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BBVA, a multinational banking group, was facing a challenge in providing its trading desks with real-time, accurate insight into counterparty credit risk (CCR) and checking the limits for each trade. The bank's philosophy is that risk is a fundamental part of every business decision, and it wanted to manage risk more proactively by moving from an ex-post to an ex-ante model. This required the ability to obtain a precise valuation of CCR and other risk measures even before closing deals. However, the sophisticated CCR models that BBVA's risk team had been using could only be run in a batch process at the end of each day. For pre-deal limit checking, traders had to use a simpler “add-on” modeling approach, which did not take some important factors into account. Moreover, this model was only used in some geographies, while in others, there was no pre-deal limit checking at all.

Bengt Dahlgren AB, a civil engineering consultancy services provider, was faced with the challenge of ensuring effective collaboration among its six group companies as it prepared to give them greater autonomy for lean decision-making. The group, which specializes in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), fire safety, energy and environmental construction, and building automation, wanted to ensure that the increased autonomy did not reduce the employees’ ability to collaborate across different departments. The group had been relying on shared drives and folders to distribute information on human resources, internal processes, and best practices. However, as they transitioned to a decentralized IT management structure, they realized that this approach would become difficult to sustain. They needed a new way to collaborate across the group.

BH Telecom, a leading provider of communication services in Bosnia and Herzegovina, aimed to become a regional leader in cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) services. They identified a significant market gap for solutions that collect and exchange data to enable smarter environments, optimizing resources like power, water, and lighting. Additionally, they saw an opportunity in providing a robust, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for enterprise clients. However, the challenge was to deliver these solutions to customers rapidly and at competitive prices. The existing environment could take months to build such a solution, which was not feasible in the face of competition. It was crucial for BH Telecom to accelerate their service delivery without compromising the reliability of their services.

Big Fish Games, a leading producer and distributor of casual games, faced a significant challenge in the highly competitive mobile and online gaming industry. The company needed to identify loyal clients and reduce customer churn to maintain its market position. The transition from a PC-centric to a mobile-centric gaming company brought about a change in strategy. With millions of games available to mobile users and new releases emerging rapidly, the window of opportunity to capture and keep the attention of a player was shrinking. The key to success for Big Fish Games was understanding customers’ changing tastes to deliver the optimal balance between challenging and satisfying gameplay. However, the company struggled to manage escalating volumes of data from tens of millions of players from around the world each day. The large data sets made it difficult to conduct effective analytical exercises without hitting dead ends.

BLOM BANK, a leading Lebanese bank, was looking to expand its market share in Lebanon and the EMEA region. To achieve this, the bank recognized the need to embrace the omnichannel digital banking trend. However, this had to be done without compromising on data availability or efficiency. The bank had a solid track record of profitability and growth in Lebanon and the EMEA region, while following a conservative strategy that includes prudent risk management. The challenge was to maintain this winning approach while providing innovative products and services to customers and staying at the forefront of technology. Achieving this without compromising service quality would require the bank to find a stable technology partner, who could offer a technology mix that would enable growth, efficiency and service continuity as BLOM BANK evolves.

Blue Shield of California, a not-for-profit health plan provider, was facing an increasingly competitive health insurance marketplace following the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The company needed to better support its members and boost competitiveness by accelerating the provisioning of new systems and improving IT agility to get new offerings to market quickly. The challenge was to adjust their offerings as the needs of their members changed, and to deliver a modern customer experience, including access from mobile devices and tablets. The company was also struggling with a lack of automation in provisioning the networking, hardware, and software.

Bonnie Plants, a national plant wholesaler based in Alabama, was grappling with the challenges of manual data processing which made them vulnerable to human errors and long delays. The company was using IBM Sterling's Gentran:Director® for EDI and Sterling Collaboration NetworkSM for their VAN services since 1994. However, the sales data took up to three days to process, leading to a feeling of being overwhelmed with data. The processing of sales orders could take an entire day and was subject to human error. After pulling information across a dial-up modem, Bonnie often discovered the data was incomplete. The company was continuously facing the challenges of trading electronically with little visibility. Moreover, 70 percent of their business occurred between the months of March and May, which required a scalable solution that could handle a large influx of data during a short period of time.

Boston Children’s Hospital, a leading pediatric and adolescent healthcare center, identified a significant challenge in the global healthcare sector. The traditional teaching hospital apprenticeship model was failing to adapt to an increasingly interconnected world, leading to a bottleneck of expert knowledge within the walls of institutions. This created disparities in access to medical education, particularly in pediatric critical care. Countries like China, India, Brazil, and the United States have more than 150 medical schools each, while 36 countries have none. Of these, 26 are within sub-Saharan Africa, areas with some of the highest disease burdens and infant mortality rates. The lack of access to expert knowledge and training in these regions was a critical issue. Dr. Jeffrey Burns and Dr. Traci Wolbrink of Boston Children’s Hospital, both experts in pediatric critical care, research innovation, and medical learning techniques, sought a solution using Internet and social networking technology to share knowledge instantly around the world.

