Mulino Marino, a family-run mill in northern Italy, recognized the need to increase its production to keep up with growing demand. The changes in consumer tastes and purchasing behavior in recent decades presented new challenges: How to be more attentive to market demands for more sustainability, traceability, and organics, as well as to increased requests for alternative multigrain and multi-seed flours, which required the development of new recipes, processes, and products. These challenges, coupled with a dearth of experience and expertise amongst the younger generation of workers, highlighted the need to incorporate new technologies. The company’s strong sustainability ethos and its concern for a depleted earth also drove it to invest in energy management solutions such as solar panels, with the rest of its energy requirements coming from other renewable sources.

CVC Technologies, a leading pharmaceutical packaging machine company, was looking to introduce digitization into their production processes to provide the best manufacturing equipment for customers. They aimed to increase their solutions to customers, reduce downtime, increase efficiency, and minimize human errors. The company was focused on introducing new packaging equipment to meet the changing needs of their customers. Their customers needed a fast and reliable way to contact CVC or the plant technicians if there were any issues with machinery or general problems.

Kunming CGE Water Supply (KMCGE) services a population of nearly four million residents with its 10 treatment plants, with a total water supply capacity of 1.58 million cubic meters per day, and a water distribution network that stretches over more than 4,000 kilometers. As the city grows, KMCGE must also continue to expand the scale of its water supply. Delivering a safe and stable water supply while optimizing production and operational efficiencies are the challenges faced by most water utilities. To make sure it could support the rapid urban development of Kunming, KMCGE recognized that it needed to leverage the power of digitization to effectively manage its water supply. It sought to tap into the rich cache of available data to coordinate network pipe pressure, the rational distribution of water resources, and better energy management.

Guardian Glass, a leading glass manufacturer, was facing a challenge with its power reliability and efficiency. The company's 750,000-square-foot plant in Dewitt, Iowa operates a furnace at 2,800 ºF to pull approximately 700 tons of glass per day, every day, around the clock. The furnace is critical to the plant’s operation and any shutdown is unacceptable. However, the plant suffered a capacitor bank failure that caused the plant’s power factor to drop below the threshold where the company could claim valuable credits on its monthly energy bills. The loss of savings from the credits persisted for more than two years. Guardian Glass needed to improve its power factor over 95% to receive a monthly credit on utility bills.

Sodexo, a world leader in providing services that improve Quality of Life, needed to expand its APAC office to accommodate more than 200 employees. The new office needed to reflect the company’s progressive work culture, supporting a myriad of working styles such as hotdesking and flexible configuration with both social spaces and focus areas. However, the old office had no visibility on energy consumption levels. The challenge was for Sodexo to achieve workplace sustainability by optimizing energy savings without compromising employee comfort levels. They needed a reliable partner who could deliver a cutting-edge facilities management solution, centered around the importance of sustainability and wellbeing of its people.

The EastLink freeway tunnels in Melbourne, Victoria, run beneath the environmentally sensitive Mullum Mullum Valley, requiring special attention to ventilation of vehicle emissions. The original tunnel ventilation system, commissioned when EastLink opened ten years ago, was designed to expel 100% of tunnel air, including pollutants from vehicles’ combustion engines, through two 45-metre high ventilation stacks. The ventilation system has 24 smaller jet fans which are located within the tunnels to control air flow direction, minimising a piston effect caused by traffic movement in the tunnel, and ten axial larger, 275kW, 690vAC, ventilation fans in the ventilation stacks to draw air up from the tunnels for expulsion at the stack tops. Since the opening of EastLink, the speed of airflows within the tunnels and stacks was controlled in a traditional way - by switching individual fans on and off at pre-programmed times of the day. When switched on, a fan always operated at full speed. This was inefficient, using more electricity than necessary and producing high operating noise levels. It was also causing unnecessary wear and tear on components.

Queensland Rail operates passenger services throughout Queensland, Australia. It is responsible for nearly 51 million customer journeys each year and about 8,000 km of track. The operator used to experience power system incidents affecting the running of its railway network. With 1.5 million visitors expected to descend on the state for the 2018 Commonwealth Games, a major international multi-sport event, a much more reliable system was needed. To master this challenge, Queensland Rail decided to upgrade its network and install a second substation for its inner-city services at the busy Fortitude Valley station in Brisbane. The location presented an extra difficulty as the available space allowed for just a 24-square foot (7.3 m2) container. As a result, solutions used for the substation needed to be compact, while still able to function reliably, efficiently, and effectively.

