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The German Energy Management Act prescribes that a smart meter for power and gas, which is read at least every 15 minutes to provide tariff information, is mandatory for every new building or every energy-conserving renovation. The data volumes that are aggregated in modern power meters and transmitted to utility companies surpass the previous amount of data by a factor of 35,000. Utilities need an appropriate IT infrastructure to manage and process such data volumes if they opt for an in-house smart meter solution. While larger utilities can afford this, it represents a huge investment for smaller energy providers such as local public utilities.

The Department of Education and Training in Western Australia (WA DET) was facing a challenge with its back-end computing environment. The department managed a range of administrative activities to support programs delivered by 11 colleges and 8,000 staff throughout the state. The systems collectively managed over 1 million student records with 120,000 students processed through the state’s training systems annually. However, regional locations had to manage their own back-end environments, which imposed an expensive support burden on WA DET staff and vendor support engineers. Proprietary Unix server environments, often built on a variety of hardware models of differing ages, had to be managed remotely, along with the complex applications they were running. With many DET colleges hundreds of kilometers apart, it had become too expensive and cumbersome to maintain this computing environment.

Deutsche Familienversicherung AG (DFV AG), a leading insurance company based in Germany, was facing challenges with the growth of data in the insurance sector. The speed and stability of a database had become major factors, especially when it came to analyzing and reporting on corporate figures and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. As its master data had grown considerably over the years and also increased in complexity, DFV AG was looking for a stable and future-proof database that would also easily accommodate further growth. As part of its strategy, DFV AG uses commercial Open Source solutions for Business Intelligence (BI) and ETL. Representing the third technology layer in the IT stack, DFV sought to find a reliable database software solution that would then fit in with the existing IT infrastructure and hardware environment.

Echelon is a pioneer and world leader in control networks and embedded control networks, which connect machines and other electronic devices. They needed an embedded database compatible with the object-oriented application model. A predecessor of LNS was introduced in 1991, using procedural code and an embedded record oriented/ relational data storage toolkit. As object-oriented programming began to emerge, the team realized that using object-oriented programming was the most productive way to add features and power to the system. At the same time, the team realized that the record oriented storage toolkit was an obstacle to object-oriented development and a big usability problem because it exposed the embedded database structure to their broad OEM programmer community.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Telescope, stationed at Noordwijk (The Netherlands), is constantly bombarded by infrared radiation, high-energy particles from solar eruptions and other events in outer space. The telescope, which is carrying the largest telescope ever flown, collects an average of six to seven gigabit raw telemetry data every day. The data is managed in an onboard storage facility and downloaded during a daily three-hour window to one of two satellite stations on the ground. The data is then transmitted to the ESA satellite control center in Darmstadt, Germany, and forwarded to the scientific control center in Madrid, Spain. On previous ESA missions, the teams responsible for the in-flight instruments had to use a multitude of tools to analyze critical instrument data extracted from various files.

Emerson Network Power, a global leader in supplying business-critical power solutions, was in the process of centralizing their IT helpdesk in Manila. The goal was to seamlessly integrate the Australian operations with Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Emerson used the Infor Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution ‘MK’ as the central hub for information, distribution, and reporting. MK was built on Ingres Database and was integral to the daily operations of Emerson. The cost of downtime per business day was estimated at $1 million AUD. It was essential that a 24x7 disaster recovery resource was available to respond to any situation in a timely manner. Additional local support would be required to properly manage IT networks, systems, and databases for Australia. Due to the consolidating nature of the project, interoperability issues would become visible, and Emerson’s handling process would need continual development and improvement. To take all this work in-house would require hiring a minimum of three full-time employees which was considered an unworkable timeframe. Emerson needed a partner that could provide both the skill sets and knowledge base to service the Ingres database underlying the MK application, and provide a 24x7 support service with the highest level of support and continuity.

The challenge was the rapidly growing number of users simultaneously accessing the same TV programs and channels via Internet. In this application domain, the database must provide fast access to rather complex data, easy integration into an ever evolving application code, and support massive concurrent access from potentially millions of consumers. The Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IPTV Ecosystem was in need of a database system that could handle these demands efficiently.

The Federal Railroad Administration is expecting railroad freight traffic to double by 2020. However, the U.S. railroad infrastructure cannot be expanded to keep pace with this demand. Railroads are confronted with meeting this demand in some other way. GE Transportation Systems, the global technology leader and supplier to the railroad industry, is addressing the problem with RailEdge® Movement Planner, an object-oriented software system incorporating the Versant Object Database. GE Transportation’s customer, Norfolk Southern Railroad, operates 2,500 trains per day over a 21,000-mile system serving every major container port in the eastern United States. Norfolk Southern expects to increase railroad capacity, velocity and efficiency with no new tracks, to increase average network train speed 10 to 20 percent, and to save millions of dollars in capital and expense.

Geological Data Design (GDD) was facing the challenge of efficiently collecting, managing, and analyzing large volumes of exploration and mining data. The data collected during the day from various field instruments, GPS, and cameras often integrated into a very large database, in some cases hundreds of millions or even billions of records. This made it difficult for geologists to quickly analyze large volumes of sample data for complex scenarios such as project timings, cash flows, and profitability with greater sensitivity levels.

