X

Transhotel, a global travel services provider, was facing challenges with its expanding client base and the increasing reliance on the internet for conducting business. The company needed a reliable and responsive technology platform that would allow close collaboration between the company and its clients. The company was also looking to expand into new markets, including Asia, Russia, Latin America, and India. The challenge was to ensure that the business could maintain and build on its growth without being hampered by speed or latency problems. The company's main website, www.transhotel.com, has a daily turnover of over 50,000 operations, most of which are room availability enquiries. 90% of these operations are served on the end-user’s computer in less than 5 seconds. The company needed a solution that would ensure speedy and uninterrupted access to the applications and websites, thus improving the end user’s experience.

Tourism Victoria, the Victorian Government’s lead tourism agency, was looking to expand its reach into strategic growth markets, particularly China and the millions of Chinese speakers around the world. They planned a two-phase, multi-million dollar online and off-line promotional campaign in China. However, they recognized that site performance and availability issues could arise within mainland China due to the country's variable Internet infrastructure and network peering. Additionally, the cost to host visitmelbourne.com in multiple datacentres in each target market would have been prohibitively expensive. Moreover, Australia’s geographic isolation from the rest of the world can add 100-200 milliseconds of latency between origin servers in Australia and international visitors.

Saxo Bank, a leading international investment bank, was facing a challenge with its online trading and investment platform, SaxoTrader, in China. The demand from investors and institutions within China to access the SaxoTrader platform grew significantly, and so did the need for accelerating the performance of the application in China. The latency caused by the distance between the Denmark-based datacentre and China, along with China’s vast geography and complex Internet peering, resulted in slower performance. Fast transaction times are critical to stock, bond, and foreign exchange trading. As little as one second can result in lost revenue from incomplete or incorrect trades based on out-of-date market information. Saxo Bank also wanted to ensure the same customer experience in China that the SaxoTrader platform is known for around the world. Saxo Bank quickly realised that doing business in China needed a different approach.

As Shopify’s customer base of online merchants grew across the globe, the company recognised the need to ensure the best website user experience possible for shoppers in a multitude of different countries. This led Shopify to underpin its website content delivery capabilities with the service of a content delivery network (CDN). Unfortunately, the CDN service provider lacked a cloud delivery presence in Australia, a fast-growing market for Shopify. To accommodate the needs of Australia-based merchants and their end users located in Australia and New Zealand, Shopify searched for a way to ensure optimal website performance in both countries - without incurring massive infrastructure build-out costs; the cost to expand data centre capabilities in the region was prohibitively expensive. At the same time, website traffic was growing for Shopify in the US and Europe. To continue its differentiated capability of delivering high-performing websites, Shopify network engineers sought an affordable solution that could ensure fast website delivery anywhere in the world.

Spiceworks, a company that provides a free desktop IT management application combined with an online community for IT professionals, was facing a challenge with its international users. The company's website was hosted from a single data center location in Austin, Texas, which was cost-effective for serving the domestic audience. However, Spiceworks began to notice that international users were spending less time than domestic users in the community. The company realized that Internet latency was affecting their business and that they needed to deliver community site content from locations that are closer to their international users. In Australia, for example, the Spiceworks community site would frequently deliver outdated content due to unusual and unpredictable content caching mechanisms used by Australia’s largest network provider, Telstra.

As TuneUp Software GmbH expanded its customer base, latency became an issue for customers located outside of Europe. The company's business model, which is based on selling over the web, required optimising the user experience and speeding up download times. The physical distance between the server and the customer location was found to have a significant impact on performance. The company's web servers were under a lot of strain, with sub-optimal speeds and high latency levels. The company also noticed an increasing bounce rate, with users leaving the site after visiting a single page. This was particularly concerning as the company was expanding into international markets.

Calaméo, a free document publishing and sharing platform developed by WebCentric, faced a challenge due to its immense popularity and rapidly-growing data volumes. The platform, which allows users to incorporate multimedia features into their web publications, needed additional IT infrastructure to manage the skyrocketing bandwidth capacity required to store and display a huge number of Word documents, PDF documents, and other content. The platform is based in Paris but has an international user base, necessitating technology that could quickly deliver content to users across the globe. Calaméo’s managers sought a solution that would provide additional capacity and rapid, reliable service at a reasonable cost.

