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The global manufacturing company was dealing with a data explosion due to acquisition, organic growth, and product expansion. The company had hundreds of disparate ERP systems, each with massive volumes of data, multiple ERP vendors, and multiple versions of ERP software, which added to the complexity. The company was using relational databases and ETL tools to integrate the data, but the process was slowing innovation and sometimes resulted in data quality issues, which could lead to negative customer experiences. The company needed to integrate its ERP systems, eliminating costly data siloes and time-consuming ETL processes in order to gain a 360-degree view of its data. The organization embarked on a massive integration project using traditional relational tools. After three years, the company had only integrated four of the hundreds of ERP systems. At this pace, the entire system would not be fully integrated for decades, resulting in the organization missing out on numerous opportunities and exposing the company to potential risk.

Lagardère Active, one of the largest media companies in France, faced several challenges in managing its vast and diverse content. The company had about 15 different databases containing various content types, including text, pictures, sound, and video, as well as data from cloud services like Dropbox. The company needed to aggregate all of this content without having to transform the data to make it usable. The company's IT department faced several tight deadlines to create certain new products. For example, it had just one month before the championships to create a live statistics site for the top French professional soccer league (Ligue 1) using heterogeneous data from several sources. The team also only had two months to build an iPad app for Paris Match, one of its biggest properties, for the launch of the French iPad. The rigid relational database technology was causing inter-department rifts, as the editorial business solutions built on a relational platform were not flexible enough.

The bank's management recognized the importance of having a real-time comprehensive global view of its positions in order to quickly and cost-effectively make smart business decisions. The existing system, based on a relational database, was comprised of multiple installations around the world. The legacy system was not fast enough to respond to growing requirements, and the data integration was simply not feasible for the bank's needs. For example, the existing system was unable to deliver real-time alerts to manage market and counterparty credit positions in the desired timeframe. The team was tasked with preventing errors, reducing time and complexity, and creating an agile infrastructure.

Hannover Re, the third-largest reinsurer in the world, wanted to add a powerful Management Information (MI) aspect to its reinsurance service portfolio. The company aimed to help its clients access all relevant data in a 360-degree view to analyze risks and make risk-adequate decisions. The challenge was to integrate and manage massive amounts of diverse data produced at the point of sale, which is heterogeneous and contains unstructured content such as lab reports and scanned images. Hannover Re also wanted to reduce administrative burdens with a fully integrated system that could provide all functionality in a consistent way without adding operational complexity. The company also aimed to deliver an exceptional user experience by making all data points fully available via integrated search to analyze risk profiles, uncover previously hidden risk patterns and offer options to clients to improve their business operations. Lastly, due to the sensitive nature of the data, security was a significant concern for Hannover Re.

The bank's clients expected to easily access up-to-the-minute content in whatever format they chose. The bank sought a system that could scale with clients' constantly changing requirements, especially the growing demand for mobile delivery and alerting. The bank's legacy system (based on Oracle and FAST) did not provide analysts with the ability to search and access previous reports at a component level. Adding that capability, which would facilitate reuse of content, and thus improve efficiency as well as information quality, was a significant undertaking. The existing system also did not have the flexibility to quickly add new features. It could not meet the demands of a constantly changing, highly competitive market where being first-to-publish was critical to retaining and growing readership.

ALM's management decided to grow from a legal content provider to a multi-industry information provider through acquisitions and new content, which would help the company maintain leadership in an increasingly competitive landscape. To best manage changes in the marketplace, enable the company to grow, and rapidly reap the benefits of acquisitions, the ALM team needed to invest in the integration and management of customer data. In two years, the company acquired four companies, and their systems and daily data feeds needed to be integrated into existing ALM infrastructure. On the content side, ALM wanted to better create and store content, but also to connect that content with customers, thereby increasing its value and better serving both customers and advertisers. The ultimate goal was to deliver adaptive news and targeted ads tailored for each individual user.

Thieme Publishing Group, a medium-sized company in a competitive landscape, needed a database solution that allows for agile data management, storage, enrichment, and delivery. They had millions of medical and scientific documents, images, and graphics, all of which were available in different formats that existed in many data silos. This situation made product development and deployment labor-intensive. In order to be successful against international competition as well as free search services like Google or Yahoo, Thieme needed to quickly deliver a platform that was capable of making highly annotated, enriched content easily searchable and accessible to a wide range of users. Because there was no standard platform or language to develop on, the heavily siloed nature of Thieme's data and products made scaling a very cumbersome and elaborate process. IT had to start from scratch to create each new product.

