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In 2012, Vertu became independent and separated from parent company Nokia. As a result, Vertu needed to build a brand new architecture, migrate and implement new applications and set up their own IT department. They needed to ensure they could continue manufacturing mobile phones, support existing customer devices using Nokia's software, and continue providing a superior service to their customers. To find a solution, they embarked on a 45-day discovery exercise to examine their current applications estate and determine a path to build out a new IT infrastructure that would support the vision of full visibility of their devices from cradle to grave and a have complete view of all customer interactions with the brand. They enlisted the help of WHISHWORKS Consulting to help them develop an innovative and cost-effective solution.

Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania (SCAO) was facing frequent system outages and data loss due to issues with their Microsoft BizTalk integration platform. This was causing significant disruption to their business operations, including the exchange of vital business documentation such as purchase orders, purchase order confirmations, and shipping notifications. The system required a hard restart every three days, leading to high support costs and interruptions to customer-facing business operations. The issues affecting SCAO’s core business processes and overall customer satisfaction necessitated an immediate replacement of the current system. Management at SCAO wanted to ensure the replacement was quick to deploy and seamless to end users.

Panviva, a leading provider of Business Process Guidance software, was facing challenges with its legacy product, SupportPoint. The evolution of SupportPoint was hampered by legacy product architecture constraints that disrupted new development. The on-premises technology wasn't evolving as fast as it could, with SupportPoint caught in a loop of incremental development and bug fixes that customers found costly to deploy. Panviva needed to create an innovative product roadmap that leveraged future-proof technologies to enable rapid development and integrations in a SaaS delivery model. The primary challenge with its legacy software was the complexity around re-developing the software for genuine cloud compatibility and deployment, while also designing for scalability and multifaceted integration.

The company, a top 4 food retailer in the UK, was operating in a fiercely competitive retail market and needed innovative ways to drive in-store revenue while also expanding into new product categories and channels on the web. After acquiring an online baby retailer in 2011, the company had a high performing online channel along with new customers in the higher margin baby product category. To capitalize on this new channel and customer base, the company expanded the baby brand to a new series of retail superstores while looking to integrate these customers into the brand experience at their existing grocery stores. However, customer and product data were stored in multiple databases, an IBM Unica marketing automation platform, and an Avaya call center platform. The middleware manager and his team made the strategic decision to consolidate a single view of the customer in Salesforce to run multi-channel marketing programs across brands.

After enjoying years of accelerated customer and product expansion, in 2008, the company identified not only a profound shift in customer engagement as a result of emerging technologies and changing culture, but also an alarming halt in growth and innovation within the company. Slow-moving IT and a disconnected architecture bottlenecked new ideas, preventing new features and products from coming to market at reasonable speed, if at all. Without innovating and responding to customer demands at the speed of technology change, the company could not maintain its market stronghold over the long-term. This software provider decided to focus on continuous innovation, rapid testing of new concepts, and delivering delightful experiences to customers. But delivering on this vision required a major shift in IT. They needed to turn their IT capabilities into an innovation platform, and that required service enabling and connecting all of their applications and data sources, then API-enabling those services for rapid access by internal consumers, partners, and even third party developers. It also required a restructuring of the development organization into small teams that would execute rapid releases in agile sprints.

The government agency was facing the challenge of serving an expanding customer base with reduced funding and high demand for cost savings and faster turnaround. The technical environment was outdated and would not allow the agency to achieve these customer driven requirements. Poor process modeling and misaligned business and data flows meant that it took an astronomical amount of time to execute system integration flows using legacy integration solutions. The agency aimed to retire some of their outdated applications to improve and update the technical environment, but many point-to-point integrations had been built in and they had to find a way to loosen existing couplings.

Banque de Luxembourg, one of the largest financial institutions in Luxembourg, was facing challenges due to new regulatory requirements and heightened customer expectations. The bank's IT landscape was built upon point-to-point connections, based on individual project and line of business definitions. This approach was becoming very complex and time-consuming to integrate and capitalize on existing architecture. The bank acknowledged that a number of upcoming projects such as their web banking system and Visa 3DS System would not see good return on investment from this tight coupling between front end and core banking systems. The bank set out to understand how they could improve efficiency in their organization and reduce time to market.

