X

As an organization with many different projects, departments, and moving parts, Amadip-Esment collects vast amounts of information from various sources, including human resources, financial ERP, operational software at restaurants and printing units, and specific software systems containing sensitive data related to persons with disabilities. The team had been manually collecting data and arranging it in Excel pivot tables, which was labor-intensive and limited in analysis. They needed to increase the efficiency of organizing and managing these data pieces and required a core BI platform for managerial reporting and customized data queries. Above all, they needed a system that could bring all their disparate data together for analysis.

WeFi’s database team had been manually running SQL queries, but they struggled to generate the reports that gave the management team crucial feedback. WeFi needed to perform advanced analysis on large amounts of data in three categories: the behavior of millions of WeFi users, including retention activity and data acquisition activity; the performance and activity of wireless networks to which its users are connected; and the activity records of active clients. The average table sizes for these categories were more than 5 million rows, 70 million rows, and 500 million rows respectively.

The operational data at OHT consists of over 20-million records in a 100GB MySQL database. Lior knew that they were collecting all the information he needed to get insights, but he simply couldn’t get to it. Transaction data was coming in pretty fast and, in order to continue to be an industry leader, he needed a way to get a 360 degree view of his business as fast as possible. Lior had various ad-hoc and separate solutions running to try and achieve the reporting and analytics the company needed, including manual analysis and home-grown software. He would often rely on someone from R&D to extract reports or would end up manually doing reporting in Excel, which would take weeks. These efforts were taking significant resources, both human and computer, to try and get the reports that were needed. Many of their analytics requirements were not being met at all, which was leading to a lot of frustration within the company.

Act-On, a software company, faced a significant challenge in managing data from over a dozen web tools used for various business activities. Each tool provided unique BI analytics, making it difficult to identify a single source of truth. The company needed a solution that could integrate these tools seamlessly and provide real-time, actionable insights to improve customer experience and operational efficiency. The complexity of integration, unknown costs, and the need for a tool that could prompt team action were major concerns.

With its multiple systems, Avatrade has been generating and gathering large amounts of data for years. Former CTO with a strong technical background, Mr. Lee Levenson, currently VP Operations of AvaTrade, took it upon himself to search out a better Business Intelligence solution for his company. “Our goal was to give a single view from different angles to different people that previously had taken three or four windows from different systems, with business analysts having to export reports into CSV or Excel to generate beforehand. We wanted to replace the need to manually mash all the data together,” explained Levenson. This huge quantity of data, spread over multiple platforms, meant that getting any report done was laborious. “R&D was writing queries, and making very simple reports for whoever needed them before. As is typical in any developed solution, when a report had to be changed or a new report had to be done, it went back to the R&D queue. These requests had to be prioritized. At times this was a huge bottleneck for us,” said Levenson. It was very important to the company to find a tool that would be cost effective, and quick and relatively easy to deploy. A key factor in choosing a BI software was that it be almost exclusively driven by the business user: meaning that anyone in the organization could create their own reports or drill down in dashboards without having to keep running to R&D for every question. “What we wanted from a tool,” summarized Levenson, “was the wow factor. We wanted people to look at it and say wow, where has this been all my life?”

The company’s marketing, operations, and finance departments all collect large quantities of data. The performance of various marketing channels (social media, television ads, influencer outreach, etc.) would generally be stored in spreadsheets, in addition to operational and financial data. As the business is global and data is coming in multiple formats from a variety of systems, the data was not uniform — it needed to be standardized before analysis. In the beginning, the company was working with a ‘data dump’ — a webpage with the relevant numbers, which could not be filtered or drilled into. As Crowd Media grew, so did their data and number of data sources. Suddenly, they were integrating Redshift DB, MySQL, and connecting to various APIs from Facebook Ads and App Annie in addition to their question/answer database. Ian wanted to generate more detailed reports on a daily basis that could be easily filtered by any user. At first Ian used Excel, but it soon became clear that a more robust system was needed.

Around the world, the popularity of voice search is only growing. As our client seeks to provide fast and accurate search and voice assistance services to users of every major language worldwide, it must understand a variety of voice-activated queries in multiple languages. Global speakers of major languages expect voice-activated apps and search engines to fully and correctly understand voice queries, regardless of the type of voice, regional accent, age, gender, device used, or surrounding environment. With billions of global users and the complexities of processing natural language, fully and correctly recognizing any user’s speech in any language is our client’s complex challenge.

