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The technology-driven business unit of a leading credit card company was flourishing in its early years, successfully reaching consumers with no previous access to traditional banking services. However, as the prepaid debit card expanded and added online and mobile features, the division became increasingly reliant on internally developed software applications and on-premise infrastructure. By early 2014, the platform infrastructure to support the mobile and web-centric business spanned multiple data centers and technologies. Advanced server, storage, and networking solutions adequately supported application growth, however, complex processes to provision and manage infrastructure began to constrain developer agility and slow release cycles. A principal concern was the two-week period to provision software development platforms. A second challenge was the deviation of environments between development, test, and production systems. Lastly, infrastructure capital and operating expenses continued to grow.

G-Core, a company that provides infrastructure for online multiplayer games, was facing challenges due to its tremendous growth. The fast-paced gaming market required clients to continuously improve games and quickly launch new features, and G-Core needed to make sure they were in a position to do that. However, G-Core struggled to cost-effectively maintain infrastructure performance and scale. Its game hosting spanned thousands of servers in 20 data centers and had even set a world record of 1,140,000 peak concurrent users. As platform expenses rose, G-Core needed improved resource utilization and cost margins. Furthermore, to shorten release cycles, gaming developers required self-service access to resources. Provisioning VM and bare metal servers, however, often involved release managers opening multiple tickets that took many days and administrators to resolve. The activity was complex, labor-intensive, and subject to human error. To help make Wargaming successful, G-Core had to help simplify the process of maintaining continuous integration and deployment of high-quality games.

The company’s engineering teams build infrastructure and applications that allow the business to deliver market leading digital content to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. This requires systems that rapidly scale, speed time-to-market, and protect valued intellectual property; all without exceeding target costs. Agile and immediate expansion of infrastructure is especially important for comprehensive sports offerings. “Demand spikes during important events can place a huge strain on our systems,” says the company’s Director of Cloud Solutions. “To respond to large-scale online requests, we often need immediate and sizable increases in application capacity.” Equally important to business success is enabling rapid development and deployment of new customer services. Continuous integration and deployment, now replacing waterfall programming methods, require elastic system architectures that allow for quick provisioning and deprovisioning of infrastructure based on developer needs. In addition to scalability and speed of development, new systems require strong protection of intellectual property to prevent cyber attacks. This means integration with existing robust security solutions. New infrastructure must also integrate with existing network and storage frameworks, and accommodate software development processes with minimal impact on efficiency.

The company, a leading telecommunications and technology company based in the Asia Pacific region, was facing challenges in dynamically allocating bandwidth to efficiently provide the exact network resources required by every user at any given time. This was critical to minimize latency in applications with large volumes of fast-moving data and to maintain high end-to-end performance in bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video, gaming and other multimedia. The rapid growth of cloud computing was putting tremendous pressure on carriers and enterprises to ensure reliable, high-performance networking services despite heavier traffic patterns and greater strain on network bandwidth for distributed computing operations. The company's infrastructure made provisioning a circuit for customers a multiweek process that included manually setting up switches, routers and other equipment.

Bailian Group, China's largest retailer, faced the challenge of transforming its business model from traditional brick and mortar to omni-channel business to keep up with the rapid growth of online commerce in China. The company's existing IT infrastructure was complex and not conducive to the fast-paced innovation required in the e-commerce sector. Low server utilization, long provisioning times, and high operating costs were impeding the company's growth in the omnichannel sales sector. The company needed a large-scale IT platform that would enable innovation and growth, with fast development, dynamic scaling, uncompromised availability, and low cost of operations.

The satellite operator was facing a challenge with the increasing number of cord-cutters and cord-nevers, people who have never subscribed to a traditional pay-TV service. The operator wanted to capitalize on this situation and address the more than 100 million payTV households by launching a monthly OTT subscription service that includes live and on-demand content. The operator had an aggressive timeline for its new service launch. The goal was to get the project off the ground within weeks. Video quality was an important consideration, and there needed to be very low latency. Moreover, the operator wanted to be able to offer its OTT service to subscribers at a much lower price point than a full satellite service in the U.S. Given these parameters, Mirantis and Harmonic partnered to deliver a cloud-native media processing solution on OpenStack that met these requirements, offering quick time to market, high video quality and little to no CAPEX.

