The Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU) of the University of Oxford is involved in extensive bioresearch and healthcare studies. They extract and analyze data related to the causes, prevention, and treatment of chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and strokes. However, they faced a significant challenge when they realized that their existing database platform could not cope with the large data volumes involved in their research. The legacy platform struggled with complex queries, especially when they involved several thousand fields. The analytics could take days, which was not acceptable for the fast-paced research environment. They needed a solution that could handle high-speed analytics and deliver results within extremely fast timescales.

Sabre Holdings, a world leader in the travel marketplace, was looking for an open system solution to provide real-time inventory for travelocity.com and several other websites. The challenge was processing Origination and Destination, also known as Airline Inventory, which requires massive transactional throughput. Relational technology was not a good fit for this task. Sabre was looking to migrate from an expensive and proprietary IBM Mainframe System, TPF, to an open system solution using an object-oriented design approach to run its SabreSonic Inventory System.

Reliance Mutual, a UK-based life and pensions company, underwent a significant shift in its business model in 2003. Instead of writing new policies, the company started buying poorly performing existing life and pensions policies from other insurers. This aggressive growth strategy relied on the company's ability to aggregate these disparate policies within a single, highly efficient administration system that could turn the previously unprofitable into a robust income generator. The transition posed a two-fold challenge for Reliance Mutual’s IT department – to build and maintain a database capable of managing tremendous volumes of data, including migrating and integrating blocks of newly acquired policies – and to do so with a staff that had been dramatically reduced as part of a strategic review.

Sheetz, a rapidly growing convenience store chain in the U.S., was facing the challenge of managing and analyzing increasing volumes of data from multiple sources. The company needed to optimize costs, maintain high quality, and ensure a positive customer experience. As data volumes continued to grow, Sheetz recognized the need to switch from a more expensive platform to a more cost-effective and efficient one that could handle the increasing data and provide actionable insights. The company was also looking to expand its data analysis from one year to two years, which equates to approximately three billion rows of data. Furthermore, Sheetz was anticipating its data to double over the next two to three years.

Siemens Industry Automation was tasked with providing a scalable solution for the automation of batch processes in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and food & beverage industry. The solution needed to ensure high product quality, production performance over time, complete traceability of production, quick response to market conditions, and efficient use of production equipment. The challenge was to find a database technology that would optimally match the requirements of the SIMATIC® BATCH program design, which provides an object-oriented view on models, procedures, and recipes for comprehensive batch processes. The system needed to be stable, performant, and capable of handling large database files up to double-digit Gigabytes in size. It also needed to provide fast and reliable real-time access to prevent any significant delay, failure, or shutdown that could potentially affect product quantity and quality.

The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) was faced with the challenge of rapidly expanding its database functionality and capacity to accommodate the increasing number of subjects and students. The agency needed to maximize the system’s development agility to offer new functionality in response to growing user expectations. The agency was also expanding to new markets in China, the Caribbean, and beyond, which required robust performance and open source flexibility.

Softwear BV, a SaaS solution provider for retailers, was facing challenges with its legacy database system. The poor performance and functionality of the system were unable to meet the analytical needs of its customers. As the database tables grew from millions of records to potentially billions, the transactional-based database solution could not keep up with the analytic demands from the customers. Furthermore, Softwear wanted to streamline the applications and reduce the amount of hardware needed in its data centers. The company also aimed to offer the analytic reporting layer as a SaaS-based on-demand online solution.

Sony Creative Software was facing a challenge with their Blu-ray authoring software, Blu-print. The software was built using object-relational mapping (ORM) technology, which was not scaling as required. The production of a Blu-ray disc can involve as many as 200,000 objects, demanding a fast and reliable database capable of handling an equal number of complex object relationships. Additionally, the emerging Blu-ray specification was in flux, and every change to the spec required a corresponding adjustment to the data model and database schema. Whenever a change was required to the data model, a time-consuming process ensued, requiring the export of all data to XML, updating and migrating the schema, and then reimporting the data.

STRATEC is one of the most innovative medical engineering companies in Germany. The development team was looking for a small but powerful object-oriented database that was available in “embedded mode” and would not require any database administration tasks from end users. The company develops and manufactures fully automated analyzer systems for clinical diagnostics and biotechnology. Main applications are blood group analysis, serological tests for infectious diseases, and immunoassays. About 90% of STRATEC’s products are licensed and sold through OEM customers, who market the systems under their own brands, including the chemical reagents.