The U.S. National Archives and University of Virginia (U.Va.) Press faced the challenge of transforming Founders Online, a scholarly tool traditionally accessed by a limited number of researchers, into a national resource capable of serving the public at large. The original platform was not designed to handle concurrent users at scale. The old platform's performance under load deteriorated quickly, and testing suggested the architecture would only support 100 concurrent users. The design imperative for the original system was to preserve the look and feel of print volumes, which had a minimal impact on smaller files, but longer, outlying collections stressed the system. The old platform recreated each search from scratch, putting an unnecessary burden on computing resources while slowing the system down. To make matters more complex, the organization had the equivalent of just 1.5 full-time programmers to devote to the project.

Warrior Gateway, a nonprofit organization, aimed to create the G.I. Network as a single source of truth connecting veterans to the right support services. However, the existence of so many resources alongside complex Veterans Administration and Department of Defense regulations has created an overwhelming maze that vets must navigate to find basic information about healthcare, education, housing, and employment resources available to them. The challenges included bringing together data from multiple sources, launching resources quickly, and custom application development with limited internal resources.

Springer, a leading scientific and medical publisher, faced challenges with its online content delivery platform, SpringerLink. The platform, which hosts over 8.4 million scientific documents, had become the core of the company's business, accounting for two-thirds of total revenue. However, Springer was relying on a third-party technology provider to power SpringerLink. As the importance of online content grew, Springer needed more control and flexibility over its content distribution. The company also faced a tight deadline to find a new solution, as its contract with the third-party provider was ending soon. Additionally, with the explosion of online content, readers were expecting better functionality from content providers, including faster search times.

Condé Nast, a renowned media and magazine brand, was facing challenges with its digital asset management system due to the introduction of over 7 million rich media assets representing more than 220 US and International Brands. The system was struggling in three critical areas: search, usability, and development. The average wait times for asset searches were upwards of 30 seconds per 100 results, making the search too cumbersome for regular use. As a result, editors started using expensive outside firms to source assets. Additionally, metadata and category additions required developer involvement, which delayed content updates by users. Lastly, there were long wait times for programmers to accommodate new features and workflows.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required the Emergency Operations Network (EON) to handle multiple document types and feeds, and make sense of the information as quickly as possible. They needed a solution that provided a backend repository and search for unstructured information-tweets, weather reports, news stories, emails, SharePoint documents, geospatial data, and more that get pulled together for decision-making; and integration with in-house custom built as well as commercially available applications to analyze and share the data rapidly. The FAA AEO-400 team tried to implement EON with traditional SQL technologies, but found it impossible due to the complex mix of data and unplanned informational needs that are standard characteristics of this environment.

The Bank, a major player in the derivatives market, was struggling with a legacy system that was slow, inefficient, and unable to deliver real-time alerts to manage market and counterparty credit positions in the desired timeframe. The existing system, based on a relational database, was comprised of multiple installations around the world, leading to duplicated, redundant, incomplete, and inconsistent data. This made risk management fallible and time-consuming, and the Bank recognized the importance of having a real-time global view of its positions.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was tasked with providing comprehensive coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. The challenge was to cover more than 10,000 athletes, cater to a sophisticated audience increasingly reliant on social media, provide continuous live coverage, and deliver content across multiple channels. The traditional method of Static Publishing, which had been relied on for over 15 years, was no longer sufficient. The BBC needed to transition to a Dynamic Publishing infrastructure, which involves creating a collection of related data elements and dynamically serving it as audiences demand. The flow of content was enormous, non-stop, real-time and went across every channel from web, mobile, tablets and broadcast.

NEWBOOKS Solutions and MVB wanted to create a new revenue stream and open up a new market by digitizing published new books, previews, and an ordering system with a new service, VLB-TIX. The developers at NEWBOOKS required an infrastructure that could integrate and manage a wide range of data sources and formats, offer the highest levels of customer service, support future growth with enterprise features, and provide agility. They needed to integrate data from its database and the VLB database, which together contained titles from 23,000 publishers and diverse data types such as bibliographic book metadata, and shared buyers' notes. They also had to incorporate a large number of publishing partners into the process with different workflows and various data formats.

