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Telecommunications companies are facing the challenge of managing and monitoring an increasing number of products, campaigns, retail channels, prepaid and roaming services, billing, customer experience and support, and order and fraud management operations. The complexity and dynamic nature of business data make it difficult for static monitoring approaches to effectively track these metrics. Despite redundancies in data centers and telecom networks, outages and incidents still occur, impacting network, business, and customer experience management operations. The cost of these incidents can be significant, with a 2016 survey indicating that the average cost of a data center outage rose 7% from 2013 to 2016. For a telco operator with annual revenues of $1B, annual incident costs can range between $11.6M-$41.1M, depending on the types of systems used for monitoring.

The company, a mobile gaming giant, relies heavily on its in-house developed cross-promotional system for revenue. Any bug or change in the system could lead to more than 15% loss in in-app purchases. The company used to monitor impressions, clicks, and conversions of their cross promotions on a weekly basis using Tableau dashboards. However, this manual process was slow and inefficient, often leading to delayed insights on glitches. For instance, a new promotion caused major crashes across several platforms, but the issue was not logged until the next day. It took almost four days for the company to realize the problem, and it was only discovered when checking another unrelated system.

Redis Labs, a company in a high-growth phase, was acquiring many enterprise customers in the Fortune 500 and Global 1000. It needed to scale its customer service while maximizing efficiency and minimizing time and resources. As Redis Labs scaled, it became responsible for managing tens of thousands of databases and could no longer manually monitor their usage patterns individually. The company wanted their monitoring to operate on a more granular level, picking up incidents that might otherwise go unnoticed. With the growing volume of databases also came a wider variety of usage patterns, which couldn’t be properly tracked with the fixed alerting that had proved sufficient in the company’s early days.

Xandr’s marketplace operates at a scale and complexity that are hard to fathom. The company serves multiple billions of ads every single day, handles 45 million transactions per second, and processes more than 175 terabytes of data. Xandr’s platforms make a lot of complex business decisions to reach the right customers for the marketers. When glitches occur and blank ads are served, all parties lose money. This has to be detected and resolved quickly before losses mount. The extensive nature of Xandr’s partnerships meant that issues could take a week or more to detect and resolve. Xandr’s infrastructure includes thousands of servers and hundreds of applications across its global data centers. The company used a variety of disparate tools to monitor the performance of the infrastructure itself as well as the delivery of the ads.

GetYourGuide, a global booking platform for travelers, was facing challenges in spotting issues in their business data in real-time. They were taking too long to identify problems, which led to revenue losses in their cloud services and marketing budgets, and negatively impacted user experience. The company needed an automated solution to control cloud costs, track product usage for changing revenue, and monitor marketing activity and ad spend. The global pandemic further complicated matters, as the travel industry was severely impacted, and GetYourGuide had to adjust its operations and spending accordingly.

Rubicon Project, one of the largest ad exchanges in the world, processes trillions of transactions each month in real-time auctions. The company receives more than 13 trillion bid requests per month, handled in its seven global data centers, housing more than 55,000 CPUs. However, the Tech Ops team could not monitor more complex aspects of business and trends, especially not in real time. For instance, Rubicon needed real-time insight if a large institutional buyer deviated from its normal transaction trend by any percentage in one of the global data centers at any hour of the day or night. Such deviations could have a devastating effect on the exchange if there was a delay in addressing it with the customer. Along the bid stream, there were many potential areas for communication or technical breakdown, which would prevent the bid from going into the auction, and negatively affect overall bid health.

With the rollout of 3G and 4G technologies, telecommunication service offerings have grown. Cell phone usage has skyrocketed. Voice, video, and data have converged to offer rich new services that customers rely upon. High-definition video consumption and other services are consuming more network bandwidth, making it more important than ever to accurately manage and maintain network performance. In this case study, a leading provider of telecommunications services needed to ensure end-customer satisfaction and quickly mitigate any network performance issues, where any incident could easily cost them millions of dollars. They had to be able to monitor service assurance, as well as analyze data at detailed levels to track the underlying quality of network performance and to avoid unexpected outages. Managing multiple communication applications and platforms required advanced network monitoring and orchestration to ensure optimal network performance. The company didn’t have clear visibility into how network resources were used. Their available network management tools were static and only addressed specific needs, unable to provide reliable, transparent data for insights in real-time.

