NordOps, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) for wholesale distributors running Epicor’s Eclipse ERP software platform, faced several challenges. They had a ready customer base with a clear need for enterprise-class IT services like Infrastructure, Disaster Recovery, and Backup. However, they lacked the resources, both in terms of time and money, to build their own solutions. Additionally, they lacked name recognition and expertise in the Disaster Recovery (DR) space. Many of their customers, despite being large in terms of revenue, had limited IT understanding and therefore limited resources for their IT budget. The rise of ransomware and cybercrime prompted many companies using the ERP software to seek solutions like real-time Disaster Recovery or more reliable backups.

Rufus Leonard, a leading UK independent agency with 29 years’ experience in brand and digital, was facing challenges with their existing disaster recovery (DR) solution. The solution, which had grown into a fully managed DR solution, was proving to be unreliable and complex. The variables for DR testing were changing every time, leading to a lack of confidence in its effectiveness in a real-life DR situation. Additionally, the costs of the fully managed solution were continually growing, diminishing the return on investment. These increasing costs, combined with decreasing confidence, prompted the search for a new DR solution to protect the 27 virtual machines in their on-premises London environment.

R’Club, a child care and social service program, was facing challenges with their existing disaster recovery solution. They were using a local partner to lease space for replication with a nearby data center and an off-the-shelf NAS device to copy their backups off-site. However, the process was cumbersome and error-prone, with the device repeatedly failing and requiring rebooting. Moreover, the off-site backups didn't provide the assurance of ongoing availability that R’Club required. It would take hours or days to recover a system, which was time they couldn't afford, especially during hurricane season in Florida when they are responsible for the children of first responders. Lastly, replacing the NAS device with a more functional alternative proved to be cost prohibitive for the nonprofit organization.

Chambliss, a long-standing legal firm, was in need of a reliable, low maintenance backup solution for their small IT team. They also required cost-effective cloud services. The firm had tried offsite backups with different local companies, but while the results were acceptable, the cost was not. It was clear to the team that the solution in place wasn’t robust enough for their workloads. They needed a solution that would support their lean IT team and tenacious attorneys, reflecting their commitment to providing the best services to their clients.

Synergy Logistics, a software house specializing in warehouse management technologies and solutions, recognized the increasing importance of e-commerce and the subsequent rise in the number of daily transactions. They needed a cloud provider who could help them exceed their customers’ requirements in a rapidly evolving industry. The company sought a cost-effective SaaS solution that could support highly transactional businesses while maintaining on-premise levels of security and availability. The new logistics demands of next- or same-day delivery required a cloud infrastructure that provided the agility and flexibility needed to manage these demands.

Khatib & Alami Offshore (K&A), a global engineering design firm, was facing challenges due to its rapid growth. The company needed a robust infrastructure that could ensure efficiency and protect the workloads associated with its clients’ multi-billion dollar projects. The company's technology journey has taken it from disparate IT islands to private cloud and, finally, to public cloud, which has delivered the most cost-effective, agile means to ensure rapid scalability and facilitate growth plans. The company manages complex, high dollar projects with aggressive deadlines, making it vital for K&A to ensure its mission critical systems, such as email and project management, are available and meeting performance and SLA targets.

Piab, a leader in industrial automation, was facing challenges with its production servers and disaster recovery. The company had been using its own servers at a colocation data center in Stockholm, but any time a hard drive failed or the IT team needed to add RAM or storage, a staff member had to physically drive to the location more than 30 minutes away. Then they had to deal with security procedures and equipment delivery in and out of the data center. Faced with the prospect of purchasing all new hardware infrastructure, Anderson took a more strategic step and tapped [11:11]’s enterprise cloud to host its entire production environment. Piab had been using an incumbent software solution for disaster recovery, but it no longer met the IT team’s requirements and did not inspire confidence. For one thing, it required a lot of resources—several gigabytes per server—from the environment. The bigger concern was that Anderson and his team weren’t sure that it would meet their recovery time objectives, and they weren’t easily able to run tests to see how it would perform in a real disaster.