The national postal service was facing a significant decline in traditional mail volume due to the rise of electronic delivery. They needed to evolve their business model to stay relevant in the digital age. They saw potential in APIs to monetize their valuable demographics data and offer new business services. However, their initial attempts to develop APIs were slow and lacked the necessary tracking and management features. They needed a solution that offered advanced design capabilities, easy integration with backend services, and scalability to support a growing number of consumers.

Oldcastle Precast, a leading manufacturer of precast concrete, polymer concrete, and plastic products in the United States, faced a significant challenge due to its rapid growth through acquisitions. While these acquisitions expanded the company's reach and audience, they also led to a lack of systems consolidation, negatively impacting customer satisfaction. The company had been using manual, custom-coded point-to-point integration to connect CRM tools such as Salesforce and MS Dynamics AX and project management tools like Clarizen, Box, Piece Tracker, and GoFormz. However, this approach was not scalable or cost-effective. As Oldcastle continued to expand, the lack of a centralized, scalable, and repeatable integration solution made it increasingly challenging to integrate the acquired on-premises systems and data into the central cloud infrastructure. The company needed a hybrid integration platform to meet the full spectrum of their needs.

TiVo, a pioneer in home entertainment, faced a challenge as its growth continued to accelerate and new partners came on board. The company's infrastructure included over 40 web services that provided services for both TiVo and its partners. Prior to implementing Mule, TiVo integrated these web services in a point-to-point fashion using custom Java code. As the number of services increased, the infrastructure grew in complexity, becoming more and more brittle. Every new service required an exorbitant amount of development effort and was difficult to maintain. Even simple configuration changes presented a problem - because of all the dependencies introduced by the point-to-point architecture, any change to the system would trigger changes that cascaded throughout the application. Because of the complexity, developers would need to meticulously test the entire system, making sure that the change didn’t have unintended consequences.

UCSF Medical Center, one of the nation's leading academic medical centers, was previously using a homegrown paging system for communication among its 8,000 staff members. The system was robust, but it had its drawbacks. Communication was one-way and text-based, requiring doctors to call back for additional information, slowing the flow of information and response to patients. It was difficult to coordinate across care teams as messages were not saved for future reference. Finally, team members had to carry a pager around with them in addition to their mobile devices, which was cumbersome and expensive.

Ube Industries had adopted a commercial enterprise application integration (EAI) tool over a decade ago. However, as the volume and type of endpoints requiring integration increased dramatically over time, Ube’s legacy EAI tool could not scale to meet growing business needs. By 2013, the number of endpoints had risen to over 100 and system failures happened often. Identifying the root cause became increasingly difficult and a single bug could impact large portions of the architecture. When system downtime did occur, transactions within the affected systems ground to a halt. Recovering from these system failures required manual intervention, which increased dependency on individual skills and lengthened resolution time. With support of that EAI tool ending in January 2013, the mission critical nature of the SAP logistics and accounting systems, and business impacts associated with failed or delayed payments and distributions, Ube decided to move to a new architecture.

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) had been using a third-party outsourced application for its Team in Training (TNT) fundraising program. However, as the number of fundraisers increased, the application began to experience frequent outages and performance issues, leading to failed or duplicate donations. The weak integration between the outsourced application and LLS’s internal systems resulted in duplicative functionality and higher maintenance costs. Additionally, the 7% transaction fee and the delayed transfer of funds significantly increased LLS’s fundraising costs. LLS needed to regain control of the infrastructure end-to-end, developing a set of rich user applications and integrating them with the existing back-end systems. The new system needed to be highly reliable, with no messages lost, robust exception strategies, and an active/passive failover architecture to achieve full redundancy.

The University of the Witwatersrand, one of South Africa's premier research universities, was faced with a required migration of their central student system, the most important system in the university. The university had implemented an Oracle-based Student System as part of a large Oracle ERP deployment. However, in 2007, the university received a notice from Oracle that their existing student system would be reaching end of life in 2013. After an evaluation of alternatives, the university decided upon Oracle’s PeopleSoft CampusSolutions as their new student system. To facilitate the move from the old Oracle system to Campus Solutions, CNS needed to split the Student and HR systems, which ran in one large Oracle instance. This required additional integration between the two Oracle products, Campus Solutions and other ancillary systems. Integration would be key to making the transition seamless.