Sanwa, a plastics manufacturer in Singapore, was facing challenges due to regional competition, a dwindling labour supply, and rising operational costs. They saw digitalization as the solution to improve factory productivity, develop skilled employees, and dramatically boost energy efficiency. They started their digitalization journey in 2016 with two long-term goals: to digitalize and automate their factories, ultimately achieving zero defective parts per million for their clients. They started a pilot project with a single production cell as proof of concept for all their stakeholders. The first automation phase successfully showed that they could do more with the same manpower, with localized data collection. The next step in 2018 was to link more of such production cells together into a data network. Forming that data network was crucial for Sanwa for it determined all the necessary steps forward. Other than productivity, their chief concern was traceability and transparency—they were losing time and money on dated manual reports.

Mataura Valley Milk, a New Zealand dairy company, aimed to build the world’s best nutritional business that could quickly tailor production to specific customer requirements while guaranteeing the delivery of best-in-class quality products. The company wanted to ensure that its plant can consistently manufacture world-class nutritional products with microbial results well below standard requirements. Over 3,300 Aerobic Plate Count tests were performed during the 2018/19 season to identify colony forming units per gram (cfu/g). Mataura Valley Milk’s highest recorded result was a mere 190 cfu/g, with the accepted limit being 5,000 cfu/g, believed to be a first for New Zealand and indicating that the plant’s critical hygiene areas and processes benchmark performance worldwide.

Granado Pharmácias, Brazil’s oldest cosmetics company, was looking to modernize its traditional manufacturing process to improve production and product traceability. This was crucial for the company to strengthen its brand internationally and continue its expansion. The company had to ensure repeatability in all its production processes and much better traceability of manufacturing information. Any quality issue would result in a product being rejected at the end of the manufacturing chain, affecting output. The company’s management decided to integrate the latest industrial automation into the company’s traditional production process, and began a potentially tricky digital transformation.

ArcelorMittal, the world leader in steel manufacturing, operates the largest steel factory in Western Europe in Dunkirk. The plant delivers 7 million tons of steel annually for various industries. Ensuring consistent product quality is paramount, and any interruption or equipment failure can be costly. Regular maintenance is necessary to ensure safe working conditions and manufacturing continuity. However, performing maintenance usually means shutting down an entire section of a plant, which can take up to two days to resume normal production. ArcelorMittal needed to address this challenge and gain better control over its dust emissions to achieve greater operational flexibility for a recent equipment modernization project.

Hilton wanted to meet a critical need in a city looking to further boost tourism: offer an affordable four-star, focused-service option in an area saturated with five-star offerings. However, Hilton had to answer some tough questions: How could they keep operations lean and efficient? To what extent could they control energy costs? Would they be able to meet tight development timelines and still ensure the facility met their sustainability standards? And, most importantly, could they do all of this and still deliver an exceptional guest experience? The hotel was constructed on a tight timeline and included the added challenge of achieving certification in the LEED building program, the most widely used green building rating system in the world.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor announced upcoming rule changes that would hold brokers and other investment advisers to a “fiduciary standard,” meaning they would be legally required to act in the best financial interest of their clients. This shift would restrict the types of investments that could be selected for certain retirement plans. Morningstar, Inc. recognized an opportunity to help employers find investments that comply with the fiduciary rule through an easy-to-use, online marketplace named Morningstar Plan Advantage. The marketplace would explain the regulations, offer searching and filtering of compliant investments, and ease enrollment into these plans. APIs connected to the application would allow investment providers to push data into the marketplace. Morningstar hoped to deliver an outstanding experience for employers and investment providers, and build revenue by increasing sales of plans for which they provide administrative services.

Movable Ink’s Intelligent Content Platform supports real-time personalization of email campaigns using up-to-date information from websites, social-media platforms, and APIs, as well as contextual data about device type, weather, recent user activity, and more. Additionally, it enables customers to analyze data about their users to make better marketing decisions. This process incorporates large and unpredictable amounts of data from a wide variety of sources, making the scale, elasticity, and connected nature of cloud services a logical fit. To meet these challenges, Movable Ink migrated its entire production environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2015, taking advantage of multiple regions and availability zones to provide redundancy, resilience, and scalability. In addition to the data and content used in personalized email messages, Movable Ink captures data on user behavior after users receive those messages, such as whether they opened the email, what items they clicked on, and what they browsed and purchased on websites as a result.

