Clarks, a fast-growing shoe retailer, needed to continually provide the business with feedback about which products are a hit with customers, and use those insights to inform future designs. The company extended the SAP solution supporting its UK business to include its US and Asian operations, enabling it to avoid the overhead of managing multiple systems and simplify analysis of its enterprise-wide operations. However, the company faced challenges with its existing storage infrastructure, which was impacting batch processing times and potentially affecting operations.

The Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) was under pressure to increase the value it offers. The business wanted greater support in attracting and retaining high calibre people, managing performance and ensuring talent was developed through appropriate learning opportunities. There was also a drive to reduce costs, improve efficiency and improve quality of service. As far as the provision of basic HR services was concerned, CFS had a number of challenges. Its general HR administration system was located in-house while the payroll system was outsourced. The two systems were linked by batch interfaces which impacted the timeliness and accuracy of information, a particular challenge when creating the monthly payroll. There was no self-service access to HR information and details were gathered on paper forms or through emails and then keyed into the in-house system or sent to the payroll provider for keying. Management information, insight and analysis were difficult to obtain and the cost of running the two systems was high.

Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.

Coca Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) was running its business on a multitude of different technologies. Manual searches and information delays were creating operational bottlenecks and business inefficiencies. CCBCC would manually enter the equipment services work order into their legacy system when work orders arrived via phone or fax from their customers. This process was time consuming and open to error, and so CCBCC began to question the potential cost of these errors. CCBCC needed to quickly accept and return information electronically without error and focus on software replacement as a means to improve cross-application and system integration. They needed a flexible and robust system to integrate internally with SAP as well as other existing systems.

Coop Estense, a retail company, needed to ensure compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) across all its endpoints. The company had to manage patches, control network access, and guard against potential intrusions. Initially, the company used a manual approach, deploying patches and firewall rules necessary for compliance. While this approach brought compliance into the company, maintaining it in the long term proved to be complex. The company needed a solution that could automate compliance across all endpoints without adding to the management burden of the IT personnel.

Duke Energy, the largest electric power holding company in the United States, provides natural gas transmission and distribution services to approximately 500,000 customers in Ohio and Kentucky. To ensure a safe and efficient supply of gas to homes and businesses across these states, and manage complex pricing, billing and gas delivery arrangements with suppliers, Duke Energy depends on the Gas Transportation Management System (GTMS). For many years, Duke Energy has used Oracle Utilities Billing Component software to underpin the GTMS. When the company’s existing version of the Oracle solution went out of support, Duke Energy knew that it needed to act fast to upgrade to a newer version. The company faced a strict timeframe for the implementation due to operational constraints. With demand for natural gas typically reaching its peak between November and March, during the so-called ‘heating season,’ the implementation had to be completed outside of these months in order to minimize disruption to the business.

Dundee City Council, serving a population of 145,000 citizens in Scotland, was challenged to do more with less, and identified IT as an area in which it could cut costs. The council needed to make cost savings without impacting the quality of service to citizens. The council soon identified its IT infrastructure as an area where changes were urgently needed to avoid service interruptions, and also where significant savings could be made. Convinced that the answer to its IT challenges lay in virtualization, Dundee City Council began formulating a plan to consolidate physical servers to virtual instances hosted by fewer machines.

Earth Signal Processing, a global leader in seismic data processing, was facing a challenge. Their clients in the oil and gas industry needed the results of their 2D and 3D seismic programs as quickly as possible to make informed decisions about land purchases and drilling locations. However, Earth Signal was constrained by the physical limits of its data center in terms of floor space and rack space. They needed to increase their data-crunching capabilities to meet the demands of their clients. The company was also under pressure to keep costs low, which meant they needed to find a solution that could maximize core and thread count within their existing infrastructure.

Anticipating continued growth for its flourishing global business, Edwards needed to extend its SAP environment. The company sought a flexible hosting solution with the scalability to accommodate current and future expansion, as well as rapid provisioning capabilities to support quickly changing business demands. And, with operations in 30 countries worldwide, it was critical that Edwards teamed with a hosting provider offering global resources and an extensive international reach.

Fabler Studio, a video postproduction services company based in New York City, was looking for a way to differentiate its services in a highly competitive market. The company was interested in facial imaging technology that could capture emotional responses to its video content, providing immediate feedback and insights into consumer reactions. This technology would provide a unique selling point for the company, setting it apart from competitors and offering a more comprehensive service to its clients.

Fiducia & GAD IT AG, a leading IT services provider for banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, was facing disruption from FinTechs. These emerging companies represented both potential partners and competitors for established banks. To demonstrate their industry innovation and stay competitive, Fiducia & GAD IT AG decided to conduct two collaborative hackathons.