Mengali Accountancy, a financial services firm specializing in real estate syndication and fund management, faced the challenge of securely moving, storing, and managing large amounts of sensitive financial data. The firm had gone completely digital in 2007, which led to a significant increase in data storage needs. The firm also had to efficiently retrieve documents and provide them to third parties, including other CPA firms, the IRS, and other government agencies. The firm's previous backup solution consisted of onsite and offsite backups, with the offsite backup located only about ten miles away. This proximity posed a risk in the event of a local natural disaster.

FolderWave, a private company based near Boston, is one of the earliest cloud-space providers for Higher Education. Businesses that serve the Higher Education enrollment management industry must be able to manage large volumes of personal data and information, prioritizing security – all in an environment where transaction volumes are highly cyclical and date sensitive. Success is further determined by an organization’s ability to deliver solutions that can be tailored to the specific needs of each institution it serves. There is tremendous variability in the process of enrollment management from one school to another. Today, FolderWave helps flagship colleges and universities like Boston College, Carnegie Mellon, Northeastern, Merrimack College, Wittenberg, Tulane, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute centralize millions of documents representing a soup-to-nuts approach to admission applications, financial aid forms, academic transcripts, contracts and grants, and practically any other paperless documentation each school wants to track.

Procon, a North American mining contractor, was dealing with an aging ERP system that was no longer able to keep up with the demands of the business. The company had a large fleet of equipment to track and a workforce scattered across some of the most remote and inhospitable regions on the planet. With new ownership potentially pushing workload volumes and availability demands even higher, it was clear that it was time for a change. The company needed tighter cost control over projects and a more robust and reliable system to handle their operations.

P3 Health Partners, a health population management group, was facing several challenges. They needed a multi-layer security system to protect their health information and systems. They also had massive volumes of data to store and back up. With a small workforce, they needed supplemental support. The data-intensive processes involved in population health management also called for a high level of IT performance, as well as a solution with the capacity to back up nearly eight terabytes of data, representing 11 years of health records. With employees and customers relying on P3 data, having a highly available, fully recoverable environment was an imperative. And, for a company only two years old with a small IT staff, keeping costs down was important.

Norwegian Cruise Line, a leading innovator in cruise travel, needed to ensure the resiliency of its systems and technology to provide exceptional service to guests. The company's reservation system had become more complex due to growth and expanding demands, and they needed a provider with the expertise to run their mission-critical operations. This included managing the NCL.com website, which serves prospective guests, travel agents, and cruise ship officials. The company sought to ensure that disasters, from natural to technical problems, security issues, and other operational snafus, wouldn't disrupt its core reservation system for its fleet of cruise ships.

Jonas Fitness, a division of Jonas Software, faced a one-year deadline to migrate its club management applications from legacy platforms to a robust, scalable, and secure alternative. The applications – a legacy system known as i4™, and a next-generation SaaS platform known as Compete®– would require not only highly available production hosting services, but disaster recovery and PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance support as well. Historically, the organization had struggled to manage and enhance its systems in an agile fashion. Rigid and slowmoving change controls hampered the success of its Compete application. As a software company in a fast-paced industry, Jonas Fitness was eager to obtain superior IT management. Given the tight timetable for migration, the complexity of the endeavor, and the array of skills necessary to manage its platforms, the firm quickly decided it would need to engage a managed services partner.

Inspired Entertainment, a leading provider of online gaming solutions, was planning its entry into the Canadian market. The company needed an established service provider with in-country data centers and proven disaster recovery capabilities. The company traditionally relied on its own IT infrastructure as the platform for service delivery. However, entering a new market posed risks and costs. Inspired’s Director of IT Operations, James Wilson, led a review of potential service providers that could meet the requirements of the regulators, as well as Inspired’s own criteria for technical capabilities and pricing.