BRD-Groupe Société Générale (BRD), the second largest bank in Romania, identified the need to enhance security protections at the customer endpoint, which was considered the weak link in banking security. Despite not having experienced fraud losses through its online banking channel, the bank's Chief Information Security Officer, Mihai Andries, and his team believed it was crucial to proactively address this increasingly vulnerable area. The bank recognized that the client endpoint was more susceptible to attacks than the bank’s infrastructure due to significant browser and operating system vulnerabilities that could be exploited by criminals to intercept traffic, inject fake pages, and steal credentials. The bank sought an efficient solution that could rapidly detect malware and phishing attacks, and remove any infections.

Brett Landscaping & Building Products, a significant sector of the Brett group, one of the largest independent construction and building materials groups in the UK, was facing a challenge in understanding their own profitability due to a complex revenue and cost structure. The company was forced to perform arduous spreadsheet work to gain true visibility of expenditure. The complexity of cost drivers in the construction industry made it extremely difficult for Brett to gain a clear view of its financial situation. The company was maintaining a huge and increasingly unwieldy set of spreadsheets to manage revenue analysis and costs including rebates and haulage. At 186 million records, their spreadsheet environment was unsustainable and prevented them from gaining a true understanding of the relative profitability of different activities.

Bridgevine, a company that powers customer acquisition solutions through its next-generation technology platform, was facing a significant challenge. The company was struggling with prospective customers not following through with conversions, specifically, calling into the call center to schedule an installation appointment. This was a significant issue as it was affecting the company's ability to acquire new customers, build brand loyalty, and unlock new revenue streams. The company's marketing team, which markets to an entirely B2C audience, was in need of a more effective way to ensure that these prospective customers followed through on scheduling an appointment.

Broadcom, a global leader in semiconductor solutions, faced a significant challenge in managing its sales compensation. The company's compensation plans were becoming increasingly complex, and the lack of real-time visibility into compensation was causing dissatisfaction among its highly skilled sales team. The salespeople, most of whom are qualified engineers, were unable to monitor their performance and predict their compensation, which was affecting their motivation and productivity. The company's compensation reporting processes were manual, labor-intensive, and could only produce reports once per quarter. This lack of timely insight into compensation was affecting the sales team's performance and the company's ability to motivate them effectively. Furthermore, Broadcom needed to make compensation more transparent without significantly increasing the headcount in the compensation team.

Brockenhurst College, a high-achieving academic institution in England, was seeking ways to gain deeper insights into student needs and learning styles. The goal was to use this information to shape a more immersive and personalised educational experience, from application to graduation. The college was also looking for ways to improve student recruitment and retention, and increase its reputation. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow the college to understand each student’s unique style of learning and interests, and continually adapt learning pathways to meet these needs. The college also wanted to improve the way it markets itself to prospective learners and ensure that its educational offerings meet both local learner and employer needs.

BT Sport, a collection of sports channels offered by the BT Group in the UK, needed a high-speed file transfer solution to support ad hoc ingest and distribution as well as power automated data replication to an offsite data recovery center. The vision of BT Sport could only be realized with a new, state of the art broadcast facility. Timeline Television, BT Sport's technical partner, had less than six months to build out the broadcast centre from an empty shell into a 24 hour-a-day operation, including the simultaneous roll-out of a fully automated disaster recovery system. They quickly identified the need for a robust, high-speed transfer platform from a trusted vendor, to power the intense file-based production workflows and meet the project’s aggressive timescale. The platform needed to support secure high-speed transfer at multi-gigabit speeds, allow fully automated end-to-end workflows including ad hoc content ingest, review, approval and distribution, and offer reliable, secure data replication of petabytes of media from BT Sport’s main site in London’s iCITY to the disaster recovery and continuity facilities located at the iconic BT Tower.

BTC, a leading property management and development company in Slovenia, faced the challenge of managing some of the largest commercial and office buildings in central Europe. The company needed to demonstrate its efficiency to clients, find ways to reduce costs, and increase service levels. The lack of real-time, central view of what was happening across all the buildings and assets they managed was a significant issue. The company also lacked visibility of the work done by technicians until they returned to the office and typed up their reports. This delay in information flow hampered the company's ability to respond immediately when something went wrong in the facilities they managed.