The Rohatyn Group (TRG), a hedge fund based in New York, needed a solution to manage risk in the highly volatile market of hedge funds. Information about positions, pricing, and risk is critical to investment decision-making. For tactical decision-making, TRG provided analysts immediate access to the information they needed in a format that they could use through a self-service data access environment. However, the combination of market volatility and a desire to do more strategic analysis drove the need to understand how their positions had performed over time. While the existing solution provided the interactive analysis TRG was looking for, it did not have the historical data. They wanted the user tools to remain the same and the query responses to be interactive, but they needed to do the analysis on more than 1000 times the data.

Telecom Bretagne, a prestigious graduate engineering school in France, was tasked with developing a French validator and demonstrator system for the UsiXML project, which is based on the European Maritime Surveillance project. The challenge was to develop a database technology that could provide both the objects of the simulation and the operational information captured during the experimental or effective mission. The system needed to integrate various autonomous surveillance applications, tactile surfaces, and sensor systems, including maritime search and rescue, traffic monitoring, fishing inspections, and maritime border surveillance.

TNT Express Services was in need of a reliable partner who could not only provide robust technology for building business applications, but also a qualified team of IT professionals who could support them by developing, running, and maintaining their applications. The company was looking for a solution that could help them track high-value items shipped by two of their divisions: Technology Express, which distributed IT and computing equipment, and Retail Express, now Fashion Group, which distributed high-end clothing from manufacturers to High Street outlets. Over time, the need for the system expanded to cover all items shipped by TNT Express.

Verite Group was developing a packet reconstruction and network intelligence application, Netscope, which was expected to handle diverse deployment environments and large, complex data streams. The original designs for Netscope called for a relational approach, with the IBM DB2 PureXML to drive the application. However, during testing, it became apparent that the computational cost of retrieving and translating XML from the database into in-memory objects was prohibitive, to the point where enterprise scaling would be limited. Turning to an object-oriented approach, Verite looked to the Hibernate framework and ran simulations with both MySqL and PostGres powering the system. While the object approach proved the right path, the Hibernate setup put a drain on CPU and disk usage, to the point where it impeded performance at even modest network data volumes.

The Bank’s in-house analytics solution, Netezza, had reached its end-of-life cycle and was not going to be supported by IBM or its channel partners. The Bank needed to create one data repository for all positions across all asset classes, enabling ad hoc analysis of positions and their sensitivity to market factors. The Bank also wanted greater visibility into its risk exposure. It knew that presently, managing client risk and exposure was at 20th-century levels. For example, risk and opportunity value was analyzed via batch data dumps once a day. The Bank needed greater insights, delivered in sub-minute intervals, multiple times a day. It also had additional criteria that had to be met, including improved price/performance levels, ease of development and maintenance, durability, and a palatable TCO.

The AA, a leading provider of roadside assistance services in the UK, needed a solution that would enable it to underwrite a prospective driver and deliver a risk-balanced, competitive insurance quote with sub-second speed. This was particularly important as insurance comparison websites in the UK give top billing to insurers who respond fastest to online requests for quotes. The AA wanted to target and provide highly competitive insurance rates to customers with the best driving records. To do this, they needed to be able to go beyond website provided data and create a more complete risk profile of a driver before determining eligibility and rates. The AA subscribes to multiple services that enable them to validate the information an applicant submits and enrich that information with data the applicant may not have provided.

Havas Media, a fast-growing media agency with over $2 billion in annual revenue, was facing a challenge in the media buying market. Clients wanted to understand each step of the media buying process, including where their money was going, why it should be going there, and the results of their investments. Havas Media's previous approach involved a team of SQL programmers to prepare the data and SAS programmers to interrogate it. This process was not only time-consuming but also not client-facing. Havas Media was in search of a software that would allow both technical and non-technical users to easily conduct analytics and explain these findings to clients.

The Company, a leading provider of Specialty Benefits Management solutions, was struggling with managing the extraordinary amount of data associated with benefits management in healthcare. As the number of insured members increased, it became crucial for them to leverage the constant influx of data to achieve operational efficiency. Their previous approach involved multi-month cycles with IT normalizing the data, and inconsistent ways of implementing their models into production. In order to scale their data efforts and achieve a more streamlined process, the company needed an end-to-end advanced analytics solution, from data blending to modeling.