Payoneer, a global cross-border payments platform, was facing several challenges. They needed to replace their traditional monitoring system with one that could scale with their rapidly growing business. They also wanted to provide mission-critical monitoring-as-a-service to internal groups. Another challenge was to eliminate wasted engineering effort by preventing false positives on operational metrics. Lastly, they wanted to prevent revenue loss by accurately forecasting demand for funds. Given that the company’s operations span so many countries and involve a massive number of partners and their APIs, Payoneer continuously monitors nearly 200,000 metrics to ensure it meets SLAs and general reliability and performance targets.

NetSeer, a leading adtech company, was facing challenges with its business and operational KPI tracking. The company was using several tools such as Graphite and alerting systems, but they were not accurately alerted on key business problems. The standard static thresholds were causing either too many false positives, or not enough alerts. For instance, the company tracks the number of ad calls to their front end and back end throughout the day and night. Daytime requests are typically 20 times more than nighttime requests, and with a static threshold, even a significant drop in daytime requests would not trigger any notification. Additionally, performance issues would crop up from time to time when new services were implemented and the NetSeer team had no way to identify them quickly.

Mayvenn, a company that provides high-quality beauty products and aims to connect customers with the right stylists, relies heavily on data for its operations. The company moves a variety of data, including ad and marketing spend, email, text, and customer service data, from Amazon S3 to Amazon Redshift using Python for analysis and into Looker for reporting. However, the company faced challenges with its previous data orchestration tool, Alooma, which hindered fast iteration of ETLT. The data team at Mayvenn often found themselves blocked on projects due to dependency on the engineering team, which often had a full queue.

HNI Corporation, a global leader in workplace furnishings and residential building products, was in the midst of a planned five-year transformation from seasonal bulk orders by big distributors to customized orders by dealers, individuals, and enterprises. This required a refactoring of the management of the supply chain by taking control of the data from ordering systems, ERP, and fulfillment systems. The COVID-19 pandemic and disrupted office and work-from-home environments forced HNI to speed up changes to how it does business, requiring a solution with flexibility and speed as a cornerstone for transformation. The data science and analytics team at HNI needed a platform that could scale with them, minimize cross-functional dependencies, reduce time-to-pipeline production, and refocus on the logic versus the infrastructure.

The New York Post, a highly data-driven publisher, was faced with the challenge of accelerating time-to-market for internal reporting, financial, and other data initiatives. The upcoming crackdown from Google on third-party cookie data in the Chrome browser accelerated the need to drive more data-driven personalization and engagement across the New York Post sites. The team at the New York Post required a faster way to ingest, aggregate, transform, and write out a variety of critical new data feeds in order to meet various business demands and requirements.

TE21, an education company, was facing challenges due to its growth and the development of more complex business processes. They were outgrowing their manual QuickBooks solution and needed a more robust and automated process. The company also needed a CRM system that could enable a true “quote–to–cash” process starting with sales, which could be easily connected to their financial billing, collection, and reporting system. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the growing business's challenges.

Netwrix Corporation, a market-leading visibility and governance platform for IT environments, was facing several issues due to their archaic data management system of copying and pasting data between datasets. This process did not scale as the company grew to a $20 million company and it quickly became clear that the company needed a better solution. The company faced three main challenges: eliminating errors in their copy and paste method, scaling their processes, and improving data integrity. In order to solve these systematic problems, Netwrix needed an efficient and effective enterprise planning software that could allow them to smoothly integrate with Salesforce.

Lufthansa Systems, a leading IT service provider for the airline and transportation markets, needed a robust and stable database platform to underpin its airline planning and routing software. This software is sold to hundreds of airlines globally to ensure every flight is a safe one. The company offers a modular range of products and services to manage all aspects of airline operations and planning. The challenge was to provide real-time availability of data, high levels of uptime, reliability and stability, cost-effective licensing, and vendor support.