GROUPE ADEO, a leading international home improvement retailer, was dealing with huge data volumes aggregated across the group's datamarts due to its extensive market presence. The company had hundreds of stores, multiple retail concepts, thousands of product references, and millions of sales translations made every day. Despite the company's experience of using Business Intelligence across this wide range of data, GROUPE ADEO was looking for an agile analytical database to complement its existing environment. The companies in the group needed a more affordable and user-friendly solution.

The Chemicals Regulations Directorate (CRD) of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was in the process of splitting its two main websites into two separate IP addresses. The first, public-facing website was to be moved to a third-party hosting provider. However, CRD needed to find a hosting provider who could provide a managed environment for its second secure site that also included the management of Actian Ingres and OpenROAD. As a result, CRD needed more than just a simple hosted Windows environment. A number of criteria had to be taken into account: the future of the existing in-house environment provider was unsure, the approach to outsourcing the secure website had to be low risk as the whole area of support for hardware and environment was under review, and the managed service had to be controlled yet flexible enough to allow CRD staff access when necessary.

Indra Sistemas, a global technology company, was tasked with building the control centers for Spain’s AVE high-speed bullet train system. The company needed a database that could handle the complex and demanding architecture of the integrated high-speed train control system (IRC). The system was designed from a global perspective, integrating information and control from each of the elements that make up a high-speed rail line. The architecture used by Indra includes three areas of management allowing for different degrees of accessibility and control of the line. The Real-time System Control Framework consists of over 30,000 objects in memory and 30 classes, with 80 TB of information eventually flowing into Oracle’s relational database on the corporate level.

INIT is a leading supplier of Intelligent Transportation Systems and Electronic Ticketing Systems for public transportation. Their application components place significant demands on concurrency, availability, and runtime performance. They were looking for a database technology that could efficiently store and retrieve complex real-time data in 24/7 operation. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle complex networked data and real-time requirements. The solution needed to be scalable, flexible, and capable of transparent data distribution and replication.

ISS Switzerland, a leading integrated facilities services company, was in need of a robust ERP back-office solution to support their payroll/HR, accounting, invoicing, and financial reporting needs. In the highly competitive market of facilities management, the company required a strong ERP system that would allow local management to run their business optimally. Additionally, the local entity needed to ensure that it could report its financials back to their corporate business in a timely manner and meet all the financial reporting requirements on an international level. After an exhaustive tender process where ISS Switzerland evaluated many other solutions, the company chose to work with Syslog and implement their ERP solution: Syslog ERP.

Medical Data Vision (MDV) develops management support software for hospitals and private health clinics throughout Japan. The MDV analyzer is an Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) service that collects and shares medical data from hospitals across Japan. The MDV analyzer aims to improve the quality of medical care by analyzing and sharing medical results with Pharmaceutical companies for epidemiological studies, market research and further drug development. MDV’s previous EBM required an upgrade due to slow performance. “Our previous application used another column type database and performance was taking up to 30 seconds for a report on 2 years of data,” said Hirai-san. “This was unacceptable, so over a 2 month period we evaluated 5 other high performance databases to see which offered the best performance.”

Lynx Services, a market leader in auto glass claims management, required a high availability, transaction-processing oriented database solution that would enable it to process claims for its clients 24x7. The solution needed to be reliable, easy to use, and able to scale as the company grew. The company manages more than 3 million claims each year, processing three types of claims for insurance clients – auto glass claims, first notice of loss claims, and auto physical damage claims. The company needed a database that could handle this volume of transactions and provide high availability and quick transactional processing.

Magna, a leading global automotive supplier, had built a successful application called MAGIC that manages their complete production line as they manufacture and supply parts to car companies such as BMW, Bentley, and Land Rover. The application runs on Actian Ingres and Actian OpenROAD. However, Magna had limited internal resources to manage and monitor MAGIC, and they were looking to outsource this to a third party. The previous management of the application was done by Computacenter.

Northrop Grumman was tasked with developing a next-generation simulation application, the Cloud Depiction and Forecast System II (CDFS II), for the U.S. Air Force. The application needed to deliver results six times faster and with four times higher resolution than the previous system. The challenge was to program complex algorithms using object-oriented programming techniques. The previous system could only create a 48-hour forecast every six hours and a nine-hour forecast on request. The new system needed to improve on these capabilities.

Bot Colony is a massive multiplayer game developed by North Side Inc., a progressive MMO game developer located in Canada. The game leverages breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is extremely intensive in terms of CPU requirements. The player converses with the game’s characters in English to solve a mystery and conduct missions. The NLP component is extremely intensive in terms of its CPU requirements, requiring access to vast amounts of data for linguistic processing and reasoning. The system database contains both linguistic data and a large store of world knowledge, represented as formal axioms. North Side became interested in Versant Object Database when it ran into a programming bottleneck, consisting of serialization and deserialization of data with MySQL.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado is conducting research on the impact of global warming. The project, titled 'Data Rods: Enabling Time-Series Analysis of Massive Multi-Modality Cryospheric Data', is focused on the Greenland ice sheet. The challenge was to process billions of time-series information in real-time to enable a time-centric change analysis of data. The database for the project contains over 10 billion persistent objects. Indexed queries to the database can span millions of data rods simultaneously across time and space and must achieve response times of only a few seconds. Using a relational database was completely impractical due to the large size of the data sets and required response time.