Remind101 is an educational technology provider that offers a communication tool for teachers, students, and parents. The service is used by over 600,000 teachers in the United States to send millions of messages every month to over ten million students and parents. The Remind101 team measures their success in terms of user acquisition and messages sent per teacher. To drive adoption of the service, Remind101 users must find the app experience to be simple, fast, and predictably stable. If the mobile app crashes or lags, user acceptance will suffer. When issues do arise, Remind101’s target audience is not likely to be able to provide much assistance regarding the source of these problems. Without additional diagnostic or troubleshooting information, the job of debugging and resolving these flaws is a laborious, error-prone process for Remind101’s team. These time-consuming detours waste precious engineering energies that should be spent developing new features.

Azul Airlines, a startup launched in 2008, has been disrupting the classic airline model by offering frequent flights to over 100 destinations in Brazil, French Guyana, and the United States. As the company grew, it realized the need to bolster the customer experience on the ground. To complement the on-the-go lifestyle, Azul needed to provide a way for their customers to conveniently book, manage, and access reservations – preferably, one that didn’t require them to be chained to a computer, waiting on hold for a customer service agent, or standing in line to check-in for their flight. Building and managing a successful mobile app presented great challenges. With scores of daily flights, Azul is dealing with a host of passengers from different countries, time zones, language groups, and so on. They needed to build an app that could cater to a diverse user pool and scale easily. Crucially, the app also had to provide customers with a convenient way to organize travel plans and seamlessly go from point A to point B. This hinged on the app’s stability and simplicity.

The retailer offers a variety of mobile apps for both customers and employees. Customers use these mobile apps to access news, make purchases, and become ambassadors of the brand. Employees use mobile apps to access inventory and shipment information, and implement point-of-sale transactions. In short, mobile apps are helping the retailer streamline operations, improve profitability, and provide better customer service. In order to deliver on a diverse set of applications with a relatively small in-house mobile group, the retailer adopted modern software development techniques such as Agile, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery. However, the team still faced fundamental operational issues, such as understanding overall app stability, viewing network diagnostics, and conducting root cause analysis of crashes. In earlier versions of the mobile app, customers commonly ran into stability issues. These problems led to bad reviews, which naturally suppressed the number of app downloads. Making a great first impression is particularly important in retail as transactions are intimately tied with mobile app usage. If a shopper opens an app for the first time and experiences an error, it is highly likely that he will never use it again. On the internal, employee-facing side, flaws with pilot projects took up to two weeks to identify and correct. Furthermore, the retailer was often left in the dark, relying on anecdotal evidence from store associates. Since field personnel are not trained software testers, they were unable to provide sufficient information to assist the IT team in identifying the sources of these problems.

In its quest to deliver a cutting-edge customer experience, the company realized that it was time to prioritize mobile. They had created a basic app, but after discovering the consumer hunger for apps, they knew they could go much bigger. It was time to put their award-winning services, from claim management to policy assistance to benefits review, directly in the hands of their customers. Insurance apps are complicated by nature, because they have both business-to-consumer and business-to-business offerings. Individuals want a straightforward customer experience to check the status of a claim or review their coverage options. If brokers are going to do business via mobile, they need a seamlessly operating app; their livelihood depends on it. For instance, if an app crashes during a policy bid, they could potentially lose out on thousands of dollars. The company needed proper visibility into their mobile offerings to make sure that they could stand alongside its other superior services. To cater to all its customers, the app needed to work on both Android and iOS operating systems. It also needed to be fully functional for both individual and business users.

DeNA offers an impressive portfolio of mobile and online services. It boasts over 1,000 web games and 100 mobile apps developed natively, with many having upwards of 10 million downloads. It has a diverse user base to match, running the gamut from games to e-commerce to entertainment content distribution. DeNA currently mobile apps on several platforms, focusing on Android and iOS. Gaming apps require extremely detailed coding at every level. The user experience, which of course is of the utmost importance, hinges on this. Creating a successful app is one thing, but maintaining that success becomes a huge headache for developers. To DeNA’s dismay, several of their creations received negative reviews in the App Store and Google Play. The feedback was mostly focused around the instability of their mobile apps, which caused many customers to abandon ship. DeNA needed a robust mobile-first solution that was capable of dissecting problems to understand real-time, real-world performance.

