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MWEB Business, a division of MWEB, a leading ISP in South Africa, was faced with the challenge of running an efficient network for secure email that guarantees dependable, effective and scalable IT infrastructure. Among the solutions MWEB Business offers to its customers, the email service is the most challenging and complex. MWEB offers three email services to its business customers: Business Mail, for smaller businesses requiring multiple mailboxes branded with the company name; Mail Spooling, for businesses requiring a large number of mailboxes allowing for all e-mails to be collected on the MWEB server, downloaded all at once and distributed to all employees in the business; and Courier List Service, enabling sending of e-mails to multiple recipients at once via an easy-to-use Web based interface allowing customers full management of their email lists, recipient information, message content and mail batches. In order to provide its business customers with these mail services, MWEB has to offer 24/7 reliable, fast service with no delays, no spamming and secure mail without viruses. MWEB had to design a powerful, intricate network, with a physical and logical layout that could undertake these email tasks. Easy and high-speed network flow between servers was imperative. At the same time, it had to ensure that the network was simple to use and administer and scalable for future upgrades to accommodate its growing customer base while still maintaining quality service.

PenTeleData, a strategic partnership of cable and telephone companies, was facing issues with its legacy security solution. The old system often resulted in application disruptions, connectivity disruptions, and security threats to PenTeleData’s infrastructure. The company required a new solution that could consistently protect its infrastructure and that would be able to integrate with DDoS detection from Kentik Technologies’ cloud-based NetFlow analytics solution. Moreover, PenTeleData was seeking to use this new security offering as the foundation for launching a new DDoS mitigation service it could sell to its customers, allowing them to stay operational during a cyber-attack.

The customer, a Tier-1 Telecommunication Operator and Internet Service Provider, was facing ongoing growth of Internet traffic capacity resulting in increased load on its services and data centers. The growth in traffic was projected to intensely continue in the coming years. The challenge was to maintain best Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users and to ensure Service Level Agreement (SLA) and service continuity while addressing aggressive traffic capacity growth. The desired solution must eliminate capacity growth risks by providing additional room for growth of services, throughput and other metrics, as well as protecting the current investment in equipment, people and knowledge.

CSEA, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance and the Italian Energy and Water Authority, plays a critical role in regulating the Italian energy sector. It collects funds from utility suppliers and distributors and reallocates these funds to electric, gas, and water sectors. Due to the critical nature of these services, CSEA must ensure 100% uptime of its customer-facing applications and networks during all operational scenarios, including in the face of a cyber-attack. The IT department at CSEA had relied on the native security capabilities of individual servers, resulting in a manual, resource-intensive process that made it difficult to implement infrastructure-wide security updates and policies. As CSEA upgraded its data centers to a modern, high-availability cluster infrastructure, it identified the need to deploy next-generation load balancing capabilities to drive data center scalability and allow new applications/services to be deployed without incurring performance degradation.

The Bâloise Group, which includes Basler Versicherungen and Bâloise Bank SoBa, needed to ensure 24/7 access to their shared website for their customers. The website contains crucial links that allow customers to log into their personal banking and financial services accounts. While the group had more than one Web Server Directed to the front page of the companies’ website, limiting the likelihood of a major outage, they wanted a solution that, in the event of a massive failure, would redirect visitors to a special emergency page with links to essential personal account services. They also needed to maintain their reputation in the marketplace, as an unreliable or intermittently inaccessible website could question the company’s overall credibility.

SK C&C designed a consolidation project to create a single highly-dense data center that provides web portal services to all fourteen subsidiaries of SK C&C. In consolidating their data centers, SK C&C wanted to achieve two main objectives – greater cost reduction, and operational simplicity. Cost reduction evolves from consolidation of hardware, software and other infrastructure equipment, and operational simplicity is achieved by managing fewer data centers, which helps meet compliance requirements more easily, handle security threats more efficiently and enhance business agility faster. For its web portal, SK C&C designed a single data center with multiple server farms, each housing multiple servers running different applications. To support the growth in traffic to the companies’ web portals, SK C&C set a target of 10Gbps throughput capacity for each server farm. One active ADC and one backup ADC with four physical ports of 10GE each were designed to handle servers load balancing needs.