The company faced a unique IT challenge due to the massive size and intermittent needs of video post-production workloads. Media coloring, rendering, and transcoding for movies required compute and storage resources that spiked to enormous levels at irregular intervals. An increase in new server requests to meet peak utilization placed substantial strain on existing IT resources. The company needed to improve innovation, decrease time-to-market, and cut capital costs. Massive file storage needs for animation and high definition video was projected at 100X growth over 10 years. This growth could not be serviced by the current architecture. Without migrating to a centralized and shared private cloud, infrastructure costs would multiply.

We2o, a technology company founded in 2014, aims to revolutionize the philanthropy sector by providing an online platform that leverages social data and the web to connect charities, companies, and donors. However, the company faced a significant challenge in building an architecture that could incorporate data and provide real-time analytics. Many charitable organizations were using outdated technology that offered little in terms of user engagement, and they lacked the ability to collect and analyze data about their online fundraising efforts. We2o needed a third-party partner with a robust, ready-made analytics solution that could be easily integrated into their platform.

Yellow Pages Group (YPG) has undergone a significant transformation from a print company to a web-based company, expanding into new channels including social and mobile. This rapid growth led to a messy and ad hoc deployment of applications running on different technologies, making it difficult to integrate all properties into a single view. As web traffic began to grow exponentially, YPG’s challenges became more acute. They diagnosed web performance issues using tracing and logging, which was time-consuming and essentially left them in the dark. Whenever developers released a new version of a website, they would inevitably encounter problems and need to roll everything back.

As RunKeeper increased in popularity, application performance became increasingly difficult to predict. The company’s engineering team now stands at 20 people and is organized into several subgroups to focus on key features. The challenge was how to go from a handful of developers to multiple teams who are deploying features for more than 27 million users. Before using New Relic, RunKeeper already had a number of performance monitoring tools in place. However, a significant gap remained in the company’s ability to understand the root cause of emerging issues.

FiftyThree, a company that develops tools for mobile creation, uses Node.js as its server-side code for enabling features like the in-app Made With Paper stream and the account system for ordering Moleskine Books. The development team chose this JavaScript approach for a couple of reasons, the first one being that they liked the simplicity of using the same language on both the back- and front-end. Node.js’ event loop model also made it perfectly suited for being a fast web server. And it didn’t hurt that there was an enthusiastic and fanatical community surrounding Node.js to help FiftyThree solidify its decision. With its new framework in place, however, the FiftyThree team knew it also needed a performance monitoring solution to ensure that Paper was delivering the best user experience possible.

MultiPlan, a healthcare cost management solutions provider, was experiencing dramatic growth, processing as many as 140 million claims annually. The company relied on almost 400 different software applications and almost 100 web services to drive its business. In 2011, the team began to encounter performance issues with the web services they were running in Cape Clear, an enterprise service bus. They had very little visibility into the performance of key components across that environment. Customers often discovered issues before they did. The tipping point came when an unexpected weekend outage caused the company to re-evaluate their performance monitoring.

Scopely, a mobile gaming company, is on a fast track of growth. In just two years, the company has released six live games and has several more in development. With each new game, Scopely aims to increase its market share by attracting new audiences. This strategy has resulted in a larger network of non-competing users, translating into higher revenue. However, it also translates into heavier traffic. With the popularity of Scopely’s newest releases, the company is handling nearly two billion API requests per week. This level of popularity means that Scopely needs to be extra-vigilant in maintaining the performance of its applications. The company needs a solution that can help it monitor and optimize the performance of its applications to handle the increasing traffic and ensure optimal user experience.

iTesso, a software company for the global hospitality industry, was facing challenges with its cloud environment. The company's flagship SaaS product, iTesso, is a cloud-native enterprise lodging system built on the Windows Azure platform. However, the company was often unaware of performance issues until customers started calling the contact center to complain. The feedback from customers was often vague and difficult to validate, making it hard to identify and address the root cause of the issues. The company needed a more comprehensive approach to monitoring its application. The iTesso system is complex and full of dependencies, and the company wanted to monitor everything as a whole, not just separate components.

Cash Converters' IT team faced a challenge in application monitoring. They were using Azure monitoring and application log files to diagnose emerging issues, but these tools did not provide end-to-end application insight. They lacked visibility into network I/O, disk I/O, CPU, memory, application throughput, and how their application consumed system resources and behaved. When a problem arose, they couldn't be sure if it was a database issue or an application issue. They were essentially flying blind. They developed application instrumentation for lower-level insight into granular performance issues, but still lacked a system-wide view. They needed a more holistic approach to monitoring the performance of their application.

