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Wings Travel Management, a company specializing in oil and gas-related travel, faced the challenge of capturing travel data for clients operating across Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East and putting it in a form that they can use to monitor their travel programs. The company wanted to create customer-facing analytics portals along with a secure metadata layer that enables clients to visualize just their subset of the travel data via interactive charts, graphs, and maps. However, their previous analytical inquiries couldn’t prevent users from changing formulas that the IT team created, which meant similar inquiries sometimes yielded conflicting results. Managing the underlying data was also tedious as they had to manually control hundreds of individual queries and reports.

Worldpay, a payment processing and technology provider, needed new reports, dashboards, and analytics capabilities to leverage its expanding big-data lake and related resources. The company discovered that many of its customers want to analyze their transaction level payment data and it has marshaled substantial resources to facilitate these requests. From the world’s largest retailers to small mom-and-pop merchants, Worldpay is leading a transformation in the payments industry. The company has nearly 800,000 merchants and processed 23 billion transactions last year. To improve its pricing capabilities, Worldpay’s Data and Analysis Insights team use WebFOCUS to visualize and populate domain-specific objects from a Hadoop data lake. Their big-data environment, which utilizes a distributed storage architecture, has lowered the cost of managing transaction data from more than $6,000 per terabyte to about $500 per terabyte.

York Regional Police (YRP) had been amassing valuable data for years from various systems including a dispatch system, a records management system, a PeopleSoft ERP system, and various other sources, including Microsoft Excel. However, to support data-driven decision-making, data had to be manually aggregated and deconflicted to answer questions about how, when, where, and why police assets were deployed. YRP wanted an easy way to query this data to gain real-time insights into officer activity and performance; how an officer’s work time is compartmentalized across a variety of official daily duties; where they stand with sick time, personal leave, vacation, and overtime; and early flagging of traumatic incidents that can threaten an officer’s mental and physical well-being.

Dahl Finland Ltd., a leading wholesale supplier of HVAC, public utility, and pipe products in the Nordic and Baltic regions, was facing a challenge with its existing enterprise resource planning system (ERP). The ERP system had rudimentary reporting capabilities and was not user-friendly. This led to workers throughout the enterprise struggling to access, analyze, and view accurate and consistent business data. The company also used Microsoft Excel to generate additional custom reports outside of the IT department. These manual methods of reporting were time-consuming and generated inconsistent data. The company needed a solution that could modernize and rationalize their analytics system to deliver more comprehensive and accurate information.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) had been collecting data on criminal activity for many years. However, it relied upon a manual process of sifting through 13 disparate data sources to analyze crime statistics, identify trends, and model resource allocations. This made it difficult to make sense of all the information. Users typically had to run multiple queries to be able to drill into the data and answer specific questions. CMPD command staff recognized the need for improvement and sought funding through an Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Homeland Security Grant. The goal was not only to enable command staff and dispatchers to easily run reports, but also to push information out to officers in real time.

As Colorado State University's analytics endeavors expanded to include many types of data and reporting tools, the institution’s faculty and staff members had a difficult time obtaining consistent data. People were showing up at meetings with conflicting numbers due to inconsistent operational definitions and the lack of a central reporting platform. The university needed one centrally supported platform that could deliver one version of the truth. Campus constituents wanted a cloud-based solution that could improve student outcomes through predictive analytics, boost operational efficiencies, and differentiate CSU from other institutions with externally facing dashboards and fact books.

The Council of Europe, an organization that represents Greater Europe and manages a total budget of over 260 million euros annually, was facing challenges with its IT infrastructure. The Council was generating and managing a lot of information that could not be rationalized quickly enough to be used to aid business decisions effectively. The Council decided to look more closely at its IT infrastructure as well as the way in which it is managed and used by employees with a view to rationalizing and improving it. A large scale upgrade of its financial information system ensued. An RFI was launched at this time to find a BI vendor that provided an end to end solution that was easy to use on all levels of the organization and was able to be implemented within the tight deadlines imposed by the wider financial information system’s upgrade that was underway at the time.