Bang & Olufsen, a global design icon and symbol of audio-visual excellence, was seeking to leverage a robust online presence to serve both mid-level and high-end customers in the world’s fastest growing consumer markets, particularly China. However, the company experienced slow response time on their websites, and in some instances, the website was failing to load. Despite testing the use of data centres located in Singapore and Hong Kong, these failed to meet the company's goal of creating a strong experience for mainland China consumers. The company needed a global solution that would ensure a strong local and global online experience when building a data centre was not an option.

Jabra, a global provider of audio headsets, was facing challenges with its growing international presence and sales opportunities. The company needed to ensure that its website was always accessible in all parts of the world, no matter how remote from its native Denmark. Key target markets for growth included Hong Kong, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and China. Jabra needed its website to load very quickly in these regions to maintain its reputation with potential customers and prevent site abandonment. The company was using a content delivery network to achieve better load times and “time to interaction”, but found that it did not have the international reach it needed, billing was unpredictable, and its support was lacking. There were also particular challenges when targeting China due to strict content filtering, often resulting in high latencies.

As Hostelworld’s global footprint rapidly grew in terms of its customers and properties, especially in the Asia Pacific region, it found that the performance of its website outside of Western Europe was becoming increasingly important. It soon became clear that users outside of Western Europe were often experiencing a lag effect when viewing the content online. With Hostelworld’s main website being hosted in its primary data centres in Dublin and London, customers situated further afield didn’t experience the same level of site performance. In order to deliver the best possible experience for its global customers, Hostelworld needed to ensure that its website performed equally as fast across the various continents and devices.

Wacker Chemie AG, a global chemicals business, was experiencing severe performance problems with its website in countries such as China. The website pages were taking 2-3 minutes to load due to the distance the data had to travel from Germany. This was causing the company to lose leads as customers opted to purchase from competitors due to the long load times. The company tried to resolve the issue by placing cache servers in Hong Kong and implementing changes to the delivery of the website, which reduced load times to 30 seconds per page. However, this was still considered too slow and the company was reluctant to manage a separate infrastructure abroad due to its complexity.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is a global leader in the protection of human rights, with 400 employees operating from offices on 5 continents. The HRW website is critical to the organization's success, as it allows them to disseminate information about human rights abuses worldwide. However, the website is occasionally targeted by individuals, governments, and organizations that aim to obstruct HRW's efforts. These attackers often employ denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. While HRW had the ability to manually mitigate these attacks, the process was time-consuming and disruptive, requiring the immediate attention of HRW's two-person technical web team and preventing the organization's 70 content creators and publishers from performing their critical web-related tasks. Furthermore, the HRW website could not process online donations during an attack, as it consumed all server resources.

Leader Summaries, a company providing business summary library books for professionals, was facing a significant challenge with its website performance. The company's website, leadersummaries.com, was experiencing a surge in popularity across South America. However, many subscribers were visiting the website from telecom networks that delivered unreliable performance. As subscriber volumes grew, so did the time it took to deliver content from the Leader Summaries datacenter in Spain to users in South America. This resulted in latency-induced delays driving page-load times up to 20 seconds in areas of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. The poor website performance led to a rise in customer complaints and cancelled subscriptions, placing the company's entire business model at risk.

The French Tennis Federation (FFT) needed a system that could handle sharp spikes in website traffic during the first few days that tickets go on sale. This international aspect is vital since the French Open attracts numerous visitors from Russia, China, and the US. Therefore it decided to host its static content on CDNetworks’ servers, to be sure that pages would load quickly for users anywhere in the world. The FFT chose CDNetworks because of its solid reputation for effective, reliable service.