When Eric Peterson joined Tableau in 2011, he began working in the marketing department’s development team. The team was responsible for managing a number of Drupal web applications, including the main corporate website — but he soon found himself facing considerable limitations. “The network operations team was handling all of our monitoring,” he explains. “We had very little access to their monitoring data, so we had almost no insight into the issues we were facing in production. We were basically flying blind.”

When BeenVerified opened for business in 2007, the company had no easy way to gauge site performance. The company was totally focused on getting their product out the door, but they didn’t know if the engines were burning hot — they had almost no visibility into any of that. They could log into each machine to check the memory and CPU, but there was no centralized dashboard for overall performance of the app. The company's Senior Software Engineer's email inbox was flooded with exception notifications. This lack of visibility into the performance of their application was a major challenge for the company.

Unwired Revolution, a mobile solutions integrator, has been focusing on the development of custom mobile apps to help clients' internal teams collaborate more effectively. However, they faced challenges in ensuring consistent performance of these apps. During the testing phases for client projects, they often encountered performance issues that were difficult to identify and reproduce. For instance, a pilot end user reported an increase in 'server errors', but the source of the problem was elusive. The company wanted to be proactive in identifying problems before they impacted end users, but their only option was to review log files and debug traces, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Manheim, a leading provider of vehicle remarketing services, faced challenges in maintaining high performance during a rapidly growing online and mobile app user base. The company's online presence serves as an additional buying channel for automotive industry professionals, providing them with valuable research tools to determine the current wholesale market value for any given vehicle. However, if one of their sites is not performing well, it can affect their ability to operate at maximum capacity and properly service their customers. Furthermore, as automotive professionals became accustomed to conducting much of their business on smartphones, Manheim responded with a major expansion of its mobile capabilities. This added complexity to their environment, making it challenging to diagnose problems.

Kwarter, a platform that enables clients to build second-screen apps for televised events, required a highly elastic infrastructure to meet extraordinary spikes in demand during major events like the Super Bowl and the World Series. The company needed to keep a large number of servers on deck and proactively address issues in production to prepare for every possible scenario. To maintain high performance even with heavy traffic, Kwarter needed to track and analyze performance data on all of the company’s servers in real time. They needed a tool that would monitor multiple dimensions of the Kwarter platform, including error detection, server resource monitoring, cache time monitoring, latency monitoring on the app server versus the database server, and a good network map.

When Tobias Schmidt joined SoundCloud in 2011, he was struck by the sheer size of the company’s code base. With 15 - 20 coders all developing different parts of the code base, it was extremely difficult for anyone, especially a new employee, to understand that much code and how it might behave in a production environment. Usage on the site was growing exponentially month over month, and Schmidt’s team was constantly pushing out new features to keep pace with user demand. In many cases, that meant creating code to meet an urgent need, then leaving it untouched for months or even years. SoundCloud’s early features worked perfectly well for a small number of users. But in many cases, those same features wouldn’t scale as users became more numerous and more active. All of those coding changes, often made under intense pressure and in response to increased demand, made it difficult for the SoundCloud team to identify which lines of code might be the cause of poor site performance. Prior to using New Relic, team members would often email each other to diagnose any given problem, relying on limited internal data to achieve a very slow, very incomplete picture of the issue at hand.

Quizlet, an educational website, was experiencing exponential growth in its user base, putting extraordinary pressure on the company to keep pace with the growing demand. The company was expecting to welcome 150 million visitors over the next 12 months, many of whom were students who expected fast website performance. In addition to faster page loads, data reliability was a major consideration for Quizlet, as users were uploading large amounts of data every hour. The company needed a reliable storage system that was available all the time, with no unplanned outages. Quizlet knew that it needed a first-rate cloud provider that could scale quickly and easily to meet user demand. In order to keep the site running optimally, the company also needed superior analytics for quick diagnosis of performance issues in near real time.

HotelTonight, a fast-growing company that helps travelers find last-minute hotel reservations at discounted prices, faced a significant challenge in developing and launching their application in time for the holiday season. The company had a goal of being included in the iOS app store by December 2010, which meant having the application fully tested and ready to go by late November. With such an ambitious goal, the ability to rapidly debug performance issues was essential. The company's service has two components: the HotelTonight mobile app and the Extranet, an internal web-based application for development, customer service, and hotels participating in the program. The mobile app is the most heavily trafficked part of the service, and the Extranet is used by the internal team, customer support, and hotels participating in the service. Each day, hotels input their room availability and rates into the Extranet. The Extranet also produces history and usage reports for the participating hotels so they can easily view their history and success rates using HotelTonight. Some hotels also use third-party inventory and reservation systems gateways and APIs to load the evening’s available rooms.