As a decentralized organization, Dorel Juvenile previously relied on multiple, in-market translators to execute translations in its European markets. Efficiency and speed varied among the translators, making it difficult to deliver translations with uniformity. Dorel Juvenile sought the services of one Language Service Provider (LSP) for its European markets to achieve uniform processes and faster translation delivery times. Quality was another incentive. Since the company had no translation memories, glossaries or style guides to draw upon, individual translators provided their own spin during the translation process, making brand voice inconsistent. Dorel Juvenile set out to: Achieve brand consistency throughout its markets, Reduce the amount of time it would take to complete translations, Reach its customers across multiple platforms.

Epson Europe required 147 InDesign files to be translated into 25+ languages for product packaging, marketing materials, and banner ads. These assets needed to be ready before the launch of their largest and highest-visibility marketing campaign of the year. Typically, a Language Service Provider (LSP) would take six to eight weeks to complete this type of job, but Epson Europe needed it done in just two weeks. With a drop-dead deadline and no option for failure, the brand asked Lionbridge to figure out how to significantly shave off production time to meet the aggressive time frame without sacrificing quality.

The customer required a global partner to manage their publishing on their homepage and internal channels, staying in line with local market requirements and delivering quick turnaround times. The customer needed content publishing services for its United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, and United Kingdom markets.

In-house terminology can be incredibly niche and specialized. This terminology must be managed in a way that all employees can understand it and use it in a consistent way – via a knowledge database. Swisscom Rollout & Access did not have a database of this kind, and consequently editors were inconsistent in their use of specialist terminology and abbreviations. This generated uncertainty among document users such as planners, site managers, installers, and training course participants. Swisscom Rollout & Access was looking for a terminology solution that would achieve: Consistent use of specialist terminology and abbreviations, a central glossary, available online and offline, rapid terminology and definition searching, and effortless integration of new specialist terminology.

For many European citizens, the arrival of summer means one thing: tourism. But in a world coping with COVID-19, it was also sure to bring new challenges. Those in the tourism industry would be met with unprecedented uncertainties: How many people will be traveling? Where will they be coming from? Where will they be traveling to? What are their safety expectations? How will travel sentiments and expectations vary country-to-country? And most importantly: What are travelers’ main safety concerns? Our client needed a way to assess traveler intentions and expectations in order to communicate safety measures for a multi-need, multilingual audience.

Kiwibank needed a solution to monitor and reduce computer energy consumption without disrupting users. It also needed to wake computers up out of business hours to patch them. A key requirement was to find a solution that integrated with Kiwibank’s existing Microsoft Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) platform.

Syngenta faced a significant challenge in managing over 250 applications across its business, both licensed and in-house developed. The company needed an automated process that would allow desk-based and mobile workers to select and download the applications they needed without involving highly experienced technical administrators. The manual process of handling software requests through the IT helpdesk was time-consuming and inefficient, leading to delays and frustration among users. The central administration team was overwhelmed with an average of 3,700 requests per month, each costing approximately $40, resulting in substantial operational costs.

Park Hill School District faced a challenge in managing user requests for new software. The existing process was slow, manual, and resource-intensive, requiring users to raise help desk tickets and wait several days for software installation. This inefficiency led to IT being perceived as inflexible, as it couldn't offer users the choice and flexibility they desired. The district needed a solution that integrated with their existing Systems Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and Active Directory, providing a user-friendly interface for on-demand self-service software installation.

Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority needed to reduce the energy costs associated with powering end user equipment. It also needed to deploy software patches and upgrades to those machines in a more effective and efficient manner.

Like most public sector organizations, the Council was under great pressure to deliver a diverse range of services on an increasingly constrained budget. Having identified energy consumption as an area where it could make savings, the council needed a solution that would allow it to monitor and reduce computer energy consumption without disrupting users.

Having already manually completed a Windows 7 upgrade a couple of years previously, the company was keen to take a different approach as it upgraded to Windows 8. It also wanted to find a systems management tool that would support automation – with a view to significantly improving migration speed, efficiency, and user experience. The company was also keen to create a leaner system by reducing the need for investment in new servers and reducing the time and effort spent on maintaining the operating system.

The company faced severe challenges in managing content distributions, given its highly distributed environment and large number of remote PCs. It was facing massive management burdens of a large distribution point array and thousands of individual remote network links, and had been relying on express shipping images on CDs throughout the world in order to keep endpoint machines properly imaged and up to date – an expensive and time-consuming manual process.