Firma Foreign Exchange, a global firm providing international payment currency solutions, was facing challenges in streamlining the creation of secure, dynamic analytics based on current account data. The company wanted to extend data management and visualization capabilities to traders, managers, and executives. Additionally, Firma wanted to deliver customer-facing analytics to account holders to provide transactional transparency. The company's business community was generating SQL reports and creating Excel spreadsheets to examine operational data. Plus, they manually created thousands of monthly statements and e-mailed them to their customers. Firma wanted to find easier ways to access, analyze, and distribute this business information.

The County of Los Angeles, one of the largest regional governments in North America, faced a significant challenge in managing the compensation and benefits for its approximately 100,000 employees. The county’s previous reporting tools required nightly data dumps and custom coding, which limited analysts’ ability to respond quickly to requests for information. This was particularly problematic when dealing with labor negotiations with state and national labor unions, which represent approximately 80 percent of the county’s workforce. The county needed a more efficient and effective way to extract, analyze, and visualize the immense amount of data involved in managing employee compensation and benefits.

Parc de Salut MAR (PSMAR), one of Spain’s leading clinical and research organizations, was facing challenges in managing, sharing, and analyzing an enormous amount of clinical data due to its continually expanding staff and rising patient volumes. The organization was heavily dependent on a legacy system that had been in active use since 1984. As clinical and administrative data continued to grow, the hospital’s home-grown reporting platform became too rigid and slow to keep up. The need for better data management, security, reporting, and analytics could no longer be ignored. It was time to pursue a qualitative leap in capabilities. PSMAR set out to acquire a general-purpose analytics platform. The project stakeholders, drawn from business and IT, envisioned a series of analytics dashboards that could produce a steady flow of key performance indicators (KPIs).

CWB National Leasing, Canada’s largest and longest-standing equipment financing company, needed to deliver a single version of truth spanning its most critical information sources – applications for receivables management, credit, and leasing. The company needed a solid analytics strategy to help their staff access and use data in the most efficient way possible. The company reviews 4,000 applications each month and adds 2,000 contracts each month. The company needed to track these applications and contracts efficiently.

RCM Brain needed a flexible analytics solution with comprehensive data management, data visualization, and predictive analytics capabilities that could be embedded into a larger software platform. The revenue cycle management (RCM) process that medical providers use to track revenue from patient visits is complex and error-prone, leading to high administrative costs and revenue leakage. RCM data is spread among various systems, making it difficult to create comprehensive reports. The challenge was to automate this process and reduce the costs associated with inaccurate medical claims.

Sound Credit Union was facing a challenge of lack of visibility into member data. This made it difficult for the employees to answer member questions and take action on their behalf. They could not easily combine data from diverse sources to achieve a cohesive, 360-degree view of member activities. The organization was bogged down with too much manual work and too many assumptions based on incomplete data. For instance, they knew they needed more deposits, but they couldn’t decipher the trend in their checking accounts, savings, money market accounts, CDs, and other deposit vehicles. They needed an executive dashboard and solid analytics to give them answers.

The City of Richmond, Canada, faced a challenge with its new online community registration system, Class. While the system was efficient at tracking registration courses, accounts, and payments, it lacked the functionality to transfer financial data to community associations. This was a crucial aspect of the city's operations, as it determined how much money needed to be sent to the various community associations the city worked with. The city needed a solution that would enable seamless information-sharing between the registration and financial management systems and create daily financial reports to help finance staff manage registration payments and distribute funds to community groups.

Link Market Services (LMS) faced the challenge of producing over 4,000 complex internal and client ad hoc and management reports every day from two Oracle transaction databases containing up to 1.8 billion rows of data. The company needed a solution that could deliver rapidly, as they wanted to be independent from a competitor as soon as possible. The solution had to be able to connect to a wide variety of data sources and consolidate information into a single report. The company also required a solution that could produce reports as soon as a client comes on board, and deliver these reports instantly.