In June 2015, Hexatom, a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Managed Service Provider (MSP) in France, took on a new client in the gaming industry and experienced its first major attack. The attack significantly affected not only the gaming company targeted, but also neighboring clients in the data center. Equipped with only a rate-based solution provided by its carriers, Hexatom needed an in-house, comprehensive and automated attack mitigation solution to protect its infrastructure and ensure such an incident did not happen again.

The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) is the UK’s central organization that processes applications for universities and colleges across the country. UCAS has been processing student applications online since 2002. Today, nearly all students are using the online application system with 98.5% submitting applications as of January 2006, using electronic means via www.ucas.com in comparison with 77.6% at the same point last year. The UCAS website was independently audited by ABC Electronic during November 2005. They verified that the total number of page impressions was 67,289,583 for that month. Due to the continuous surge in online applications UCAS deployed Radware’s APSolute Education solutions to guarantee the continuous, fault tolerant and secure operation of the UCAS website.

Myntex, a leading provider of trusted encryption solutions for mobile devices, was hit with a series of massive multi-vector DDoS attacks, resulting in severe service interruptions that negatively impacted its customers and the availability of their mobile devices. The company utilized standard security methods and protocols in conjunction with a DDoS solution from a provider that offered poor customer service and couldn’t prevent downtime. Attack campaigns could last a month and involved Advanced Persistent Denial of Service (APDoS) attacks, which included multi-vector burst DDoS attacks at massive sizes ranging from 40Gbps to 130Gbps. These attacks resulted in service disruptions for Myntex’s customers, causing communication downtime with their mobile devices.

KiwiCollection.com, a curated collection of more than 2,000 international luxury hotels and resorts, was facing a significant performance challenge. The website, which allows travelers to research and book their hotels online, was being served from a single data center in the US. This resulted in slow page load times and dramatically inconsistent user experiences for its worldwide audience. The issue became glaringly apparent when the CEO of Kiwi Collection, who is based overseas, was showing the site to a group of European partners and had to wait an embarrassingly long time for the site to load. It was clear that the company needed an acceleration solution.

The Town of Ajax was struggling with a paper-based document management system that had become an administrative nightmare. The municipality was maintaining 27 sets of binders across their departments with hard copies of their ISO 9001 quality documentation. Every time a document was created, edited, or updated, 27 copies had to be printed, distributed, and added to each binder. This process was not only time-consuming but also led to a lack of version control, disparity across the departments, and last-minute scrambling to ensure audit preparedness. The municipality needed a system that would allow them to better manage their ISO 9001 documentation, including operating procedures, work instructions, and related forms.

The Wine Group, a global wine company, was facing challenges with managing Environmental, Quality, and Health & Safety activities as their employees were using different systems. This led to a lack of centralization and standardization of processes and data. The company wanted to implement a centralized software solution that would unify all their performance data and standardize common processes. The solution needed to be user-friendly and support a high level of transparency into their performance metrics with the ability to output data in reports and dashboards easily available to upper management.

The City of St. Albert, the 5th largest city in the province of Alberta, was seeking an integrated management system to help them achieve their short term goal of meeting requirements for ISO 14001 certification and their long term goal of ensuring operational efficiency and excellence. The first step towards ISO 14001 certification required the City of St. Albert to streamline internal processes and data management across the City’s departments, beginning with Transit and Public Works. Before Intelex, the majority of the City’s documentation, tracking, and reporting lived on paper, in disparate spreadsheets, or in the municipality’s in-house system. This resulted in lengthy processes to find the right document and at times turned out missing or inconsistent data fields. The City of St. Albert knew they would need to standardize their approach to environmental management by automating the collection, storage, assessment and reporting of environmental data.

Moss, a leader in the construction business in America, was looking for a fully integrated safety, risk and claims management platform. The company needed to integrate its dispersed and siloed data into a single database. They could use it to extract knowledge that could be used to understand what was happening in the business and to identify opportunities for improvement. Legacy manual systems simply would not allow Moss to be predictive and achieve the kind of growth rate they were seeking. Moss’ Safety Management System had a good foundation, but lacked comprehensive and analytical views – including the ability to assess incidents and claims together. It also did not have predictive analysis capabilities. Moss wanted to move to an SMS/RMIS (Safety Management System/Risk Management Information System) that provides a more integrated view of a working environment.

