Pediatrix Medical Group, a leading provider of maternal-fetal, newborn, and pediatric sub-specialty physician services, was facing significant challenges in its claims processing due to lack of data integration. The company works with multiple clearinghouses for insurance claims and receiving claims status reports, each of which employs unique and complex formats in generating reports. The lack of data integration between internal applications and clearinghouses caused breaks in information flow, slowing down the claims review and reporting process, and creating a disconnect between reporting and other process steps in the Pediatrix patient life cycle. As the volume of the claims increased, these challenges grew more severe, causing bottlenecks and delays in insurance claims processing.

Unruly Media, a leading global technology platform for social video distribution and analytics, was faced with the challenge of providing its clients with real-time visibility into the social footprint of their videos. This included factors such as reach, shareability, and other elements critical to gaining a competitive business advantage. The company needed a robust solution that could handle the delivery, tracking, and auditing of billions of video views across thousands of social video campaigns for hundreds of brands.

TimoCom, Europe’s leading provider of freight and vehicle exchange services, was faced with the challenge of managing 450,000 freight offers per day and 30,000 warehouse/logistics options with efficiency and security. The business was complicated by the varied operational and regulatory requirements and languages of different countries. Company leaders recognized early on that sustained business growth would require improved performance and deeper insights into its international operations. In the transport and freight forwarding industry, orders tend to be large and represent a large investment on the part of the customer. Criminal organizations sometimes monitor and prey upon transport networks, attempting to steal valuable freight in transit.

Axiell, a UK-based company that designs, develops, implements, and supports systems for libraries, archives, museums, and other community resources, was looking to expand its services to all 33 boroughs of London, a growth rate of almost 200 percent. The company's existing system, a 64-bit Solaris system, limited scalability and was not able to support the increased workload that would come with this expansion. Axiell needed a system that could handle the increased workload without causing slowdowns or failures. Additionally, many of Axiell's customers are run by local government agencies, which are under pressure to control costs. As a result, Axiell was looking for a less expensive but technically superior platform that could help it increase service without increasing costs.

Banca IFIS, an independent Italian bank specializing in financing enterprises, faced a challenge when new Italian banking regulations imposed a demand for a higher level of security and data protection. The bank had to evolve its core business application to meet these new challenges. The main issue was the limited time frame available to implement the new version of their application to meet the timeline given to the bank. In less than one year, they had to deliver a cost-effective and scalable solution, a fully unicode enabled database and application to support Banca IFIS expansion, high availability, and a secured infrastructure fulfilling disaster recovery targets imposed by new banking regulations.

C&K Market, a supermarket chain servicing Oregon and Northern California, was facing the need to transition from its legacy VMS platform to a new platform. The company wanted to adopt an open source database solution to take advantage of improved efficiencies, scalability, and low total cost of ownership. The company had been running Ingres on a VMS platform, which was being phased out. The efficient reporting and analysis of pricing and inventory – and effective control of costs – was all enabled through the Ingres Database, an enterprise open source database.

DAI Rubicon, a company that provides publishers with an end-to-end solution including print, distribution, and circulation management, was facing a challenge. They were in a high volume, low margin business and needed to find a better way for customers to manage their logistics for online purchases. They decided to add a point of sale supply chain delivery solution that would make the ordering process more transparent, scalable, and easier to manage without adding to the cost. They chose Base2Services, Australia’s leading open source cloud computing specialist, to build the supply chain delivery solution. They wanted a solution that was more scalable, more transparent, and easy to use, built on the Amazon EC2 cloud that would lower their ongoing operational costs.

The Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) in Germany was tasked with monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-ban Treaty (CTbT). The CTbT, signed in 1996, prohibits all forms of nuclear testing in any environment, whether it’s underground, underwater, or in the atmosphere. The international monitoring system monitors compliance with the treaty, and comprises a global network of monitoring stations. One of BGR’s primary tasks includes monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the CTbT. In addition to monitoring the CTbT, the second key task of the BGR research group is the monitoring of earthquakes. Even today, it is still almost impossible to forecast when and where an earthquake might occur. Germany has seismically active regions that are repeatedly subject to earthquakes. Due to the high population and industrial density, continuous monitoring of seismic activity is essential. Only by careful monitoring is it possible to identify long term trends and make forecasts on future earthquakes and the accompanying seismic hazard. Both current and historical data on earthquakes form the basis for many scientific investigations.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is dedicated to solving cases of child abduction and child sexual exploitation. Timely information is vital to the organization’s work, as its workers collaborate internally and with partner agencies around the globe to find and recover children at risk. When NCMEC began the implementation of its first database, it wanted to make sure its technology worked as hard – and as tirelessly – as its personnel. To help agencies and organizations around the world work together, the solution had to be able to support Web-based applications and websites in multiple languages and character sets serving diverse user communities. With time a critical factor in every case, the system also had to deliver maximum availability under any conditions.

NETinfo, a rapidly growing independent software vendor, was faced with the challenge of providing a cost-effective, fully customizable e-banking multi-channel solution to financial institutions. The solution needed to meet high-performance requirements including scalability, always-on availability, robust security, and full customizability. Additionally, the solution had to support multiple jurisdictions, single sign-on across multiple banks, and multi-signature workflows. The company initially used Oracle for the NETteller e-banking platform, but the high upfront licensing fees and costly ongoing support significantly increased the total cost of ownership. MySQL was also considered but was quickly rejected due to its lack of critical features such as online backup, point-in-time restore, and security features.

NK.pl, a popular social networking service in Poland, was facing a challenge in keeping pace with the changing preferences and behaviors of its 13 million users. The traditional transaction database used by NK.pl was not powerful enough to process the 250 terabytes of data generated by its users in a timely manner. When product managers attempted to run queries against the data, which was spread across 1,500 servers, they faced query response times of three to four weeks. Such slow response times were unacceptable to NK.pl because the data was outdated and meaningless by the time it was received. To optimize product features, marketing efforts, and the experience of its social network members, NK.pl needed a system that could perform both simple and rich queries quickly for intra-day analysis and response in an extremely cost-effective manner.

With its business growing, Peerless needed a more consistent, flexible platform to modernize its production environment and support future expansion. The company began exploring commercial off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and underlying databases. While companies in similar situations often go straight to proprietary vendors, Peerless decided to build its own ERP solution from the ground up. With a team of just a half-dozen developers, Hamilton’s department set out to develop a fully featured business platform that would automate every aspect of the company’s business processes – from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution – in order to enable a highly optimized just-in-time manufacturing process. To support this environment, Peerless required a flexible, scalable database environment that would be easy for developers to optimize around the evolving ERP platform.

The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), an executive agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was facing the challenge of keeping pace with rising regulatory challenges without increasing costs. The organization’s mission encompasses ensuring the safety, effectiveness, and regulatory compliance of plant protection products used by both industry and amateur gardeners; regulating a market worth around £450 million in the UK and a similar figure in overseas exports; and shaping UK policies on pesticide issues – all with a staff of only 200. Technology plays a vital role in making this possible. Most recently, Park’s group was called on to deliver a particularly high-profile project – enabling the electronic delivery of all services, followed by the introduction of a complete, end-to-end electronic workflow for the entire new product application and approval process.