Aurigo, a global B2B software construction technology company, was facing challenges with its sales enablement and onboarding process due to the growth of its sales team. The existing process was unstructured and lacked visibility into available content and collateral for the Go-To-Market (GTM) teams. The company was struggling to ramp up new representatives faster and prepare them for fieldwork. The enablement ecosystem at Aurigo used ad hoc training videos and content to onboard and educate representatives about the various products at Aurigo. The marketing and sales teams at Aurigo created great content available on Sharepoint, but people weren’t aware of the content and often spent time recreating collateral that already existed. Aurigo’s Business Development Representative (BDR) team was challenged with completing more extensive discovery prior to handing them off to the Account Executives (AEs).

SaaScend, a revenue operations consultancy, was facing challenges in managing, sharing, and tracking sales content. The sales and marketing teams were spending 2-5 hours a week managing, distributing, and answering questions about content. The content was saved in multiple locations, making it difficult for sellers to find it quickly. Moreover, the team lacked visibility into prospects’ engagement and interest during the sales process, as well as into content effectiveness, influence on sales deals, and sales team usage.

PreSales Academy was experiencing growth and an increase in demand. More career changers were applying to the academy, leading PreSales to re-evaluate their current processes for the academy program. The majority of the academy was virtual training sessions that were scheduled at certain dates and times and all students would attend. This posed a bottleneck not only for the students, who have varying schedules and career changes, but also for the trainers and volunteer coaches, who all had to commit time. In addition, PreSales Academy started to notice inconsistency among coaches and how they provided feedback. Coaches would share one large document of feedback with over 10 parameters, becoming overwhelming for students to understand.

The company, one of the largest coaching and training companies in North America, lacked a quality assurance process. There was no way to ensure that guidelines were being followed, supervisors were unaware of which associates needed help with their scripts, and top performers weren't being monitored, making it difficult to extract best practices to share with the rest of the team.

The multinational education and publishing corporation was facing a challenge in improving the performance of its contact center agents. With eight teams distributed across four different countries, the company was only able to review less than 1% of customer interactions. This lack of visibility into customer interactions was leading to longer call durations and average handle times (AHT), which were out of range. The company was also experiencing a rising number of customer requests, which further exacerbated the situation. The company needed a solution that would not only reduce AHT and increase efficiency but also improve the performance of its contact center agents.

Kanmo Group, an omnichannel operator serving tens of thousands of customers monthly with various brands, faced challenges in handling customer support for multiple brands, communicating through emails on product claims, and resolving customer queries faster. They also wanted to supercharge their brand experience and consistency. During the pandemic, the influx of chats grew disproportionately, and Kanmo Group wanted to ensure a high customer experience and safety. They also wanted to ensure their customers felt safe when they were on chat and could shop remotely during the pandemic while maintaining the tonality of each brand under them.

AcadGild, an ed-tech startup, serves thousands of customers from across the globe. The company needed an internationally compliant lead generation tool that could assist their customers even when they weren't available. They were using traditional methods like emails or forms for lead generation, but these methods were not yielding the desired results. The challenge was to find a solution that could not only generate leads but also qualify them and answer their queries in real time.

O2 Spa, one of Asia's most dominant health and wellness providers, was struggling with customer engagement. The company had tried live chat and other chatbot platforms, but they were not meeting their goals of zero missed chats, instant response times, and tailored sales pitches at scale. A significant portion of their customer base was millennials, a demographic known for its preference for messaging over traditional forms of communication. The challenge was to find a way to engage this demographic effectively.

Despite their upward trajectory, the team at Lido Learning wasn’t willing to slow down. They knew they could do more to accelerate their customer experience. Hence, the team identified the following key challenges. Much like businesses across the world, Lido Learning’s support department managed all their customer queries through CRM, email, and phone calls. Maintaining the history of a user in a unified place was difficult. When agents didn’t have enough context around a query, they had to create new tickets in Freshdesk which was cumbersome. Besides, Lido Learning observed that customers were less receptive to the campaigns that were sent via in-app. In essence, for Lido Learning, the goal was to encourage parents to come to the platform to give feedback so that the team can collect actionable insights from it. As Lido Learning scaled up, they also realized that their support team had to, too. Unfortunately, with the existing support setup then, it was hurting their Opex. The bottom-line was to strike a balance between scaling up and providing a stellar customer experience.

Kaarva, a fintech startup, was facing challenges in managing its operations with 3 separate WhatsApp Business Accounts and a team of agents. The company was looking for a solution that could automate its processes, provide advanced customer behavior analytics, and serve as a single touchpoint for their customers. The platform needed to be engaging, easy to use, vernacular, and scalable without major reinvestments. Furthermore, it had to be less data-intensive and capable of sending necessary financial documents even in 2G and 3G networks.