Fredericia Kommune, a Danish municipality, was seeking ways to improve efficiency and maintain a high level of service to its citizens. The organization found that its employees were spending a significant amount of time managing paperwork, which detracted from more productive tasks. Additionally, with several key employees nearing retirement age, the municipality needed to ensure it was well-prepared for the future. Fredericia Kommune set a target of increasing productivity of the time spent recording data by 45 percent. A speech recognition tool that could convert dictated words into typed words presented an ideal solution to help achieve this.

Friedhelm Loh Group, a leading engineering company, was looking for ways to optimize its operations to deliver products to customers faster and at a lower cost than its competitors. The company was facing rising IT complexity and costs due to its growing business and the need to integrate new acquisitions onto its central IT system. It also wanted to boost system availability, as even short periods of downtime would cause backlogs in its warehouses and delay manufacturing and customer deliveries, tarnishing the company’s excellent reputation. The company also wanted to deliver even the most complex orders on time and cost-effectively.

As the G-INCPM has grown over the years, it began to reach the limits of its current data center. The IT team needed to expand the capacity of IT resources to support a rising number of researchers and facilitate increasingly complex, data-intensive research. Finding a solution that could be deployed quickly was key; the IT team did not want to slow down the addition of new researchers or place technology limitations on research projects. At the same time, the IT team wanted to retain control over its infrastructure and help ensure the tightest security for research data. The team also wanted to keep any new data center in close physical proximity to its IT staff and existing facilities.

Gabriel India Ltd operates six main manufacturing sites across the country, and plans to open additional plants in northern India. To streamline operations and support growth, the company wanted to move to a single central enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that would support manufacturing processes as well as finance and distribution. Its existing architecture – Intel processor-based HP Proliant machines running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases – was struggling to deliver adequate performance even for SAP Business One, and the predicted resource requirements for SAP ERP were far higher.

Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest aquarium, was looking to strengthen its relationship with visitors, sponsors, and donors via the email channel. However, there were gaps in communication and data was stuck in silos. The digital marketing team, which consisted of just one person, was tasked with not only retaining loyal fans, providing consistent value, and driving more revenue, but also proving the benefit of bringing on additional resources. The team needed to identify the Aquarium’s key personas and match these with the Aquarium’s primary goals. They also needed to redesign the newsletter templates to be mobile-friendly and study readers’ behaviors to create better-targeted conversations.

Getac Technology Corporation, a leading manufacturer of rugged computing solutions for extreme environments, was facing challenges with its aging IT systems. The company's Oracle solutions supported all of its processes, from the factory floor to final delivery to customers. However, if these Oracle solutions were to go offline unexpectedly, practically every business process would be forced to stop, causing severe delays. Being unable to meet delivery schedules would jeopardize customer relationships, posing a significant risk to the business. To safeguard its customer relationships, Getac wanted to ensure the smooth running of its global business. To achieve this goal, it looked to refresh the infrastructure for its mission-critical Oracle applications with a robust, reliable, and scalable solution.

GigaScience, an online open-access, open-data life sciences journal, publishes 'big-data' articles covering a wide range of biological and biomedical sciences. The journal hosts the complete data sets associated with each published article in a comprehensive public database, GigaDB. However, the data sets submitted in support of articles published in the GigaScience journal can reach multiple terabytes in size. GigaScience found that FTP was not suitable for moving large files because transfers were often exceedingly slow, and if a user encountered a network problem, the transfer would have to be restarted from the beginning. Plus, transfers over long distances were particularly time-consuming and unreliable due to the high latency on the network. On one occasion, GigaScience was presented with the challenge of uploading a 15 TB liver-cancer data set. Ruling out FTP, GigaScience had to load the data onto 8 hard drives and physically transport it from the submitter to the journal, a costly and time-intensive process.

Green Shield Canada (GSC) wanted to expand its role in the health administration market by offering claims processing as a service for other health plan providers. However, the company faced a challenge in ensuring its IT systems could meet the demands of new clients. GSC’s first client implementation was set to increase the total workload for its claims processing solution by 70 to 80 percent overnight, which required the company to ensure its infrastructure could handle the increased strain. The company realized that I/O speeds were going to be the biggest bottleneck when the new workload came online, prompting them to start thinking creatively.

Grupo Hefame, a pharmaceuticals distributor based in Spain, was facing increasing competition in the industry. The company aimed to overtake its closest competitor to become the second-largest distributor in Spain. However, as its business grew, the demands on Grupo Hefame’s SAP systems were increasing. The company realized that its existing server and storage infrastructure would soon become unable to support its operations, and decided to look for a fresh platform to support its growth objectives.