Buffalo David Bitton, a leading fashion brand, was facing challenges in analyzing, planning, and forecasting demand and inventory for its wholesale, online, and in-store channels. The company's sales channels were run on different software systems, and its financial data was managed in another system. This disparity made reporting a laborious process, hindering the company's ability to make timely decisions. The company needed a solution that would provide a holistic view of sales trends across all channels, ensuring the right products were always available to appeal to each customer. The existing systems, while efficient for day-to-day operations, had limited reporting capabilities, making it difficult to gain an overall view of the business or to analyze data in detail.

Busan Bank, a retail banking service provider in South Korea, faced a significant challenge in providing efficient and effective services to its out-of-branch customers. The bank's salespeople, when operating in the field, had to carry all necessary forms and information they anticipated they would need. However, if a customer asked an unexpected question, the salesperson had to return to the office to find the answer. Similarly, completed forms also had to be brought back to the branch for processing. This process was not only time-consuming but also left customers with a negative impression due to the delay in service and lack of immediate answers.

Cabify, a Spain-based startup offering chauffeured car transport services, was experiencing rapid data growth as it expanded globally. The company's databases, which stored critical information on vehicle locations, routes, drivers, pricing, and payments, needed to be accessible in real time. Initially, Cabify ran its database services internally using Apache CouchDB. However, as the company grew, managing databases became a time-consuming task that distracted from its core business activities. The company was also grappling with the challenge of balancing the number of servers it could run and the staff time required to maintain them. The increasing difficulty in maintaining in-house databases led Cabify to seek a solution that would reduce operational costs, free up time for core activities, and provide a scalable data services platform to support its ambitious growth plans.

Cablevisión, one of Argentina’s leading media and communications companies, was facing a challenge in boosting customer loyalty and minimizing churn. The company wanted to enhance service quality and customer satisfaction but lacked an effective method to identify dissatisfied customers and address their issues. Regular satisfaction surveys did not provide a comprehensive picture as many subscribers chose not to participate. Moreover, if customers did not report their problems to the helpdesk, the company often had no feedback from them at all. The company realized that it needed to diagnose and resolve connectivity problems early to retain customers. The challenge was to predict which internet subscribers were dissatisfied, regardless of whether they complained or not, by gathering data about network status from customers’ modems and comparing it with the results of satisfaction surveys.

The cancer treatment and research center was facing a significant challenge in managing and accessing its vast volumes of patient data, which were primarily in paper format. The institution's unique approach to treating patients as a whole, rather than a series of isolated maladies, resulted in extensive patient medical records. The sheer volume of these paper records often made it difficult for clinicians and researchers to rapidly and reliably access the information they required. This situation was negatively impacting productivity and causing delays. Furthermore, the practice of 'checking out' medical records for research purposes often left clinical teams without immediate access to these records, especially in cases of unexpected patient visits. The center needed a more effective way to work with patient information that would enhance the delivery of prompt diagnosis and treatment, and accelerate the progress of vital research work.

Canon Marketing Japan Inc., a subsidiary of the Canon Group, was grappling with the challenge of improving employee productivity and satisfaction by enhancing response times for crucial information systems. The company's IT headquarters, responsible for managing and operating mission-critical business applications used daily by approximately 4,000 of the 18,000 employees across various Canon Group companies, was facing increasing wait times due to the concentration of large volumes of transactions. The company had created a mechanism to utilize mission-critical systems as data warehouses, but the processing of data extracted through SQL queries was time-consuming, especially for complex commands. The system load gradually increased from January to December, with the last three months of the year experiencing particularly severe deterioration in response times. Despite regular system upgrades, the response times during peak periods started to deteriorate sooner than expected due to data and transaction volumes far exceeding estimates.

Cathay United Bank (CUB), a subsidiary of Cathay Financial Holding Co., is a major player in Taiwan's banking sector, with a significant portion of its revenue coming from the consumer credit loan business. In 2013, the bank's total loan amount exceeded TWD1 trillion (USD32.25 billion), and its total assets reached nearly TWD2 trillion (USD64.51 billion). However, to maintain its competitive edge, CUB needed to expedite its loan approval and disbursement processes. The bank was facing challenges in responding efficiently to market dynamics and enhancing customer satisfaction. The existing system was not agile enough to meet the changing demands of the market and the expectations of the customers. The bank needed a solution that could streamline its loan origination and servicing processes, improve its response time, and increase its market agility.