Lechler GmbH, a German mid-sized company specializing in the manufacture of nozzles and custom spray technology solutions, needed to revamp its company-wide manufacturing technology solution. The company aimed to improve its business processes, enhance and extend its reporting options, and ensure flexibility in its database administration. The ultimate goal was to continuously improve customer service and minimize the time from order to delivery. Prior to the implementation of the new system, Lechler was working with a large data processing center which was very inflexible.

HSS Hire, a leading tool and equipment hire company in the UK, needed to upgrade its database infrastructure to incorporate transaction encryption functionality for secure credit card transactions. The company had developed an online platform, HSSlivehire.com, which tied into an early version of the Actian X hybrid database. However, as the platform grew, so did the demands on the database. The company faced the challenge of not having designed its core database with online payment in mind. To provide an environment that was 100% secure for accepting credit card transactions through its website, HSS needed to upgrade its database. However, the company lacked the internal IT resources and expertise to perform the database upgrade.

Pinnergy, a diversified energy services company, was struggling with an outdated, manually-driven invoicing process. Invoices moved from the dispatch system through customer signoff and then had to be entered into customers’ online electronic data interchange (EDI) systems. This process was tedious and involved significant duplication of effort and data, increasing the potential for errors and disputed invoices. As Pinnergy’s business grew, order management became more complex, with more customers and a higher volume of transactions moving through multiple applications with various data formats to support and no common standard for data exchange. The invoicing process became a bottleneck, resulting in high cost per transaction and high accounts receivable aging.

AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd. is the United Kingdom’s leading distributor of pharmaceutical and healthcare products and services to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors. With more than 4,000 employees, 19 distribution warehouses in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and more than 2.6 million products delivered daily, the company relies on an enterprise-class IT infrastructure to support its large-scale logistical operations. At the same time, in its highly regulated and constantly-changing market, AAH must also maintain the agility to respond quickly and efficiently to emerging business requirements. The company’s role as an intermediary between suppliers and end customers brings additional complexity to the challenge; each business application used and each link in the value chain must perform optimally to maintain competitive advantage.

Algonquin College, based in Ottawa, Ontario, offers over 100 courses of study to more than 30,000 full-time and part-time students. The college's mission statement includes incorporating technology to improve service delivery and exceed client expectations. Advanced technology drives services for students, faculty, and employees, providing them with wireless and web-based access to curriculum, self-service, and student information. In 1993, when developing its technology-based services, Algonquin knew it needed to invest in a high-performance, transaction-oriented database that would scale. They chose Ingres, and today, the college continues to run mission-critical student and faculty applications on Ingres open source technology.

Askews Library Systems provides libraries around the world with complete services including selection support, buying, cataloguing, physical preparation for lending, promotional support, and management reporting. The libraries market within which Askews provides these services has become increasingly sensitive in recent years as economic pressures cap and in some cases depress spending. Four other companies compete with Askews in the £90m-a-year UK market, where contracts are awarded by competitive tender. Over the past decade, these pressures led the 130-yearold Askews to embrace state-of-the-art technology and process automation, including using the Web to market globally and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to serve customers world-wide. In addition, the company undertook the development of a bespoke e-procurement system.

In the depths of the 2008-2009 economic downturn, Autometrics faced a significant business challenge. The recession had hit the automotive and travel industries hard, and Autometrics felt the pinch. The company needed to completely reinvent itself to survive. Autometrics had access to a phenomenal array of U.S. auto industry data from sophisticated third-party sources, that, when combined with auto manufacturer data and intelligently analyzed, could help predict buyer behavior and deliver real impact to manufacturers’ and dealers’ bottom lines. However, many potential clients were not only reluctant to give up their internal data but also reluctant to trust it to a cloud environment.

Badoo, a global networking site, was facing challenges in understanding the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and assessing the impact of their reach. They were using a hard-coded, custom-built analytics solution that was limited in functionality and could not provide the level of detail needed by the marketing and finance teams. The previous solution lacked the ability to perform detailed analytics and could not provide actionable insights based on events occurring among their user base.