RadPad, a start-up aimed at streamlining the mobile rental experience, was looking to optimize the performance and efficiency of its underlying database. The company initially used PostgreSQL, then adopted MongoDB to make its listing data easier to serve to apps or web users. However, MongoDB had limitations in handling large amounts of data, and some searches on larger data sets were timing out, potentially leading to user dissatisfaction. As RadPad prepared to launch a new iteration of its map-based search service, it needed a solution that could offer high availability, elasticity, and reach of the cloud.

Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V., a leading services provider for the dredging, maritime infrastructure and maritime services sectors, faced the challenge of carrying out essential maintenance in a time- and cost-effective way. The company operates more than 300 vessels in five continents, and the sand and salt water environments in which it operates could significantly shorten the lifespans of its multi-million dollar equipment. To meet its commercial objectives, the company aimed to complete essential maintenance tasks quickly and efficiently. However, managing such a large fleet spread across multiple locations was a complex process. The company aimed to improve asset reliability by transitioning from a reactive to a preventative maintenance model.

RunKeeper, a fitness startup, was facing scalability issues with its existing PostgreSQL database as the company expanded. The database was unable to keep up with the pace of growth, threatening to halt the company's progress. RunKeeper wanted to eliminate performance bottlenecks and reduce the time and effort spent on database administration. This would allow the company to focus its resources on developing new data-driven features and applications, and help users to access and analyze their data faster and more reliably.

Logistics leader SDV faces unique challenges with each customer relationship, requiring new processes, personnel, and warehouse and freight capacity for each new contract. This adds financial and operational complexity to the business. The company needed to ensure it had the right people and assets in place to provide flawless service to new and existing clients, while keeping costs under control and maintaining profitability for its 10,000 customer relationships. The complexity of SDV’s business is increased by the multiple dimensions that need to be taken into account for prudent decision-making, including client, types of services, shipment routes, and local legal requirements and regulations in different countries.

SONIC Drive-In, a leading quick-service restaurant chain in the United States, was facing a significant challenge due to the increasing complexity of new global lease accounting standards. The company manages approximately 1,500 leases across the business, and even small changes to its real estate spend can have a significant impact on its bottom line. The new FASB regulations would apply to almost their entire lease portfolio, and the company was keen to reduce the cost and complexity of complying with the new regulations. Their existing reporting systems were vital for delivering the information needed to satisfy regulators and make informed decisions about opening new stores and negotiating new leases. However, the use of spreadsheets and legacy systems was creating challenges.

SRG Global, a leading manufacturer of high value coatings on plastic, aims to capitalize on opportunities by increasing the efficiency of its manufacturing operations. The company was looking for innovative ways to drive efficiencies to make it more competitive in the marketplace. The challenge was to track the effectiveness of its people and processes on the shop floor. The company was using spreadsheets to track its production processes, which was a labor-intensive process. The data had to be manually collated and shared within the organization for further analysis.

Santos Ltd., one of the leading oil and gas producers in the Asia-Pacific region, operates one of the largest exploration and production businesses in Australia. Its extensive operations rely on a huge and highly complex network of assets, including thousands of kilometers of pipeline, wells, pumps, compressors and other equipment. Keeping this specialist infrastructure in working order is a key priority for the company, as any downtime can interrupt production and limit profitability. The company had been leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as SCADA to collect information from thousands of sensors across its asset network for many years. The challenge was to harvest and sift through this data, recognize the patterns that indicate a high likelihood of asset failure, identify the most urgent issues, and get the right information to its engineers with enough lead time for them to take effective action.

Scania IT recognized the dawn of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a golden opportunity to offer valuable new products and services to its customers in the logistics industry. The company wanted to enable better communication between vehicle drivers and fleet owners to improve safety and reduce costs, thereby enhancing Scania's ability to attract new business. The challenge was to develop a solution that would allow for real-time communication and sharing of information about road hazards between drivers and fleet owners.

Sicoob, the largest credit union system in Brazil, was experiencing rapid business growth and an increase in the number and range of its products and services. This growth, coupled with the desire for non-stop services, created a perfect storm for Sicoob’s existing distributed infrastructure, which was running all core banking services. Moreover, each time a new credit union joined Sicoob, the organization had to integrate new systems and processes into its operations, scaling to accommodate additional users, transactions, and data. As a result, Sicoob ended up with hundreds of databases to manage, increasing complexity, inefficiency, and cost. To avoid hindering growth, the organization needed to find a smarter approach.

SilverHook Powerboats, a company that designs and races powerboats, faced a challenge in making use of the vast amount of telemetry data generated by sensors on their racing boats. The data was crucial for making strategic and safety decisions during races, but it was difficult for the team to keep track of and analyze the information in real-time. Additionally, the company wanted to enhance the fan experience by providing a real-time representation of the race, but faced challenges with camera equipment in the harsh marine environment. The company aimed to debut a solution at the World Powerboat Championship, which was only a few months away, imposing a tight deadline on the project.