ASICS, a global athletic footwear and apparel company, was struggling to deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience due to its inability to connect disparate systems such as order management and product management for the company's seven growing brands worldwide. The company generated only a small percentage of revenue through eCommerce and needed a new approach to engage customers directly via digital channels. As part of a new digital strategy to drive eCommerce, ASICS had to unify multiple systems across all brands, geographies, and channels. This required building a universal eCommerce platform to manage the global ASICS portfolio of brands, developing APIs to integrate with various Order Management Systems (OMS), product management systems, payment providers, email service providers, and legacy systems to access all the backend data, and migrating to the new eCommerce platform.

Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the world, was on a digital transformation journey to deliver a unified customer experience (CX) at the accelerated speed that their customers expect. The bank aimed to unify customers' experience around any interactions with the bank - whether it is over phone, web, or mobile. However, the challenge was to seamlessly integrate services from all partners and applications into the Wells Fargo experience and consistently render them on any channel.

Siemens, the largest manufacturing and electronics company in Europe, was tasked with deploying 60 million smart meters in response to UK climate change regulations. This massive undertaking required a more efficient way of managing their complex network of devices, vendors, and suppliers. The company's legacy IBM mainframes housed siloed services and data, which needed to be made accessible to their network of service providers. Additionally, Siemens needed to expose energy consumption data to regulatory authorities in real-time, eliminating the need for manual report preparation and submission.

Buffalo Wild Wings, a growing restaurant chain, faced two challenges in its quest to provide the best beer experience and better connect with their fans. The first challenge was monitoring to ensure that the Perfect Pour guidelines were being followed. The second challenge was managing the growing assortment of beers available in the market. Both challenges prompted the need to better leverage technology for operational efficiency. Buffalo Wild Wings needed a real-time monitoring technique and a better understanding of inventory. This was an IT challenge considering that the company needed to configure all new beer items in more than 1,200 restaurant POS systems before a restaurant can begin selling a new beer to a guest. Additionally, it was a business challenge to ensure restaurants gained an understanding of the actual beer inventory usage across all restaurants to help drive future purchasing decisions.

GANT, a global fashion retailer, wanted to provide a consistent experience across channels to keep up with changing customer preferences. However, they identified a major missed opportunity when customers found items out of stock online that were available in stores. This resulted in a negative customer experience and lower profits for the company. GANT sought to optimize orders across channels, but this initiative proved complex since data was siloed across systems, preventing real-time inventory updates. The retailer wanted to establish more control across its application landscape. And when it came to innovative new projects like the OSSC initiative, it was hard to make informed judgments about how long the project will be, and how much it would cost.

Service NSW, a government initiative in New South Wales, Australia, was conceived as a 'one-stop-shop' for citizens needing to interact with state government departments. However, executing on the program's broad vision provided a thorny challenge for the organisation's IT team. Delivering new digital services required that manual back-end processes be automated; doing so required access to data spanning over 40 government departments and agencies. The sensitive nature of the data involved made security an imperative, complicating things further. Recognizing the need for a connectivity platform that could not only handle complex data integration, but also orchestrate, expose, and govern data access through APIs, Service NSW adopted MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform to anchor the program.

Hologic, a leading global healthcare and diagnostics company, decided to adopt Salesforce's sales cloud, service cloud, and marketing cloud products to provide their growing sales and support teams with 360-degree customer views populated with real-time data. The executive team set an aggressive six-month timeline for the company to bring a pilot group into production. However, the Information Systems (IS) team was constrained with a heavyweight integration stack that slowed development time. They needed a faster way to deliver integrations to keep pace with the growing needs of the business. The project required real-time integration across multiple hosted and cloud systems, demanding new tools to make development faster and more agile.

Big Bus, the world’s largest owner-operator of hop-on hop-off open-top sightseeing tours, was facing a decline in traditional “on-street” sales using paper vouchers and a growing market demand for online sales options. The company needed to transform its sales strategy and customer experience. However, it lacked a unified integration strategy to support all these channels. Data was locked in monolithic legacy systems, and the company had to establish disparate, inefficient point-to-point connections with each new partner that was added to their ecosystem. This slowed and even prevented new partner onboarding. Big Bus needed a new technology to effectively and efficiently integrate internal sales systems with digital channels and partners.

