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Pfizer’s high-performance computing software and systems for worldwide research and development support large-scale data analysis, research projects, clinical analytics, and modeling. Pfizer’s computing services are used across the spectrum of research and development efforts, from the deep biological understanding of disease to the design of safe, efficacious therapeutic agents.

Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wanted to share the launching of Curiosity with fans by providing up-to-the-minute details of the mission. Supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent visitors to the website would have been very difficult since NASA did not have significant web and live video streaming infrastructure.

Vodafone found that traffic for the applications peak during the four-month period when the international cricket season is at its height in Australia. During the 2011/2012 cricket season, 700,000 consumers downloaded the Cricket Live Australia application. Vodafone needed to be able to meet customer demand, but didn’t want to invest in additional resources that would be underutilized during cricket’s off-season.

ACTi recognized the potential for cloud-based IP video surveillance and realized that cloud technology could help customers avoid the cost of deploying large physical infrastructures and maintaining a team of security professionals. ACTi wanted toseize these opportunities and make cloud-based solutions available to companies of all sizes.The company started developing a cloud-based surveillance and big data analytics system, but ran into technical difficulties. These challenges disrupted the company’s own plans to switch its internal systems from on-premises to a cloud-based platform. It had no option but to find a cloud-service provider since the situation limited growth potential and the organization’s ability to reduce operating costs.Peter Wu, sales director at ACTi Corporation, says the company was dedicating an increasing amount of budget to support a 20 percent increase in data per year. “We wanted a cloud-based solution to reduce our IT overhead, but the priority was to develop our cloud-based IP video surveillance solution to drive our market share worldwide,” he says.

 Brooks Brothers frequently launches new business initiatives, which helps the company stay competitive in the retail industry. The organization needed a more agile way of quickly testing these new projects. “When we embark on a new initiative, as with anything in the retail industry, it has a short timeframe from the initial idea to solving business needs, as driven by consumer preferences,” says Philip Miller, director of infrastructure and technical engineering at Brooks Brothers. “We’re very good at deploying technology that will exist for the long term in our data center, but we’ve struggled to spin up resources for testing new projects. We wanted to become more agile in moving concepts into an environment we could easily access and possibly move into production.”The organization was also seeking a more cost-effective way to manage its SAP HANA in-memory database management system, which would support a new customer relationship management (CRM) application. “We wanted to save money when we implemented the CRM system on SAP HANA, and we also wanted to be able to test out new projects on that platform,” says Miller. 

With the acquisition of hardware and platform partner, AlertMe, in 2015, Centrica Connected Home was faced with the prospect of a significant shift in focus. Previously the relationship had been one of vendor-customer with AlertMe also pursuing it's own goals for expansion and licensing of its software. After the acquisition, Centrica Connected Home moved to quickly integrate the technical talent from the two companies and then to realign the development efforts of the teams.The new common goals of product evolution, feature enhancement and international launch, presented a number of challenges in the form of a rapid scaling requirement for their live platform, whilst maintaining stability and availability. Added to these demands on the company were an expansion into new markets, and brand new product launches, including smart boiler service and a growing ecosystem of new Hive smart home devices. They even found the time to develop deeply functional Alexa skills for their products and hence be a Smart Home Launch Partner for the Amazon Echo in the UK in 2016.

Like many aerospace engineering firms, TLG employs STAR-CCM+, a leading industry application, to perform CFD simulations. TLG uses the application to conduct aerodynamic simulations on aircraft and predict the pressure and temperature surrounding airframes. However, the company wanted to reduce the costs associated with running simulations. “We were using a cloud provider to host our simulations, but the cost per simulation was high,” says Andrew McComas, engineering manager at TLG Aerospace. “Running a typical simulation was costing us hundreds of dollars per case, and there may be hundreds of cases per project.”TLG also wanted the ability to scale its high-performance computing (HPC) applications to take on larger simulations. “The trend in our industry is toward doing more complex simulations that require more compute resources,” McComas says. “But with the internal HPC cluster we were using, we were limited as far as the maximum size problem we could run. We were limited to a small number of nodes and couldn’t allocate enough memory to run large-scale problems.”Because it wanted to reduce costs and gain scalability, TLG decided to search for a new cloud provider.