Sunset Transportation, a logistics management and brokerage services company, was facing a challenge with its existing Tableau environment. The platform lacked the enterprise capabilities needed to elevate their analytics to the next level. The company needed a robust analytics platform that could be embedded into a larger application to provide a holistic client experience. They wanted to leverage a lot of internal and external data, and the existing BI platform was not capable of scaling to meet these needs. Sunset also wanted to deploy the new software in a cloud environment to reduce infrastructure costs and increase scalability.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had to develop a Health Insurance Marketplace (HIM) and Data Services Hub (DSH) that would allow millions of Americans to shop for insurance, check their eligibility against dozens of federal and commercial data sources, and provide a way for state health exchanges to connect. This was the first time the US government would tackle an IT project of this kind. CMS had to overcome some daunting challenges: Strict time constraints, Stringent security requirements, Multiple data sources, An unknown data specification, Scalability.

Mitchell 1, a leader in providing information solutions for automotive professionals, faced challenges with managing and integrating complex data from multiple sources. The company's online manuals were based on a relational database, which was struggling to handle the growing volume and disparate types of data. The company saw an opportunity to integrate its data and turn it into a competitive advantage. However, the increasing data types and volume were making data integration with a relational database time consuming and costly. To maintain its industry leadership and continue to outpace competitors, Mitchell 1 needed to offer up-to-the-minute, relevant, rapidly searchable and comprehensive repair information.

The American Psychological Association (APA) was facing challenges with its existing search engine, Lucene. The search response times were inconsistent, leading to a poor user experience. Moreover, the delivery of content to APA users was slow, taking up to 48 hours to prepare, deliver, and post content on APA websites. This was unacceptable as APA is the authoritative source for this content, and timely online availability is crucial to the authors, readers, and business partners who depend on it.

Fairfax County wanted to upgrade their existing Police Events application. This application allowed the public to search, filter, and map police service calls by type, location, and date, and access preliminary police investigation data from Fairfax County's 9-1-1 call center. With more than a half-million data points from all over the county, the data overwhelmed the existing Oracle relational database. The county's GIS database contained data from more than 800 different sources, including libraries, schools, hospitals, most of which have unique schemas, making it difficult to sort through and access. Only a small amount of GIS data was available via the previous Fairfax GIS search application, which was JavaScript-based. This legacy application did not provide the flexibility to constrain searches to specific data layers without customization. The existing database had to search layer by layer, one column at a time, making searches slow and difficult. The county has approximately 800 distinct layers in its GIS database and most have their own specific data schema. For non-GIS staff this can make sifting through all of the information very difficult. The ability to add new datasets as they were identified and provide a set of tools for loading and enrichment was tough. Also, returning information in a variety of formats including JSON, XML, and KML was not possible, and data needed to be RESTful to keep in accordance with current practices.

Fairfax County, one of the largest counties in the nation, was facing a challenge in responding to the high-volume of requests from their constituents regarding property history information. The data was stored in disparate databases and file systems and in different formats, making it difficult to effectively search. The county needed a solution that would integrate this data, maintain its integrity, and make it easy to access. They also needed a solution that would fit with their existing IT infrastructure, and have a low and predictable total cost of ownership.

In a world of shrinking budgets and rising rates of chronic disease, health information exchanges (HIEs) are an essential element of national and regional efforts to improve healthcare and contain costs. HIEs establish an interoperable framework for healthcare providers to share secure patient information across disparate electronic health record (EHR) platforms and other information systems. However, the challenge lies in creating a flexible, reliable, and scalable analytics platform that could ingest large volumes of diverse data types and provide high performance for batch and interactive processing. Since healthcare providers face steep penalties if they fail to secure protected health information (PHI), the solution also required a robust security architecture that could keep pace with interactive performance requirements as deployments grew.

IOP Publishing, a global publisher and distributor of scientific publications, was facing challenges with its legacy solution built on Oracle and Hibernate. The eight-layer stack required a multi-step process to take unstructured content, like journal articles, from ingest to delivery. This often resulted in multiple versions of content in different locations that created a mismatch between versions. Valuable time was lost tracing back to the source; this directly affected the scientists and other users who rely on the IOP platform as a vital research tool. To provide the best service to its user community, IOP Publishing wanted to overhaul its biggest platform, IOPscience. With a limited budget and a mandate to switch systems with no downtime, the IOP Publishing team knew it couldn't rebuild the system from the ground up with traditional technology.

