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.

As Geddis Paving & Excavating grew, its software needs also expanded. The company found that spreadsheets were no longer effective in managing estimating and bidding requirements. They needed a more seamless and professional solution. The company also wanted to streamline field tracking and have real-time field data for faster response and adjustment of operations.

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.

Lice Clinics of America, a network of over 300 clinics in 35 countries, was looking for a way to better understand how their national advertising campaigns were impacting their lead flows. They wanted to know which campaigns were driving the most calls and to which locations. They were also facing challenges with their existing provider for sending out text messages through their booking platform with clients. The messages were experiencing significant delays, which was a problem as their clients needed immediate responses.

Genesys, a company that sells customer experience and contact center technology, was facing challenges in managing its sales process. The sales managers were operating in a world of “guessing and speculating” about where to spend their time and effort for maximum efficiency. They were scaling rapidly, yet struggling to onboard efficiently. The process of preparing for a call was time-consuming and did not scale. Sales managers were heavily involved in every deal, which spread them thin and did not allow them to deep dive into each deal. The process was more about “following fields in the company’s CRM” and then using one-on-one meetings to “add color” to better understand each deal.

Workato, an Enterprise Automation platform, was in a phase of hypergrowth and was relying heavily on anecdotal data for tracking demand generation. This approach was restricting their visibility into the full sales funnel. The sales team was growing rapidly and was looking for a way to scale the team consistently while providing top-notch training and guidance. The uncertainty of relying on anecdotal data was not sitting well with Bhaskar Roy, Head of Growth and Marketing at Workato, whose marketing team is driven by the number of opportunities it generates. The team was ready for a change and was looking for a solution that could provide them with accurate and reliable data.

Sendoso, a rapidly growing company, was struggling to analyze its retention data. The Customer Success team wanted to understand what was causing churn and what was driving positive retention numbers. The company's annual contracts meant that a customer lifecycle was long, making it difficult to track what happened during that span that led to a renewal or churn. The reasons for sales and churn had also changed over the years due to the company's rapid growth and scaling. The team was also struggling with inefficient and redundant handoffs from the Account Executive (AE) to the Customer Success (CS) team.

Appen’s Customer Success team was struggling with managing their communication with customers. The team was often engaged in the “fun” game of Telephone, which turned out to be frustrating, inefficient, and often a huge waste of time and effort. There was no way to go back and validate what was actually said in the call. This ended up being a huge pain point for the CSM team. Moreover, the onboarding process for a new CSM was painfully long, taking up to six months. The first three months were reserved for just learning about AI, learning about data labeling, learning about machine learning, and really getting up to speed with the industry. The next three months were spent learning the different use cases on the platform.

Drift, a conversational marketing platform, was experiencing hypergrowth. With the expansion of its team, product, and customer base, the potential for redundancies and inefficiencies increased. The leadership team was spending countless hours on phone calls with sales reps and prospects, trying to understand what was and was not working. There was no consistency around pitches or coaching new reps. The lack of clarity was not limited to the Sales Team. Drift’s Product Marketing Manager, Daphne Funston, would hear different issues from the customer when they spoke with the CSM and the product team. The Drift team needed a solution quickly.

With the impact of COVID-19, simPRO needed a way to strengthen and develop their new remote sales process. The company was initially structured along geographic lines, with offices operating as independent units. However, they decided to restructure their business units along functional lines, bringing together colleagues from around the world—regardless of location. The pandemic forced them to put these plans on hold. When the lockdowns persisted, they decided to move forward with the reorganisation and invest in their future. They wanted insight into the remote sales process, including intel about their customers’ needs and their reps’ performance.

EdgePetrol, a UK-based software company that specialises in fuel price optimisation, was facing challenges in meeting their pipeline goals. Their prospect base was so used to the status quo, they didn’t recognize their situation as problematic, or see a need for a solution. With a global pandemic and an off-kilter economy, EdgePetrol needed new ways to build a highly qualified pipeline and communicate its product’s value so it could close big deals. The company was also transitioning from a field sales team to an inside sales team due to the pandemic, which presented its own set of challenges.

Demandbase, a marketing technology company, was aware of the vast marketplace opportunities available but lacked a reliable method to uncover them. They needed a solution grounded in reality that could identify areas for improvement and growth to generate more revenue. The company was also facing the challenge of integrating the functionality of three new companies it had recently absorbed. This required a collaborative approach and the identification of data that could help increase their Average Contract Value (ACV).

Filtered, a UK-based learning technology and content company, was seeking ways to grow its revenue and better coach its sales reps. As the company grew, the need for a Revenue Intelligence tool became apparent. The company wanted to focus on its most important accounts and make the most of its pipeline. In early 2020, the Filtered sales team spent a lot of time sharpening its sales skills and methodologies. They implemented a more deliberate and structured sales framework, began running more internal demos, and started a sales book club. However, they needed something more to take their efforts to the next level.

Mintel, a global leader in market research, was facing a challenge in improving their efficiency. With a large portfolio of over 6,000 clients worldwide, it was difficult for them to detect patterns in calls, which delayed improvements to customer service processes. They needed a single tool that could provide guidance based on data from feedback in client calls. The company was also struggling with getting internal teams up to speed with new initiatives, which often resulted in lost or stalled deals. The lack of a tool to review calls meant that the knowledge gap was not being closed quickly enough.

Corporate Traveler’s customer success (CS) team wanted to invest in efficiency as a way to boost its customer adoption and retention rates. During the pandemic, they started using Gong, and have seen their adoption and retention rates improve dramatically. By streamlining their handover system and focusing on an accurate, trackable voice of the customer, Corporate Traveler has leveled up their CS game.