Libération, a major French daily newspaper, was facing issues with its website, particularly slow page loads on mobile devices. This was due to the use of responsive design technology, which required the full page for computers to be uploaded first and then adjusted to the size of the smartphone screen. This not only made viewing the website on mobile devices tedious, especially in areas without 3G network coverage, but also impacted Libération’s SEO as page load times are a factor in search engine rankings. The digital technology team at Libération decided to switch from responsive design to dynamic serving, a technology that allows companies to have two websites with the same URL address: one for use on computers and one for use on mobile devices.

Agent Provocateur, a premium British lingerie retailer, was facing a challenge with its global online footprint. As the company expanded, site latency became an issue, particularly for customers outside the UK, including those in the US, China, and Australia. Localized webpages were taking too long to load, a problem that was exacerbated during peak shopping times and sales. The company realized that to attract new customers and grow in its key target markets, it needed to ensure that it wasn’t compromising on its website performance. Deploying multiple locally hosted sites would be too complicated and require significant resources, leading the company to decide that a content delivery network partner would provide the best solution.

MailUp, a technology company operating in Italy, developed a digital cloud computing platform used by SMEs and large corporations to create, send and monitor newsletters, e-mails, and SMS. As part of their development plan, they aimed to grow in non-English speaking markets. However, they faced challenges in the initial phase of their push into Indonesia and Japan, where competitors were hard to surpass and offered a more user-friendly experience. They needed to improve performance for customers accessing the platform, balance the traffic load, and offer superior performance over rival infrastructures in these markets to facilitate and drive forward market penetration.

Duininck Incorporated, a third-generation family business that began building roads in 1926, was initially using spreadsheets for their bidding processes. However, the company found that spreadsheets were not efficient or flexible enough to meet the requirements of their various divisions, which include road and heavy highway construction, paving, concrete, golf course construction, aggregates and mining, utility work, and alternative energy. The company also needed a solution that could integrate with their Viewpoint accounting system and provide built-in advantages for Department of Transportation (DOT) bids, as federal, state, and county projects account for a high percentage of their work.

Alvin J. Coleman & Son previously relied on a payroll and accounting system that required manual data input to establish budgets. Entering the actual corresponding performance data from the field was an additional manual process. The fact that the information from the field was handwritten further complicated the system, with back-and-forth communications between the office and the field required to clarify notes, quantities and labor time once the original data made it to the main office. The information transfer was time consuming and slow, and the accuracy and reliability were questionable.

Wave Broadband, a provider of high-speed internet, video, and phone services in Washington, Oregon, and California, was facing challenges with their existing estimating and bidding process. They were using Excel workbooks developed in-house, which made extracting data for reporting a labor-intensive process, requiring a lot of redundant data entry work. The company's clients range from residential and apartment complexes to businesses, hospitals, and universities, with cell service providers accounting for a large portion of the work. While some of the projects are small, estimates for large networks for these cell carriers can be very large and complex, adding to the complexity of the process.

Casella Construction, a company with over 175 employees, was relying on a mix of spreadsheets and paper-based systems for managing its operations. This approach was described as 'everything but specialized software'. The company was looking for better efficiency, data, and communication to ensure continued profitability in heavy construction. The challenge was to find a modern, connected software solution that could integrate all areas of the business and flow information across divisions.

Don Pearson, a veteran in the estimating and operations field, started his own company, Tenex Contractors, in 2021. The company, based in Burlington, Wisconsin, performs grading, excavation, and road construction work across the southern part of the state. Pearson had previously used B2W heavy construction estimating software for close to two decades, helping him produce up to 1,200 bids a year as chief estimator for a $200 million company. With his new company, Pearson faced the challenge of maintaining the same level of speed, accuracy, and consistency in bidding, but on a smaller scale.

Don Pearson, a veteran in the estimating and operations field, started Tenex Contractors in early 2021. He had been using B2W Estimate for nearly two decades, during which he was able to produce up to 1,200 bids a year as chief estimator for a $200 million company. As he started Tenex, he faced the challenge of maintaining the same level of efficiency and accuracy in his bidding process. He needed a solution that would allow him to work faster, increase accuracy, and maintain consistency in his bids.