Tribune Technology, a subsidiary of the Tribune Company, manages the digital operations of eight major daily newspapers, 23 broadcast stations and a number of national network site partners. The company serves approximately 400 to 500 million pageviews per month, mostly in publishing news content for consumers. The company's digital landscape is constantly changing, especially in terms of mobile websites and device applications. This results in an extraordinarily complex system that gets more complex by the day. Before using New Relic, Tribune Technology lacked the application instrumentation necessary to achieve real time insight into emerging issues. During production incidents, the company had trouble finding where application bottlenecks were occurring. The system monitors would fire, but the company couldn’t immediately tell what might be causing the problem. No consumer facing website can afford delays like that, so the company needed to find a more acceptable solution.

RunSignUp, a software service provider for race management, registration, and related activities, was facing challenges in managing its performance as its service and customer base grew. The company was using semi-manual scripts to manage system monitoring and alerting, which made it difficult to determine when the system was down and for how long. The company was committed to delivering a 99.9%+ uptime, but this was consuming a lot of resources and time. In addition to managing site availability, the team needed to manage site performance, which required understanding the response times end users experience. The tools they were using were not providing clear visibility into end user response times. Another challenge was the ability to handle traffic spikes when managing really big races. The company needed an automated performance management tool to provide visibility into performance.

AstraZeneca's Medical Affairs team was initially satisfied with its custom-built, on-premise, .Net CRM system. However, over time, the system's functional limitations, high maintenance requirements, and escalating costs became increasingly problematic. The team needed a more robust system with enhanced reporting, planning, and management functionality. The new system also needed to facilitate collaboration with other AstraZeneca teams, partners, and external resources. Furthermore, the new system had to demonstrate its ability to decrease system maintenance effort and cost, increase system flexibility and usability, reduce the time required to make changes, increase scalability, ease system collaboration with partners, improve user productivity and performance, integrate easily with external data sources, and improve reporting efficiency.

Ferrer had been using a home-grown sales force automation system for years but recently started feeling the pains of outdated technology. The old system couldn’t keep up with the company’s changing needs and increasingly complicated sales structure - one which encouraged competition within territories. For Ferrer, it became mission-critical for the sales reps to have a complete view of one another’s interactions with HCPs across territories and over a mobile platform. The company also wanted a direct-to-pharmacy order management system built right into the CRM system – a capability that had been recently integrated into Veeva CRM. It was also important for Ferrer’s new CRM system to be intuitive and easy to use both for the sales users and administrators.

Before moving to Veeva Vault eTMF, IDDI was burdened with a cumbersome hybrid system of paper-based processes supplemented with electronic shared drives and e-rooms for sharing documents with its clients. Users turned to unsecured workarounds like email, and the complexity prevented effective collaboration with sponsors, independent data monitoring committees (IDMCs), and internal teams around the world. Paper documents proved too difficult to access and track, and the organization turned to shared drives to give sponsors access to content electronically. However, these shared drives were only accessible off-site by using a VPN. E-rooms were meant to provide more flexibility, but limitations in the e-room access control model created a new set of challenges and security vulnerabilities, leading to serious compliance concerns. Lacking true content management capabilities like workflow, reporting, and audit trails, these file shares functioned largely as document storage, and had to be cleared periodically to make room for new documents. Facing an impending audit, IDDI decided to print all electronic documents to create a paper-based TMF. Despite the time and effort expended to compile trial master f ile (TMF) documents from disparate sources, audit-readiness remained challenging.

MSD UK, a subsidiary of Merck, was struggling to find a replacement for its 16-year-old custom-built CRM system. The company had tried one of the leading client/server CRM systems, but it failed to meet their needs. MSD was specifically looking for a CRM solution with innovative mobile capabilities for eDetailing and sophisticated analytics. They also wanted a uniform CRM platform that could be implemented across all of Europe and grow with the company. The challenge was not only about replacing outdated technology but also about adapting their approach to stay ahead as the industry evolves.

Merz North America, a specialty healthcare company, was struggling with an outdated customer relationship management (CRM) system that was expensive to maintain and difficult to upgrade. The system was slow, unreliable, and caused the sales force to waste time and valuable opportunities with physicians. As the contract for the old system was expiring, Merz management decided to look for a new solution that offered world-class performance and reliability, modern functionality, and the flexibility to make changes quickly and inexpensively. They wanted a tool that would put their sales force at the forefront of the technology race.