GIE-UGIM, a major health insurance consortium for French civil servants, was facing the challenge of continuously improving the services it provides to its over 800,000 members. Improved service increases retention rates and thus improves the financial position of the consortium as a whole. In 2010, GIE-UGIM implemented Silligent CRM as the central customer relationship management system for the group. However, the challenge was integrating the multitude of applications core to GIE-UGIM's business with the new CRM system. They decided an Enterprise Service Bus was the ideal architecture for their needs. They wanted to loosely couple applications with the new CRM system and allow their developers to focus on developing applications that provided value to their members, not protocol and data issues.

In 2010, Pacific Compensation Insurance Company (PacificComp) decided to change its business model from direct sales to utilizing insurance brokers. This significant shift required a major systems overhaul and posed substantial integration challenges. The company needed to integrate their policy management, billing management, and other systems to support its new business initiatives. The overall goal of PacificComp's business initiatives was to decrease costs and increase ease of use for both underwriters and their broker partners. This became the mandate for the architecture PacificComp's technical team was tasked to build. As much as possible PacificComp chose to invest in software as a service (SaaS) applications as these allowed the company to increase and decrease its usage as the market dictated. However, they also had several existing systems so it was necessary to integrate both current and new systems, whether cloud or on-premise.

Addison Lee, Europe’s largest premium car service, was facing the challenge of keeping up with changing customer behavior and the competitive pressure from new technology-focused entrants in the marketplace. The company needed to launch new mobile apps and features for enhanced customer experience and expand its partner ecosystem to increase user adoption. However, it was hindered by a brittle point-to-point architecture that took months to extend and change. The company needed to move away from bespoke code and towards a more efficient and flexible system that could deliver bookings application on a mobile device or web page.

Dixons Carphone, a leading specialist electrical and telecommunications retailer in Europe, faced the challenge of differentiating its in-store customer experience to compete against e-commerce vendors. The company aimed to drive consistent sales execution and gain deeper insight into sales and colleague performance. It also sought to optimize the customer buying journey and remove friction due to manual processes. The challenge was compounded by the expansion of Dixons Carphone's product offerings, which increased the breadth of sales expertise required of in-store sales teams.

Citrix, a pioneer in virtual workspace solutions, was looking to create agility and competitive advantage by pragmatically moving their primarily on-premises infrastructure to the cloud in phases. The first opportunity came from the marketing department. The Citrix marketing team needed a better way to synchronize data between Marketo and Salesforce. Client account data wasn't always up to date, hampering the pace of sales and the ability of the marketing team to use real-time data to refine their marketing efforts. Vinod Sangaraju, Integration Development Manager for Citrix, knew that an on-premises only solution would not scale with their long term vision to move to the cloud.

Deakin University, located in Melbourne, Australia, is facing significant challenges due to the arrival of the digital economy, changing funding models, and increased competition among educational institutions. The university needed to offer a unique service to its students to enhance their learning experience and stay competitive. However, students were struggling to learn efficiently due to disconnected applications. The university uses almost 200 applications across its operations, including learning management, student management, human resources, finance, and customer relationship management systems. The challenge was to integrate these systems to provide a seamless learning experience for students.

Splunk, a rapidly growing enterprise software company, was facing challenges in maintaining its pace of growth post-IPO. The company was using cloud technologies such as Salesforce for sales, NetSuite for finance, and other custom applications, including one for fulfillment. However, they were using a data extraction, transformation and loading tool (ETL) to manage the data flows between their systems and for an order fulfillment process across their sales, finance and fulfillment teams. This ETL tool was a black box, which made it challenging for Splunk's developers and IT team to quickly drive and support innovation. Moreover, the ETL tool proved to be incompatible with the company's fast-moving processes and goal to be a 100% cloud platform, as the tool required an on-premises agent. The system also ran in 15-minute cycles rather than in real time, limiting the speed of order processing.

In 2009, the Affordable Care Act was passed, and Colorado chose to create their own health insurance marketplace instead of using the systems provided by the Federal government. They also expanded Medicaid coverage. To ensure their citizens had access to these expanded health care benefits as soon as they came into effect on October 1, 2013, the State of Colorado had 6 months to build the new integrated system required to process applications online. The expectations of today's citizens have evolved significantly over the last 10-15 years. They now live in a 24/7 world, where they expect all of the services they consume to be readily available, easy to find and easy to use. The State of Colorado needed to deploy a system that met their citizens' ever growing expectations, while still meeting their tight implementation timeframe.