Haven’s focus on customer service has fuelled a rapid level of growth since its launch in 2006. For its first five years, the company ran on a hybrid infrastructure that was made up of a mixture of onsite and offsite servers. Haven’s systems were not as flexible as it would have liked, with limited support for technology testing and development. The company lacked a complete business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) plan, and needed a technology infrastructure that could both keep up with demand and help drive further growth.Haven had three options: getting a DR solution through the data center of its parent company, Drax Group; going through a third-party re-location disaster recovery service; or moving to the cloud.

At Atlassian, growth is on a fast track. The company adds more customers every day and consequently needed an easy way to scale JIRA, which is growing by 15,000 support tickets every month. The instance supporting this site was previously hosted in a data center, which created challenges for scaling. “The scale at which we were growing made it difficult to quickly add nodes to the application,” says Brad Bressler, technical account manager for Atlassian. “This is our customer-facing instance, which gathers all the support tickets for our products globally. It’s one of the largest JIRA instances in the world, and growing and maintaining it on premises was getting harder to do.” For example, the support.atlassian.com instance was hosted on a single on-premises server, which the company needed to frequently take down for maintenance.The company also needed to ensure high availability for JIRA. “This is a mission-critical application, and the number of customers potentially impacted by downtime is huge,” says Neal Riley, principal solutions engineer for Atlassian. “As we grew, we became more concerned about the resiliency and disaster-recovery capabilities of the data center.”To move into a more scalable, highly available environment, Atlassian created JIRA Data Center, a new enterprise version of the application. However, JIRA Data Center required shared storage. “We needed a shared file system so the individual application nodes could have a shared source of truth for profile information, plug-ins, and attachments,” says Riley. 

Based on a program need to build a collaborative data repository for the Marine Hydrokinetic Program, NREL wanted to build a secure, yet collaborative, platform to collect, curate, store, and share moderately sensitive data, which focuses on water power research. As part of this effort, NREL built an environment with a Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) accreditation from the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). With a FISMA Moderate ATO, NREL maintains all mandated cyber security requirements, while gaining the ability to manage and share moderately sensitive data with other government agencies and research entities.As it prepared to design the new infrastructure, NREL knew it needed agility and flexibility. “Our goal was to make it easy for analysts and scientists to access and publish data, but we didn’t want to spend our time managing infrastructure to facilitate that. We want to focus on the product—the data itself,” says Webber. For example, NREL uses a dev-ops team approach focused on the needs of the client and ensures that the research metadata is optimized for accessibility. “We need to make sure the right descriptors and keywords are there so we can easily connect our users to all the other research sites,” says Jon Weers, senior web strategist at NREL. “If the data isn’t discoverable, it’s not useful to researchers.”

Investors use Dow Jones to learn about what’s happening in financial markets throughout the world. “Our mission is to shine a light on dark corners of the world, focusing on news that impacts decision making,” says Stephen Orban, Chief Information Officer & Global Head of Technology. The company relies on cutting-edge technology to keep its customers as up to date as possible on the latest news.In Asia, about 12.8 million people use WSJ.com, which generates about 90 million page views each month. When the lease on its Asian data center ran out in early 2013, the company needed to find an alternative that would help its developers focus more on revenue-generating applications instead of on data center maintenance. Dow Jones also wanted to reduce latency for its Asia-based customers—and it wanted to avoid delays for acquiring and configuring hardware. “My preference is to have my team build products rather than running data centers, Orban says. “Now that data center is a commodity, that’s exactly what they’re able to do.”

Socrata customers often seek help in unlocking data from siloed, difficult-to-access systems and putting it into a self-service accessible platform that enables strategic use of that data in delivering on program outcomes. For example, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), a Socrata customer, had struggled to use data and analytics in its daily work because only a small group of employees had access to their business intelligence (BI) software.“For UDOT, something as simple as changing a color on a graph could take months; it would lag on the long list of asks for the few folks who could access and use their BI tool,” says Saf Rabah, chief product officer for Socrata, an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). “The organization needed to consolidate different systems and give more people access to the information and basic analytic tools. Accomplishing this was especially important because UDOT relies on being able to get updated data quickly to the state legislature to secure funding for projects.”

IIIEPE was looking for a faster, less expensive approach for deploying Moodle-based online learning environments that would still enable the Institute to meet high service standards.IIIEPE evaluated firms that could assist with this project and decided to work with IT Era.