Veracode, a CA Technologies company, is on a mission to secure software applications so developers don’t release software that could be susceptible to breaches. As part of this mission, the company created Greenlight, a tool that helps developers discover and fix security-related defects while they are writing code. Because Greenlight is designed to find security flaws quickly, Veracode must ensure strong performance. “We need to deliver security vulnerability results in under a minute,” says Patrick Day, principal cloud engineer for Veracode. “If developers wait too long for the data, they’ll move on to a different product.” Veracode also needs to scale its solution to accommodate growth. “As we were building the application, we needed to plan for increases in code-scan volume,” Day says. As an application-development company, Veracode also strives to reduce the amount of time employees spend managing the IT environment. Day says, “We’re focused on developing and deploying products, so we don’t want to put our resources and energy into managing and provisioning.”

Amplframe, a photography community platform in Taiwan, was facing challenges in managing the increase in website traffic, with 18,000 visits over a period of seven months. The company needed a solution that could efficiently handle the sudden spikes in website traffic during events or holidays. Additionally, they were looking for ways to enhance the user experience by reducing webpage loading time and increasing the website engagement rate.

Firefly Learning, an online tool for teachers, students, and parents, was initially deployed by installing its software on Windows servers locally at each school. This setup presented numerous challenges, as supporting schools largely consisted of solving problems with their underlying infrastructure, such as dealing with backup issues and domain name system failures. As more schools adopted Firefly, the issues multiplied. The software was installed on hundreds of servers, and the task of supporting them all became overwhelming. Firefly needed a solution that would help join up the learning experience and allow for easier and more efficient support and management.

FuseFX, a visual effects company, was facing a challenge of lack of compute power, specifically, finding enough nodes for the compute-hungry process of rendering computer-generated imagery (CGI). The company was growing quickly in terms of size and the scope of its creative ambitions. One of the responsibilities was ensuring that the capacity of the FuseFX content-creation pipeline grows right along with the rest of the company. The company needed a solution that could provide unlimited computing power, the ability to expand rendering nodes quickly, affordably, and essentially infinitely.

Mirriad, a London-based company, delivers next-generation advertising solutions by using its computer vision technology to naturally place brands in premium video content across TV, online, and mobile channels. The challenge for Mirriad was achieving this intelligent insertion of ads at scale. The company was initially using physical data centers, which proved to be a bottleneck when it came to onboarding big businesses. In addition to fast access to compute capacity, another vital requirement for the company was the ability to use NVIDIA GPUs across multiple regions worldwide.

Springworks launched SPARK, a platform that lets car owners receive key data about their vehicles at the touch of a button, served straight from the cloud, direct to their smartphones. The platform also connects them with service providers that can sort any issues that might come up – from MOTs to tyre changes. However, each talking car generates about 10,000 data points per day. To handle 20 million cars, Springworks needed a system that could handle several billion data points in one go. They wanted limitless scale. In order to hit the market with a great new product, Springworks needed to be able to focus on innovation. When they started out, the release cycle as about 2 weeks for a new feature – but the team wanted to move faster. Finally, data security was a major concern. For a new market offer that was looking to partner with the big mobile networks, security couldn’t be an afterthought. It had to be built into the SPARK infrastructure from the start.

Edmunds, a company that helps consumers browse automobile dealer inventory, read vehicle reviews, and consume other automobile-related content, was planning a key update with better image quality and faster load times on the company's website and mobile apps. The company had a library of 50 million vehicle images that needed to be processed into several new aspect ratios and resolutions, resulting in more than half a billion new images. The company's existing image-handling solution, based on Cloudera MapReduce clusters, wasn't suitable for the job as it would have taken too long to develop and would have required the management of new clusters and incurred new monthly costs of at least $10,000.

