file delivery. As the broadcast industry widely began to adopt file-based workflows, SES was confronted with a request for a file-based transfer mechanism to speed content ingest and reduce delivery times to VOD platforms worldwide, more than File Transfer Protocol (FTP) file delivery could offer. The playout services are particularly time-critical, as consumers await the latest episodes of their favorite shows. Faced with quick deadlines and driven to stay competitive, SES Platform Services required the transfer solution to be fast and also reliable because missing or defective files are unacceptable in this business. As a service provider, SES Platform Services has to tailor the delivery workflow to suit the needs of different customers and their content providers. Thus they were looking for an advanced solution that would enable tight integration into their existing master system and offer the flexibility to accommodate different workflow steps and diverse client requirements.