Norfolk and Waveney MHFT were looking for a solution that would consolidate its overall desktop management and include the following requirements: single desktop maintenance system, consolidation of existing toolsets, less intrusive patch management, and lower energy consumption. The Trust's ICT department, responsible for all core IT infrastructure and services, faced challenges with high energy consumption due to overnight upgrades and the practice of leaving computers on all night. This was in direct conflict with the Trust’s wish to become ‘greener’ and save money.

Verizon Wireless made a commitment to deploy a range of technologies specifically designed to provide a “greener”, lower energy solution, without compromising on performance or reliability. The company operates several call centers across the country, providing service and support for its customers. These centers run advanced communications software and systems which are constantly monitored to ensure they offer the best solution for the company and its customers. As part of a growing awareness of the benefits of reducing energy consumption, Verizon Wireless sought to implement technologies that would reduce energy usage and CO2 emissions while maintaining high performance and reliability.

Software was a challenging topic for this bank: it was plagued by software license sprawl, software audits, enterprise agreement renegotiations and manual processes. It wanted to address software compliance and usage for its top vendors as a matter of urgency to halt spiraling costs. The bank’s software asset inventory featured some major gaps – resulting in a need for many hours of costly consultant hours. The data harvesting procedure was labor intensive, unsustainable and inefficient. What the bank needed was a single, centralized portal featuring an automated approval process that would empower end users and integrate seamlessly with third party ticketing systems.

Saint-Gobain needed an efficient way to deploy software patches and upgrades to 100,000 desktops across 6000 branch offices. Managing the IT network and architecture for a multinational organization of this magnitude is a sizeable task. The PC Solution Team is responsible for delivering all the tools to manage the company’s 100,000 workstations. In 2008 the team chose to implement Microsoft Systems Management Platform across the group to create better collaboration and improve productivity. The standard architecture for the Microsoft platform is for each geo-location to have a dedicated, or ‘branch’ server. For Saint-Gobain this would have meant investing in, and maintaining at least 6000 servers. The PC team sought an alternative solution that would avoid having to put a server into each branch office. The team decided to research the possibility of using SCCM and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) GPO and found a considerable reduction of servers would be possible but that they would still require a 1,000-strong server farm.

The pharmaceutical giant needed a quick and easy way for its 60,000 users to select and download software that they need, when they need it. There were two challenging areas that needed to be radically improved, the long lead times to get things packaged and to get software onto desktops which was, in the main, a manual process. The situation was far from satisfactory and so the company sought to automate the process and selected 1E Shopping whereby users would be able to select, download and install software in just a few minutes by themselves.

Already using 1E Shopping and NightWatchman Enterprise, the company wished not only to quantify software application usage across the company by deploying AppClarity but also save money by removing unused applications from its environment. It wanted to be confident, when presented with a request for a vendor software audit, it could give an accurate and compliant response with hugely reduced time and effort required.

With the management of its desktop-class application environment already in hand, the company was keen to identify any areas for improvement. AppClarity analysis confirmed that the organization had a common software waste problem: 8% of the deployed application instances were flagged as not being used in the previous three months, representing a waste of $405,805.91.

The company was looking for a quick and easy way for its 51,500 users to select and download the software they needed, when they needed it. There were two areas that had to be radically improved: the long lead times to get things packaged; and automating the delivery of software. To achieve this, the company needed to migrate from Vista to Windows 7 and Windows 8 quickly and seamlessly, while continuing to support certain applications. The organization was still using SMS 2003, so it also needed to migrate to SCCM 2012.

The environmental firm faced significant challenges with its imaging depots, which were designed to build and distribute computers to users across the company. While the depots provided excellent customer service, they were not sustainable from a business perspective. The process was labor-intensive, costly, and time-consuming, leading to significant backups and inefficiencies. Storage was another major issue, as maintaining a large quantity of equipment at non-warehouse locations was impractical. The firm needed a more efficient and cost-effective solution to streamline the computer delivery process without compromising the quality of service.

Handle Financial initially relied on a traditional on-premise solution for load-balancing, security, and traffic management. As the company grew, it moved all resources, applications, and workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, this created two significant problems: the large volume of workloads in AWS led to razor-thin margins, and the Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) lacked technical capabilities such as static IPs and SSL client-server authentication. Handle Financial needed better solutions for managing, securing, and controlling its environments.

Leucom, a major ISP in Eastern Switzerland, faced a critical challenge as IPv4 addresses were no longer being issued, and their existing addresses were running out. The secondary market for IPv4 addresses was prohibitively expensive, and acquiring or merging with another company that had free IPv4 addresses was not a viable option. This scarcity of IPv4 addresses posed a significant threat to their ability to continue providing seamless internet services to their growing customer base.