GE Healthcare, a leading manufacturer and distributor of diagnostic imaging equipment, was seeking to improve patient outcomes by reducing workflow processing time through the sharing of medical image data across specialists and referring physicians. The company wanted to increase the value derived from device usage and data by enabling the leverage of cloud compute, storage, and access. The challenge was that up to 35 percent of patient cases were being misdiagnosed, partially due to a lack of access to images, data, and records. Additionally, better interoperability between systems could save healthcare ecosystems $30 billion per year, according to GE Healthcare.

Modernity Financial Technologies, Ltd. was facing the challenge of supporting a rapidly growing user base on its digital currency exchange and investment platforms, MaiCoin and MAX Exchange. The company needed a solution that could easily scale to accommodate a 563% average monthly member growth rate and an 894% average monthly cryptocurrency exchange rate. Additionally, the company wanted to decrease its daily operational time and reduce costs.

Matson, a leading U.S. shipping carrier in the Pacific Ocean, embarked on a journey to modernize its entire portfolio of enterprise applications and to upgrade and optimize every corner of its IT infrastructure. The shipping industry requires advanced IT capabilities to enable precise tracking of assets and customer shipments as they move around the world. Matson’s vessels, shipping terminals, container equipment, and truck shipments all require highly reliable technology to ensure that its transportation network operates at world-class levels. In addition, Matson’s customers count on cloud-based applications to provide real-time visibility and analytics in managing their own supply chains.

Vidsy, a London-based company that helps brands develop mobile-first video campaigns, was facing challenges with Docker Cloud. The company had moved all its applications into Docker containers running on Amazon EC2 instances and automated the administration of the containers using Docker Cloud. However, they regularly had to deal with Docker Cloud software bugs and dedicate precious engineering resources to fixing the issues. Furthermore, Docker Cloud’s cluster management feature was going end-of-life and Vidsy needed an alternative.

Commodity-crop farmers across the United States often depend on satellite images of their fields to get an updated view of the health of their crops. However, the resolution of these images is not high enough for farmers to get the most accurate picture of their fields. In fact, for many specialty-crop growers, satellite images are somewhere between useless and misleading. TerrAvion is changing that. The company uses airplanes and drones to obtain full-frame and thermal images from high-resolution cameras. TerrAvion gives farmers, retailers, agronomists, and ag distributors the best possible pictures through OverView, the company’s core subscription service. “Our pictures offer resolutions of 9 or 18 centimeters per pixel, which satellite can’t do,” says Stephen Smith, CTO of TerrAvion. Using such high-resolution images, farmers can more accurately view the health of a plant.

SolarNow, a for-profit social business, provides solar energy products and financing solutions in East Africa. The company faced challenges in identifying common device pain points for customers and optimizing device longevity. As SolarNow’s customer base grew, the company began identifying areas for business growth and improvement. They noted pain points for customers, such as a short battery lifespan or inefficient solar panel usage, that they felt they could proactively address and prevent these issues using Internet of Things (IoT) technology to build a connected device and monitoring solution. SolarNow needed to be able to enhance access to and use of device data to remotely monitor system performance and alert customers of inefficient device usage.

Zignal Labs, a company that helps its customers measure brand impact, mitigate reputation risks, and inform data-driven communications strategies, wanted to take existing sentiment classification techniques to the next level with a focus on reputation polarity. The company wanted to offer a solution that identifies the actual positive or negative impact of online content on a brand. Zignal Labs was all too familiar with the limitations of third-party sentiment-analysis solutions, having experimented with many of them itself. Some of these tools presented problems around scalability, and some weren't well suited to all the different media sources Zignal needed to track.

Stonehenge NYC, a private real estate group, was facing challenges with its outdated rental approval process and other tenant-related services. The company wanted to differentiate itself in the market by becoming technology-driven to drive efficiencies throughout its entire organization that result in a better customer experience. The team turned to Salesforce, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform leader, to modernize the sales and leasing process. As the company continued to develop its Salesforce application and explore how new technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), would be key to its digital transformation journey, it chose to migrate its applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Royal FloraHolland, a century-old company, recognized the importance of going digital to provide its growers and buyers with more opportunities. The company wanted to improve current processes and provide growers and sellers with new opportunities to reach buyers. The company recognized its need to reorganize in order to go digital and become more data-driven. Royal FloraHolland wanted to use other trading methodologies outside of the physical auction house to sell flowers. The company also wanted to improve the quality of the images that are presented at the auction and provide buyers with stock availability and alternative options tailored to their preferences.