The New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) manages more than 25,000 lane miles of highway, nearly 3,000 bridges and culverts, 2,055 miles of railroad right-of-way, and 61 public-use airports. The department also oversees three international ports of entry, 32 rest stops, and 34 nationally designated scenic, historic, and recreational trails. NMDOT faced several challenges in optimizing its pavement treatment process. A primary concern was the operational challenge of developing and implementing the program throughout the state. The integration of the software with the department’s legacy pavement data-collection systems was another challenge. In addition, a significant challenge was the organization and management of statewide staff training.

The DDG, General Practitioner (GP) call services, had been using Adastra, a call management and patient registration system specifically designed for GP services. However, Adastra lacked sophisticated analysis functions, making it difficult to generate management information beyond the number of patient contacts and consultations. The organization needed to find out whether they were satisfying the performance criteria for the response to calls. They initially attempted to tackle the problem by developing an Access database themselves, but soon realized that QlikView was a far better option.

EDEKA Hessenring, part of the EDEKA Group, was facing significant inventory discrepancies amounting to €4.5 billion annually across the German retail industry. These discrepancies were largely due to organizational weaknesses and employee crime. The company's auditing department, consisting of only four people, was responsible for auditing approximately 4,300 employees. The auditing process was heavily reliant on the experience of the employees and required a significant amount of effort. With a data volume of more than 36 million lines of accounting data per month for 73 markets and branches, this was a near impossible task. EDEKA Hessenring needed an analytical tool that could evaluate all the transaction data according to various criteria both systematically and quickly.

FE Global Electronics, a leading electronic components distributor in the pan-Asia region, faced challenges due to its broad distribution coverage and complex web of supplier and customer relationships. The company had trouble getting consistent, timely, and visual information from its legacy systems and other data sources, in addition to its SAP ERP system. This lack of timely and correct information made managing inventory a major headache. The organization faced several problems of increasing and aging inventory, identifying and managing demand and consumption patterns, and managing obsolescence. Managers lacked timely and enough information on receivables aging, which affected cash flow and increased bad debt. Compounding the problem, the company had been unable to get its A/R information in foreign currencies to understand exposure and minimize currency exchange losses.

FiberMark, a multinational company specializing in the production of specialty fiber-based materials, was struggling with data management. As the company grew, the volume of data it collected began to exceed its ability to effectively analyze and gain insights from it. The company's JD Edwards system was managing ERP-related data effectively, but the management had to run thousands of pages of reports to extract any information from that data. This process was time-consuming and often did not provide the necessary information for making quick, accurate, and well-informed decisions. The company needed a solution that would allow them to interact with their data in ways that were not previously possible.

Fila Europe’s production is entrusted to outside suppliers, each with its own systems, in a variety of countries. Its worldwide sales group had difficulties pulling information from these various systems, as well as transmitting and exchanging information among the various sites. The company needed to improve data quality, ensuring that data could be accessed and analyzed, regardless where it resided. Fila Europe needed a flexible application that was simple to access and use for a wide range of people. And ultimately, the solution had to provide people with insight into corporate functions to better monitor their activities and optimize decisions throughout the company.

Frigoscandia Distribution, a leading logistics partner in the food industry, was facing several challenges. They wanted to increase control over accounts payable by providing customer-facing employees with accurate payment histories. They also aimed to streamline purchasing processes to lower purchasing costs and improve cash flow. Additionally, they needed to reconcile redundant and outdated data to improve operational efficiency. The company was looking for a solution that could help them achieve these goals and improve their overall business operations.

Groupe Pasteur Mutualité was facing challenges due to the existence of several databases and multiple demands on the IT department. The lack of internal organization and unstructured information linked to multiple disparate databases greatly increased the load on the IT department, which was stressed by the multiple requests. Requests for statistics, specific studies or technical management reports clogged up the IT department. Each query had its request and response: nothing was unified. Since the frequency of requests submitted to the IT department by the business staff had become a daily occurrence, it had become urgent to implement a solution enabling quick access to all of the databases.