Salesforce DMP's infrastructure is continuously live across each customer's digital footprint, including websites, devices, apps, and campaigns, and Salesforce DMP is embedded within every digital interaction between its clients and their consumers. Fast performance and unlimited scaling capacity are crucial to delivering both real-time personalized experiences to consumers and data-driven insights to clients.Salesforce DMP collects, stores, and makes every piece of audience data continuously available to its clients, managing more than 10 petabytes of on-demand data. Observing behavior comprehensively across media, not just campaigns reduces bias and provides clients with greater accuracy and more sophisticated segmentation for targeting and analytics. Salesforce DMP does not require its clients to use a pre-determined audience taxonomy; instead, it enables them to independently change their audience taxonomy as needed so they can quickly adapt to changing business needs.This approach, however, puts enormous demands on the Salesforce DMP system to quickly and efficiently process massive quantities of data. Salesforce DMP needed tools to ensure it could deliver a high return on investment to its clients while continuously developing and bringing new platform features to the market.

Salesforce DMP collects, stores and makes every piece of audience data continuously available to its clients, managing more than 10 petabytes of on-demand data.This approach, however, puts enormous demands on the Salesforce DMP system to quickly and efficiently process massive quantities of data. Salesforce DMP needed tools to ensure it could deliver high return on investment to its clients while continuously developing and bringing new platform features to market.

 The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), a Socrata customer, had struggled to use data and analytics in its daily work because only a small group of employees had access to their business intelligence (BI) software.The organization needed to consolidate different systems and give more people access to the information and basic analytic tools.

Improving Advertising Campaign EffectivenessYieldmo needed to deploy this solution quickly because it wanted to include sessionization capabilities in its soon-to-be-launched data platform. Plans for the capabilities of the new platform included in-depth insights into customer engagements, making campaigns more effective for advertisers, more profitable for publishers, and, ultimately, more relevant for consumers.To address its needs, Yieldmo wanted to use a system that reported the exact moment of each unique interaction on an ad within a session. “Capturing hundreds of billions of micro-interactions presented a technical challenge because these detailed measurements would increase the number of requests coming in and require adding many more proxy servers to capture and analyze all these events,” says Indu Narayan, director of data at Yieldmo. “We needed to implement a solution quickly and at a significant scale. Solving this problem using a traditional approach would take an engineering team months to implement. The resulting solution would also be expensive, requiring the use of a large amount of storage and compute power. Such a solution would be cost-prohibitive for both Yieldmo and our customers.”

From its extensive experience working with educational organizations and government agencies, IT Era has seen that its public-sector clients often face similar challenges. “Tight budgets, small IT departments, and time-consuming procurement rules can make it hard for these organizations and agencies to adopt up-to-date IT best practices and take advantage of the latest technology,” says Arturo Juarez, an account manager for IT Era, an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). “That’s where we can help.”Those were the challenges faced by Instituto de Investigación, Innovación y Estudios de Posgrado para la Educación (IIIEPE, or the Institute for Research, Innovation, and Graduate Studies for Education). Based in Nuevo León, Mexico, IIIEPE is publicly funded to promote innovation in the Mexican education system through research, technology development, strategic planning, and both online and classroom-based professional development programs for educators. Until 2015, IIIEPE offered all its online training programs through online learning environments based on Moodle, a free and open-source learning management system, that was hosted in an on-premises data center.In 2015, IIIEPE learned of an opportunity to assist the Mexican Public Education Secretariat in providing a new platform for online courses for a national professional development program for high school teachers that would start in about two months. The program would require a new online learning environment, but the Institute’s on-premises data center was at capacity. “Setting up a new learning platform in our data center would have required procuring, configuring, and securing new physical servers,” says Nefi Aguilera, IT infrastructure coordinator for IIIEPE. “This would have taken too long and exceeded the available budget.”IIIEPE was looking for a faster, less expensive approach for deploying Moodle-based online learning environments that would still enable the Institute to meet high service standards. The organization knew that using AWS could help it meet these requirements but wanted expert guidance on the best options and approaches.

Yieldmo needed to deploy this solution quickly because it wanted to include sessionization capabilities in its soon-to-be-launched data platform.Plans for the capabilities of the new platform included in-depth insights into customer engagements, making campaigns more effective for advertisers, more profitable for publishers, and, ultimately, more relevant for consumers.