BBP AG is a software and solution vendor specializing in the integration of interbank applications. The company's middleware, IGTplus, connects financial institutions to payment transactions, securities trading, and processing systems. BBP offers this middleware on an in-house or ServiceBureau basis for a range of financial networks including SWIFTNet, the trading, clearing and settlement systems of the SIX Group, as well as FED and CHIPS. The company serves more than 200 financial institutions, making it the largest SWIFT SB in the world. Product reliability, security, and control are top priorities for BBP. The company must be able to guarantee continuous interbank connection availability and 24x7 access to their business-critical application, along with unshakable security and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

British Friendly, an income protection mutual company, was running an outdated version of the Ingres database (v2.6) for their M2000 insurance application. The company wanted to upgrade to Ingres v9.2.3 to benefit from the database’s new functionality and new hardware. However, they only had one administrator to manage the M2000 insurance application and lacked the internal resources needed to both upgrade to v.9.2.3 or continue to monitor the Ingres database to ensure their applications and associated systems continue to run smoothly. Furthermore, the company needed to ensure that their internal risk levels were not compromised by upgrading their internal systems.

China Telecom, managing a customer base of 250 million ADSL subscribers, was facing a significant challenge with its existing database system. The company's applications relied on the ADSL subscriber database to provide real-time access to hundreds of thousands of account objects. The subscriber database was deployed on a relational database management system (RDBMS), which required a high-performance server that was expensive to maintain. The system was proving too cumbersome over time to keep up with the company’s growing customer base. The company needed a solution that could handle as many as 480,000 queries and 1,000 update transactions per second at peak times, with database performance and reliability being top priorities.

The CIV, a subsidiary of the Dutch Police and a center of excellence for football hooligan management, was created in 1986 after particular heavy riots and violence related to football. The CIV needed to find a way to track previous football related violence, maintain a record of trends among offenders, and keep a database of all known football hooligans. As a result, it created the Hooligan Tracking System (VVS in Dutch) to gather information regarding incidents of violence, hooligans’ backgrounds, effects of actions, previous convictions, and trends in behavior. Cost management is key to any IT project in the public sector. The ability to integrate and allow access to the system was central to its success as a national and pan-European knowledgebase. As Hooligans travel through Europe for games, the VVS also understood the important of supporting multiple European languages, using Dutch and English as the default languages.

The challenge faced by Comsoft was to ensure highly available access to the database for business-critical applications. In 2009, German Air Traffic Control (DFS) counted more than 2.9 million flights according to Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the airspace of the Federal Republic of Germany alone. Air traffic management deploys cutting edge technology to control and regulate whether planes are maintaining the necessary safe distance from one another in controlled airspace, that they are on the right course and flying at the correct altitude and speed. It uses special air traffic management systems, instrument landing systems, and radar and navigation systems to enable fast and accurate processing of huge data volumes, thus ensuring the smooth flow of traffic. The wealth of different data processing systems in Europe, has led EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, to take steps towards harmonizing European Air Traffic Management.

Today’s emerging HPC applications must handle complex and large volumes of data, which if not managed appropriately, may result in a serious performance bottleneck. CRL (Computational Research Laboratories Ltd.), a TATA Group company, was looking for a database engine running on a highly scalable Linux cluster. The company needed a solution that could offer sustained performance of complex analytics in the face of increasing data and seamless performance-oriented scalability of elastic database services underpinned by a tensile computing infrastructure.

Cypress Semiconductor Corporation is a diversified supplier of high-performance, integrated circuits for network infrastructure and access equipment. The company’s manufacturing processes are intensive in both scale and precision, as its billion-dollar wafer fabrication plants conduct and log dozens of intricate manufacturing processes. If its machinery sits idle, the company has serious production problems. If the measurement specifications are off by a fraction of a millimeter, that’s trouble, too. “If you botch a wafer lot by executing a wrong step or mismanaging precision controls, you’ve literally destroyed a million dollars worth of wafers,” said Robert Price, DBA Manager at Cypress. “If any aspect of the system goes down, it will cost you.” This need for reliable, consistent performance has led Cypress to demand absolute perfection from its databases and related services. Simply put, if its systems can’t keep pace with its requirements, the company’s productivity comes to a costly halt.