Grotto S.p.A., a manufacturer and distributor of Gas clothing worldwide, was facing challenges in analyzing market results, managing and fulfilling extemporary requests for information, and monitoring the turnover of in-store stock at each retail location. The company's evolution in the retail world created the need for a structured solution so that sales management could analyze direct and associated stores on a daily basis. The data covered multiple business functions – from checking overall shop sales to analyzing top selling styles and fabrics in the various markets, and stock turnover – and required drill down to individual details. Moreover, the solution had to handle ad-hoc reporting without additional expenses and development costs for the IT department, and be easy enough for any end user.

Hella Handel Austria, a leading worldwide partner of the automotive industry, was facing challenges with its data management. The company generates vast quantities of new data every day, with 45,000 active items, 900 active customers, and approximately 20,000 orders per month. To evaluate this data, the company needed a powerful analysis tool that would allow ad-hoc analyses of its extensive data inventory while conserving employee resources. Previously, only a few specially-trained Hella experts had suitable programming skills to evaluate the business data stored in the DB2 and Oracle databases. Several employees were busy almost full-time programming queries and manually processing the results in Excel or Access. The multitude of different tools and the high percentage of manual work meant that errors were inevitable.

HEROtsc, a leading Business Process Outsourcing company in the UK, was facing challenges in managing large volumes of data spread over 10 different UK offices. The company needed to radically overhaul the way its data was used to add value to both their clients and their own business. They were looking for an efficient and cost-effective way of uniting, presenting, and communicating complex business data throughout the enterprise without the wide range of challenges associated with manual collation using Excel spreadsheets.

iSi North America, a multi-national provider of specialty pressure cylinders for industrial and consumer applications, was facing several challenges. The company was data-rich but information-poor. Sales analysis was a tedious, time-consuming process, and the company was losing money on unprofitable customers and products. The company lacked a clear view of the profitability of specific customers or products, and the burden of report generation was heavy on the small, stressed IT staff. The company made a significant investment in Lawson’s M3 or Movex ERP system, but still found itself struggling with data analysis.

Istobal, a leader in the car, automobile, lorry and bus washing tools sector, was facing a need for Business Intelligence (BI) tools for fast, agile, and easy tracking and better controls. The company was in the midst of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) migration project, which made the need for a BI tool even more necessary. The company needed a tool that could integrate with databases from different systems and some Excel flat files, and that was easy to use and develop. The company was also looking for a tool that could provide better and more efficient information analysis to drive decision-making.

Jardine Lloyd Thompson (JLT) is an international group of risk specialists and employee benefits consultants. The firm wanted to give its global executives access to real-time information on mobile devices to help them deliver great customer service. However, JLT needed to replace its existing business intelligence (BI) infrastructure and move away from its labour-intensive approach to business discovery. The company had a large data warehouse, but all of the analytics were pretty much after the event. Internal analysis at JLT took time and there was uncertainty about the accuracy of the findings. It led people to question what they were seeing. JLT wanted to adopt a more intuitive, real-time, graphical solution that better suited its global dynamic workforce and commitment to business transformation.

KG Knutsson, a large family-owned company in Sweden, was facing challenges with its business performance due to lack of clear understanding of information in its Movex system. The lack of visibility was driving up inventory costs and undermining accounts receivable management. The company was spending too much time and energy to create reports. They needed a better control and an overview of the information in its Movex ERP system. They evaluated a number of different tools and chose QlikView.

La Mancha Resources Australia, a gold mining company, was facing several challenges. The month-end and year-end reporting process was time-consuming, and there was little transparency on the allocation of costs. Some departments were not fully utilizing the existing systems. The company had implemented an ERP system in 2009 to track and report on company data. However, they wanted to leverage their data to enable decision-making through reporting and analytics. They began evaluating several data extraction and reporting tools.