Interstate Electrical, a regional, family-owned, commercial electrical contractor, was facing several challenges in their project delivery process. The company was relying on paper drawings, emails, and spreadsheets for project delivery, which was not efficient or scalable. The estimation process was done using a combination of wheel-and-paper process, Microsoft Excel, and other software, resulting in a slow, bulky process that often led to costly errors and rework. Change orders were done with side-by-side paper comparison, taking valuable time and resources for item verification and quantities. As-built drawings could not be accurately scaled, leaving time-consuming manual verifications and room for error. Cut sheets faced a similar problem with no standardization options to accurately send information to the prefab team. Markups were made on physical drawings and presented problems: there were multiple copies, notes were hard to read and accuracy was not optimal. CAD detailers were used to create drawings for markups, resulting in a costly and time-consuming back and forth verification process that also mismanaged CAD time and use.

Mission Bell, a company specializing in custom casework and reclaimed lumber, was facing a challenge. Their clients were requesting increasingly complex projects with faster turnaround times. The company realized that to meet these demands, they needed to become more efficient rather than just assigning more people to a project. The complexity of the designs and the speed at which they were expected to be completed required a solution that would increase collaboration, reduce errors, and enable quicker turnaround times.

Premier Mechanical was faced with the challenge of winning more work by producing better estimates, being more efficient, and adding value to their project delivery model. They also wanted to improve the consistency and delivery of information between the office, fab shop, and the field. The 2008 recession had forced many companies within the AEC industry to shut their doors, but Premier Mechanical decided to not only survive but thrive. They aimed to achieve double-digit growth during the recession by transforming their project delivery methods, elevating efficiency, and saving money by digitalizing paper-based workflows.

Márkus Engineering, a Budapest-based civil engineering firm, was in the midst of managing a major renovation project when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The project was the creation of a new Radisson Collection Hotel in St. Stephen’s Square. With face-to-face work restricted by the pandemic, the firm needed a reliable online project collaboration platform to maintain information flow between project teams both on- and off-site. The solution had to work with Archicad, Graphisoft’s BIM software, which was used by the project’s designers and architects. The firm was also looking to become more digital and BIM-focused to keep up with the rapidly growing AEC market in Hungary.

Ribuna AG, a civil engineering and infrastructure company based in Interlaken, Switzerland, needed a solution for end-to-end digital planning and data management. The company had to quickly adapt to a decentralized approach due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which required teams to work from home. This was particularly crucial for the Oberried Station project on Lake Brienz, which started in the midst of the pandemic. The company sought a digital solution that would minimize errors and facilitate structured interaction at every planning and coordination stage. The solution also needed to be sustainable, reducing the use of paper and saving time.The company identified that internal work processes, particularly with complex construction tasks and intricate project coordination, could waste huge amounts of time. Therefore, Ribuna decided to find digital tools that would make processes more efficient and help to minimize the potential for errors by optimizing and standardizing processes. The company also needed a tool that would optimize both internal processes and interaction with external project partners to create a proven planning and construction process that would be both transparent and reliable.

The City of Las Vegas was facing inefficiencies in its permit approval process due to its reliance on paper-based plan reviews. With an average of 20,000 permits a year, the city was struggling with a process that could only be reviewed one discipline at a time, taking a week or more per discipline, across a minimum of five different disciplines. The process also involved routing printed mylars to five utility companies for final signatures, a process that could take up to six weeks. Storage was also an issue, with paper plans scattered across three different repositories. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift to remote working made the paper-based review sessions impossible.

Solid Earth Civil Constructors, a civil construction company based in Pueblo, Colorado, was faced with an ultimatum from a large potential client to adopt a digital estimation and bid submission system. The company had been using traditional, paper-based workflows for estimation and lacked the IT staff necessary to undergo the digital transformation for estimation, project delivery, and communication. The company was also faced with the challenge of implementing the new system, Bluebeam Revu, without a dedicated IT staff and with no background in technology. The company had to adapt to the changing industry and stay nimble to maintain its reputation and success.