The Spanish bank, a leader in European banking for over 50 years, recognized the need to adapt to the mobile lifestyle of its customers. Spain has one of the highest levels of mobile penetration in Europe, with smartphone owners making up over 55% of the national population. This trend led the bank to release a personal banking app. However, the initial app received lower user ratings than expected. The bank had a variety of user personas to contend with. Although an impressive 50% of its customers had adopted mobile, the remainder were still banking on their computers via a web browser. The mobile development and customer team needed better end user intelligence so they could easily understand how to enrich the mobile experience to help it achieve parity with – or even surpass – the web experience. The team also needed a solution that would help them maintain the stringent security measures that banking requires.

The bank wanted to create a mobile experience that would make banking convenient, quick, and compelling for their customers. The mobile banking landscape is a competitive and complicated one, with most institutions offering apps, so they had their work cut out for them. Providing a seamless and stable customer experience was paramount. However, a banking app is a complicated beast. Stringent security measures combined with a complicated technical backbone created a plethora of potential fail points. For instance, “mobile unavailable” messages plagued many customers. Because the bank couldn’t reproduce the app failure notifications, they were unable to diagnose the root cause of the issues. As an institution that always puts the customer first, the bank wanted to understand where failures were happening. To monitor the pulse of current performance and address any issues, the team needed real mobile app intelligence. In addition to standard features like Touch ID or Mobile Check Deposit, they also wanted to be at the cutting edge of the industry and deliver the innovations that customers were clamoring for.

B&H Photo, a major supplier of photo, video, and audio equipment, has been a technology leader in the retail industry, offering online ordering and mobile applications since 2009. However, with the increasing importance of mobile users, the company faced challenges in maintaining the quality and performance of its mobile apps. Customers generally did not report app flaws and crashes, leaving the IT team operating in the dark. Certain key APIs were experiencing slow performance, but the exact cause of these issues was difficult to ascertain. This resulted in increased latency and potentially alienated customers. The company was dedicating crucial development talent to deciphering these app issues, instead of focusing on innovation and new features.

Groupon is focused on ensuring an exceptional mobile user experience through their mobile apps. As such, they must be proactive in managing app performance and user experience. Because of the transparency of app store ratings, it is more important now than ever to delight customers. This is no trivial task, however, as complexity and fragmentation across the mobile ecosystem causes many challenges. Groupon turned to Apteligent for a solution that would delight customers with app quality and user experience.

The hospitality company, with over 4000 hotels worldwide, recognized the need to attract a younger generation of customers, particularly millennials, who are more comfortable with mobile technology. The company's existing app was plagued with stability and performance issues, leading to poor reviews and ratings. The company realized that to deliver excellent customer service to this demographic, they needed to provide a seamless mobile experience. This meant their apps needed to make it easy for customers to find hotels, make reservations, check-in, and more.

Peloton, a company that offers high-energy group fitness products, had to completely re-invent fitness equipment to deliver a stellar product. Their Internet-of-Things inspired experience consists of a cutting-edge carbon steel bike with a near-silent belt drive and magnetic resistance flywheel, combined with sensors for a smooth, motivating, fun ride. The bike is equipped with an integrated sweat-resistant console that can link to heart rate monitors and wireless speakers. The console tracks calories burned, cadence, and power output. Peloton also offers live-streaming and on-demand classes with music from some of the best indoor cycling instructors broadcast directly to the Peloton bike. Riders can track progress and motivate friends before, after, or during class with a leaderboard. Additionally, instructors monitor live statistics to help motivate you during the class. To offer the most effective workouts in the world, Peloton must ensure the experience of their IoT bike is fast and flawless. Peloton requires proactive insight into the customer’s experience, making sure not to react to support calls with minimal context.

Showroomprive, a leader in European e-commerce, faced the challenge of making their mobile experience universally accessible for their customers. They created both iOS and Android native apps, which had to be offered in eight different languages due to their diverse customer base across Europe. However, they quickly realized that mobile is a completely different creature than web, and thus faced the formidable task of understanding this relatively uncharted user experience. The mobile challenge was further complicated by the company's plans to enter new international markets.

QxMD, a company that creates high-quality, point-of-care tools for healthcare professionals, was facing challenges in optimizing the performance of its mobile apps. These apps, which are used by over 568,000 physicians and 1,279,000 healthcare professionals worldwide, assist doctors by simplifying the use of clinical prediction models at the bedside and improving access to critical information. However, the company was struggling to ensure flawless performance, which is of utmost importance given the critical nature of the apps' functions. The team had tried Google Analytics and iTunes’ monitoring tools but found that these did not provide the actionable diagnostics and information necessary to optimize performance.