In 2010, Agnico Eagle recognized a need to improve environmental health and safety (EHS). It was using paper-based spreadsheets to track incidents, inspections and other critical activities and had no real-time capabilities to act on data. EHS staff at Agnico also needed to quickly get data in the hands of executives to speed up EHS project approvals. And, with locations throughout the world, a tool that could accommodate multiple languages – particularly Finnish – was a must.

SUEZ North America, a company responsible for treating 560 million gallons of water and over 440 million gallons of wastewater each day, faced challenges in managing facilities of different ages and stages in building and equipment maintenance, supervising and engaging employees who have not received comparable training, and aligning often varied safety missions and cultures. Accurate incident reporting and data management was key to improving health and safety for workers and satisfying maintenance and operations demands at the many facilities SUEZ manages. Initially, the company used spreadsheets to capture, report, analyze, and correct hazards. As its client list grew and new software and technology became available, SUEZ realized a paper-based approach to incident management had become cumbersome and ineffective.

Cory, a leading waste management, recycling and energy recovery company in the UK, was overly reliant on paper-based forms and checklists, making it difficult to meet current demands while planning an expansion of the business. These paper-based forms needed to be scanned and emailed to a central team who cut-and-pasted relevant information into an Excel spreadsheet for basic analysis. This process was time-consuming, costly, and did not allow for data to be seen in aggregate or in context. The company needed a solution that would streamline data collection, improve visibility of operations, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and awareness.

Kloeckner Metals Corporation, a full-line manufacturing, production and service center business specializing in metals industries, was seeking a solution to streamline its processes and make it easier for branch operations to meet the company’s environmental health and safety (EHS) objectives. In 2017, the company was using multiple EHS systems to track incidents, perform corrective actions, hold safety meetings, perform job hazard analyses, and run other EHS programs. Each system was disparate and there was no interoperability. Kloeckner wanted to consolidate these workflows, close the loop on both corrective actions and audit recommendations, and enhance its overall EHS processes.

SGS, a global product testing, inspection and certification company, needed a software platform that could be customised to fit the needs of their business. The company was focused on quality control, regulatory compliance and product safety, and required a software provider that could collaborate with them to create the best possible safety management system. Prior to implementing Intelex, reporting was done on paper and aggregated in dozens of excel sheets to produce statistics. There was no traceable visibility of incident investigations and corrective actions, which was a big challenge. Another challenge was to ensure that any software tools used were representative of real-world and operational needs and made sense for the actual end users.

Glanbia, a global leader in nutrition based in Ireland, has been expanding its product offerings and acquiring new plants. However, this rapid growth has presented operational challenges, particularly in standardising processes and data collection across different regions. Prior to implementing Intelex, Glanbia relied on local-site or business-level processes, primarily using MS Excel, which lacked standardisation. Collecting and aggregating data was a difficult and effort-intensive task, and the reliability of the data was not always strong, often requiring further time and effort to check and validate it before further use.

Fortive, a company with operating companies specializing in a wide range of sectors, is driven by the motivation to create a world that is stronger, smarter, and safer for everyone. However, creating a better future requires the collection and management of a constant flow of high-quality data. Sustainability, in particular, is a remarkably data-intensive practice. Prior to using Intelex, the sustainability team was using Excel spreadsheets to collect data. However, the disparate and constantly expanding data sources, as well as the specialty knowledge required to ensure the quality and fidelity of the data, made this an impractical solution over the long term. Beyond collecting the data, the most important step is communicating the meaning of that data to a diverse range of stakeholders inside and outside the company.

The customer, a North American company that creates displays and helps its clients create meaningful customer experiences, was looking to focus on continuous EHSQ improvement with processes that are simple, connected, accurate and quick. Their previous approach to quality involved a lot of paper and spreadsheets, which produced good results but was labor intensive. Information wasn’t always available when it was needed, and only a few people really engaged with the data or processes. The company needed a technology solution that would allow them to begin the digital transformation of their EHSQ practices. The goal is to eventually support the entirety of their EHSQ practices in an integrated digital management system.

Coats, a global leader in thread manufacturing and structural components, needed a way to manage health and safety across its global business. The company's Journey to Zero strategy aimed to create a comprehensive global safety culture, but the demands of collecting and managing data across the organization were consuming significant resources. Before implementing Intelex, Coats relied on manual data entry and spreadsheets for tracking actions, which was time-consuming and prone to errors. The company needed a technology platform that could support its safety culture at every location worldwide and streamline the reporting and approval process involved with incidents and actions.