Airbus, a leading aviation company, was facing the challenge of meeting the growing needs of the aviation industry, which is expected to double in the next 15 years. The company needed to significantly increase aircraft production while reducing costs and improving efficiency in a sustainable manner. However, Airbus's legacy systems were not equipped to support this massive growth. As a result, Airbus needed to revolutionize its approach to IT, transforming from a manufacturing company into a technology company. This required a complete overhaul of its IT strategy, including implementing an enterprise-grade API platform to enable digital transformation at scale, building a library of reusable APIs to speed up development time, leveraging APIs to unlock data in backend systems and expose it to suppliers, employees, and internal and external stakeholders, streamlining the supply chain to meet growing production pressures, and delivering self-service mobile applications to improve manufacturing team efficiency.

Pilot Flying J, the largest operator of travel centers in North America, was facing a challenge with its IT systems. The systems were either siloed or connected via one-to-one integrations, making critical data inaccessible. This was hindering the company's ability to provide a fully personalized and frictionless guest experience. To overcome this, Pilot Flying J needed to adopt an omnichannel strategy, backed by fully integrated systems, that allowed guests to engage with the brand through multiple channels - whether it is checking parking availability and reserving showers on the mobile app or redeeming offers on the web portal.

LuxairGroup, a key aviation company in Luxembourg, was facing stiff competition in a market dominated by global alliances and low-cost airlines. The company needed to differentiate itself by driving innovative experiences through technology. However, LuxairGroup’s complex IT environment was already supporting 1,500 users with 120 applications that were mainly connected with tightly coupled, point-to-point integrations. This made it difficult to connect new systems, replace old applications, and pursue innovation. The result was high maintenance costs, specifically due to IT’s limited visibility into the application landscape, application interfaces, and security standards. To address these business challenges, IT needed to establish a higher level of control and security when connecting to third-party applications, get a holistic view of existing integrations, and increase the speed of delivery for innovative projects.

SES is a communications satellite company that has 65 satellites covering 99% of the world population. It distributes over 7,700 digital TV channels to 325 million homes globally. As part of a new business strategy, SES needed to transition from a wholesale, infrastructure provider to an end-to-end service provider to customers across the world. This includes providing access to Netflix for a crew on a ship in the Pacific to direct-to-home platforms that want to better understand how their customers use their services. The challenge was to transform its digital landscape and establish closer relationships with its customers by building a customer portal to unify their experience.

Spark::red, a service provider for top-tier web properties, understands the high expectations of its e-commerce customers when it comes to website speed and security. Performance and security features are absolutely critical for online businesses. Sites need to load fast, and customers need to know that their personal information (emails, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) is protected. A shining example of the challenges faced by Spark::red’s clients is Calendars.com—an internet top 500 retailer. In the past, Calendars.com suffered from multiple site outages due to traffic spikes on Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays as well as during other peak periods.

As Discord prepared for rapid growth, they needed a way to affordably and quickly scale their existing hardware infrastructure, while maintaining performance and security. Performance wise, Discord would need to transition from serving their content from a single homed server to a high performing CDN (Content Delivery Network) partner that could serve their static assets from all around the globe. Security wise, Discord needed to protect their websockets-based traffic from the rampant DDoS attacks that they were experiencing. As CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy explained, “Since we are a gamer focused product we attract a lot of users who love to DDoS each other during game matches. As we grew more popular the intensity and occurrences of these DDoS attacks increased to the point where our engineers were constantly dealing with them.” Vishnevskiy continued, “Before Cloudflare, we were using a large number of HAProxy boxes with DNS load balancing to be able to failover during DDoS attacks on our real-time gateways.” However, their initial hardware solution could cost Discord up to six figures annually at scale and would still require work from Discord’s engineers.

Quizlet, a popular online learning service in the United States, was facing challenges with DDoS attacks on their site, preventing students from accessing study material. As the site grew in popularity, it became a more visible target for bad actors. Furthermore, Quizlet was serving traffic out of a single region in the US, which was limiting its ability to quickly serve content to a global student base. In order to make its learning tools readily available to the world, Quizlet needed a way to both protect its website from the increase in DDoS attacks, while simultaneously distributing its content internationally with high performance.