IQ Solutions, a full-service public-health communications and information firm, was facing a challenge in disseminating content from various sources and in disparate formats for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The company had to adapt to new technologies and meet mandates from the White House and other government agencies to use shared platforms, focus on digital formats, and expand their reach when it comes to content dissemination. The company was also under pressure to reduce costs associated with content development and delivery. To meet their goals of modernizing and streamlining their business while expanding SAMHSA's reach, IQ Solutions decided to put together a new content repository.

The Press Association (PA) was originally made up of multiple companies brought together to form PA Group. With such diversification in different types of content and services, more technical cohesion and strategy was needed. PA needed a new, centralized solution that could handle XML, while also merging a large volume of structured and unstructured content in a useful and efficient way. Speed and efficiency were also key considerations. With previous solutions, the company was spending 70% of their time managing and manipulating data before they could get any use out of it. It was important that the new platform be fast and flexible.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) had been gathering millions of images, science data files and articles from more than 200,000 authors since the 1840s. All of this information was stored in a wide range of formats at multiple locations and was growing by the day. In 2010, largely due to the huge growth of social media and digital formats, the RSC launched an initiative to make its data more accessible, fluid and mobile. They needed an integrated repository that would make all of their content accessible online to anyone-from teachers to businesses to researchers. The key was finding the right technology.

In 2012, Wiley partnered with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to create a flagship academic resource in earth, space and environmental sciences. This required integrating all of AGU's data and functionality into the Wiley Online Library. The project posed several challenges. Firstly, the project had an aggressive timeline, with project goals needing to be completed in four months, with just six weeks for actual development. Secondly, Wiley had to migrate existing content, comprised of 160,000 articles from 21 journals, 33 virtual journals based on AGU index terms and 743 special sections in addition to customer, user, product, license and alert data. The project also required a search engine capable of working quickly and supporting content search across a range of index terms and special sections. The articles and journals were not standardized, many articles had no issue or page numbers, and journals came in an assortment of formats, including issues with multiple subsections or special editions. Internally, the production workflow from author contribution to the editorial system had to be well integrated and adapted to the new platform and yet function as it did before.

Before the introduction of the new database technology, the Haufe Group had distributed its data across different data silos, each created for different applications. A linking of the data and thus an overall view of all content was hardly possible. Due to the silos, users would receive results of their keyword searches which only partly reflected the total availability of specialist information and topical cross-references were largely missing. The scattering losses for the user were significant, and Haufe wanted to fix this issue. The original system was based on the open-source platform Apache SolrTM and relational databases. It stored different types of data such as book metadata, widgets, book covers, product information, and the actual content in different data silos. Queries were made using various search engines and tools.

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (ICLR) faced stiff competition as other publishers began to move their data online in the 1990s. At the time, ICLR was lacking a digital delivery platform or experience in digital delivery, and therefore chose to outsource its content through a series of licensing deals with third-party online providers. However, as online customers and information demand increased, ICLR decided to create its own digital delivery platform in-house in order to regain control of its content, and reign in costs. ICLR launched a custom digital platform in 2011, providing basic search and content delivery and was primarily based on duplicating the printed versions of reports. This platform was difficult to maintain, couldn't be changed easily and presented an inconsistent user experience. In addition, ICLR wanted to do more than just deliver English case law: The organization wanted to become the primary source for researching and accessing English case law. To address these issues and add the ability to quickly create new products and services, ICLR needed to create a new, robust, fast, and user-friendly platform.

Smartlogic was looking to support the knowledge management needs of a broader audience and provide an efficient and economical platform for customers and partners. They explored a number of cloud deployment options for their Semaphore platform. The solution needed to have full functionality and integration capabilities, enterprise-grade security, high availability and scalability, all while keeping overall costs and environment management low. They aimed to bring together three leading technologies to provide an efficient and economical platform for customers and partners to address security, scale and on-demand requirements.