Linde, a global company with over 2,000 sites in more than 100 countries and over 70,000 employees, faced the challenge of creating a unified safety culture. The company's size and diversity made it difficult to ensure that all employees embraced safety and recognized the importance of reporting incidents. Following the merger with Praxair in 2019, Linde had to deal with several legacy systems, making it difficult to get benchmark KPIs when different systems were used in different business units. The company needed a system that could be used by frontline employees and that would encourage them to report incidents, no matter how small. Linde also wanted to support the business units with advanced data analysis to improve safety across the organization and to direct resources for continuous improvement.

Heraeus, a technology company with a global presence, developed a new global Environment, Health and Safety organization (EHS) in 2019 to safeguard the enterprise. However, the company faced challenges with its EHS systems. There were no standardized processes to identify risks, investigate incidents, or follow up on known problems. The lack of a centralized tool for incident investigation and action planning resulted in a manual, time-consuming workload for EHS professionals. The company needed to increase the transparency of EHS data within all levels of the organization.

When Ken Hankins, Director of Product Quality and Consumer Satisfaction, arrived at Vornado in late 2018, he quickly identified some key opportunities to improve operations. The quality management team was using largely manual processes to collect and collate data, passing information back and forth using spreadsheets and e-mail. Although these methods worked, they were extremely labor-intensive and often resulted in information that was incomplete, or which was out of sync across the company’s multiple locations. As a result, business leaders at Vornado’s headquarters had limited visibility to data from their numerous overseas manufacturing facilities. Hankins recognized that the company needed greater transparency across all of its locations, with automated data collection and a centralized repository for all of its quality management information. Acceptable quality levels (AQLs), for example, were not available to Vornado’s quality managers in real time, making it difficult to determine where they should focus their attention. Hankins knew that effective quality management programs are driven by data – but the company simply didn’t have much of the data that it needed.

ORIC Pharmaceuticals, a company focused on overcoming resistance in cancer, was struggling with its quality management system (QMS). As an FDA regulated company, ORIC needed to maintain strict controls regarding quality management and employee training. Initially, they developed their QMS processes around spreadsheets, paper documents, shared network folders, and other manual systems. However, these processes quickly became unwieldy and time-consuming, leading to considerable frustration among the company’s employees. Melody Puckett, ORIC’s Senior Manager for Quality Assurance, was tasked with finding an eQMS solution that could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the company's quality management processes.

The Massachusetts-based audio technology company was struggling with an inefficient and manual process for managing their product development lifecycle. The process was captured in a series of Excel spreadsheets, Visio diagrams, and reports that were generated manually by a dedicated department. This resulted in miscommunication throughout the project, countless hours in meetings, loss of time, and disorganized data that was never easy to share. The company needed an automated process management system that would track their project development throughout the various phases: concept, design, development, manufacturing, and quality. However, none of the off-the-shelf solutions in Project Management or Product Lifecycle Management fit their process without major and costly customization.

When Birch Gold Group launched their business in 2012, they knew they needed to automate their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) processes to scale their business quickly. They needed the best technology to organize, automate and synchronize their business processes. The company needed to handle processes like implementing and tracking their call back system. They needed to simplify their shipping and purchase orders to keep transparency throughout the process, avoiding confusion and loss of time. The problem with most off the shelf CRM Software solutions was their complexity and difficulty to understand by non-technical users. However, the most challenging problem for Birch Gold Group, was the lack of flexibility and workflow management in other CRM solutions. They needed a BPM solution that would offer them the flexibility and scalability to customize and maintain their processes, in house and as needed.

Edwards Technologies was dealing with rapid growth, having recently acquiring very large projects with high visibility. Their challenges included ensuring that products ordered were delivered on time, project issues were addressed effectively and projects completed on deadline. Managing their day to day operational and workflow processes as well as retrieving pertinent information all in one centralized location became a major undertaking. The manual process of storing documents in various folders on their network server, tracking and managing their project statuses via Excel and other programs were no longer effective, while visibility into projects and overall accountability was slipping. Another challenge was the communication barriers between internal departments. Each department was spending a lot of time conveying real time progress and identifying bottlenecks.