Pixowl, a mobile game studio, was facing a challenge in delivering smooth gameplay to its users. The mobile gaming industry is highly competitive and requires excellence in execution. One of the key factors in this execution is the game's overall performance, including the speed of loading its contents and the refresh time. In the mobile gaming industry, there is a player drop-rate of 20-40% for games if initial load times are over a minute long. Pixowl's game content, which is cloud-hosted by Digital Ocean, needed to be delivered as fast as possible to their players. However, Pixowl is a lean, indie gaming studio, and their focus is on making great, fun, compelling games for their target audience of kids and families, not to develop complex backend technical solutions to deliver their content. Thus, Pixowl’s challenge was to globally scale without distracting their engineers trying to develop games and avoiding internal headaches.

Creare Group, a leading digital marketing agency for small to medium businesses in the UK, was in the process of revamping its server security. They were looking for a solution that could not only improve their security but also boost the SEO rankings of their clients' websites. The company was hit by a DDOS attack during the relaunch of its brand and site at a high-profile event. The attack was so strong that it was able to take down the dedicated server that solely hosted the site. Additionally, Creare wanted to deliver rapid load speeds to its clients in the UK and around the world, and improve the load speed of highly dynamic Magento e-commerce sites.

Yola, a website creation and hosting platform, was looking for ways to offer Universal SSL to all the web properties on their network. They had already implemented DDoS protection, a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and managed DNS capabilities to deliver a world-class service. However, they were looking to consolidate multiple vendor contracts and roll out Universal SSL while doing so. The challenge was to find a single-vendor solution that could meet all their needs, including Universal SSL, DDoS protection, CDN, and DNS. Additionally, they had to migrate their substantial user base to the new platform, which was a significant challenge.

Zopim, a cloud-based live chat platform, was facing a significant challenge in meeting the demands of its customers. The customers wanted their websites to load instantaneously, as speed forms a critical part of the user experience. However, Zopim was having a hard time meeting this demand. The widget loading time was extremely important to Zopim’s customers, and the company was struggling to ensure that everything on their website loaded quickly and efficiently.

Dan Baritchi, co-founder and CEO of BlogPress, along with his wife Jennifer, have their own successful blog and were interested in sharing their knowledge with other would-be bloggers. Once they created the theblogpress.com they were in need of added performance benefits and solutions.

Handelsblatt Media Group (HMG), a leading media house for business and financial information in Germany, was facing significant challenges with online attacks from hostile actors. These attacks were causing major issues, including overwhelming HMG's origin server multiple times over several weeks, rendering the site inaccessible. This was eroding the trust of their readers and causing erratic website reliability. With no signs of the attacks abating, HMG needed to find a solution that could not only mitigate these hostile attacks but also provide benefits to performance, reliability, operational efficiency, and cost.

In 2015, AO began their expansion into Germany and the Netherlands. While the logistical effort of delivering products in these new markets was a challenge, they also faced increased pressure to ensure that their website would perform optimally for customers in these regions. AO implemented a well known content delivery network (CDN) to improve site performance across all of their web domains, and to reduce their overall infrastructure costs. While the onboarding process and support was straightforward, it wasn’t until they began routing more traffic to the provider’s edge network that they started experiencing some new unforeseen challenges. They were hit with some very high unexpected charges as a result, and this made them question the overall investment return of this solution. They also experienced an outage around this time, and had issues getting their case sufficiently escalated. These events forced AO to begin exploring alternatives for a solution that would be more cost-effective and support over the long term.

Carousell serves around 1 PB of images per month and utilizes artificial intelligence to create a frictionless user experience for anyone looking to buy or sell items on their platform. In order to meet intensive performance requirements for a rapidly expanding regional customer base, they need a cloud provider that can ensure uptime during high-traffic events and cache dynamic pages on an as-needed basis. These issues come into sharp focus during Carousell’s periodic “flash sales” — a recurring limited-time event when they partner with sellers to provide deep discounts for buyers. Just one of these flash sales can attract over 3x the amount of traffic Carousell typically sees. It isn’t an easy task, especially as the rapid influx of traffic during flash sales places a significant strain on the platform. Initially, Carousell turned to Amazon CloudFront to keep their site running smoothly, but soon found that they were not able to handle the site’s growing audience and performance needs.