Cegid, a leading management software solutions provider in France, was facing challenges in harmonizing its sales practices across different verticals and business units. The company was struggling with its existing CRM systems, which were not adequately aligned with its sales process and lacked sufficient multichannel capabilities. The lack of standardization and integrated reporting made it difficult to create accurate sales pipelines and forecasts, impacting Cegid’s ability to direct resources efficiently and profitably. The company aimed to create a new CRM and PRM solution that would enable it to harmonize sales practices across all verticals and business units, promote growth through better knowledge of clients and markets, develop a true multichannel approach to sales, and boost productivity through greater operational efficiency and process automation.

Celerity Limited, an IBM Premier Business Partner, specializes in delivering dynamic infrastructure and enterprise-class solutions to a wide range of clients, from medium to large enterprises across all industries, as well as public sector organizations. However, the company faced challenges in developing client relationships, speeding up contract negotiations, and avoiding implementation delays. The challenge was to find a way to reduce trading risks and manage working capital while ensuring client satisfaction. Additionally, the company needed to address the issue of stretched IT budgets and sensitive cash flow situations of their clients. The challenge was to make strategic investments more affordable and accessible for their clients, without letting temporary budget issues or cash flow be the inhibitor.

Celero, a leading provider of IT solutions for Canadian credit unions and financial institutions, faced a significant challenge in ensuring high performance and availability for their mission-critical systems without incurring excessive costs. The company's clients, operating in a fast-paced sector, had high expectations for Celero's services, which included hosting key banking systems and Oracle databases running on IBM Power Systems servers. Much of Celero's existing infrastructure was nearing its end-of-life, necessitating an upgrade to the latest-generation technology to guarantee the smooth running of key business systems and associated databases well into the future. The company needed to improve performance and increase scalability to continue delivering top-quality service to clients as their business grew.

CEMEX S.A.B. de C.V., a global leader in the manufacture and distribution of cement, ready-mix concrete, aggregates, and related building materials, recognized the potential of its high-profile social business platform as a tool for employee skill development. The company, which employs over 44,000 people in more than 50 countries, saw that its employees were using the platform to share and develop their expertise. However, the challenge was to structure and accelerate this organic collaboration and content creation to fully capitalize on the information-sharing that employees had already developed. The company needed a solution that could identify areas of expertise across the organization and analyze gaps in expertise to define personalized skill development plans.

Benesse Corporation, a company engaged in educational and lifestyle businesses, was seeking ways to uniquely use digital technology to differentiate its education services. The company aimed to develop a strategy that combined digital technology with conventional learning materials. To successfully launch this new education service in the market, Benesse Corporation needed a system to offer a flexible and affordable payment service to meet the members’ economical needs. The company was also faced with the challenge of making the new service accessible to members who did not own an iPad, a device necessary for the new learning style. The cost of purchasing a new iPad was seen as a potential obstacle for members.

CenterGrid, a full-stack IT hosting and support services provider, identified a gap in the market for mid-market firms seeking data protection solutions. These firms found themselves caught between public cloud backup services, which were limited in scope, scalability, and performance, and on-premises solutions that were costly and oversized. Mass market cloud backup solutions were too limited and did not scale cost-effectively to their needs. On the other hand, on-premises enterprise solutions for backup and recovery were often oversized for their requirements, requiring costly investments in both infrastructure and highly skilled specialist personnel. These mid-size organizations were storing increasing volumes of business-critical data but lacked the internal IT resources to properly manage backup, recovery, archive, and retention policies.

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG), a renowned international biomedical research institute, was faced with the challenge of sharing large amounts of genome sequencing data quickly and cost-effectively with worldwide research institutions. The volume of data available for analysis was growing rapidly due to advancements in genetic sequencing technologies. CRG partnered with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) to improve the services of the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) to offer easier access for a global research audience. However, the EGA archive contained over two petabytes of data in a range of different formats, which posed a significant challenge. Research institutions required huge amounts of data very quickly, which may be distributed across multiple small files, a small number of very large files, or a mixture of the two. Traditional file transfer protocols were unable to deliver the required performance.

China Merchants Bank, under the leadership of Zhang Xiang, executive of open platforms, was facing a significant challenge due to the rapid changes in online and mobile requirements for banks. The competitive landscape necessitated the bank to increase new product development and enhance operations and maintenance agility. The traditional waterfall approach was proving increasingly inadaptable due to rapid transformations and growth in the bank's business. This led to more demands on IT infrastructure management. The bank needed to ensure stability and efficiency over the long term, while also being agile enough to launch applications fast, diagnose malfunctions in a timely and predictive way, and schedule apps based on wide variations in transaction volumes. To achieve these objectives, the bank had to conduct a performance capacity assessment, which required collecting huge amounts of historical data showing transaction volumes during normal and peak times, as well as growth trends.