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BBVA, a global banking and financial services group, was faced with the challenge of adapting to the rapidly changing landscape of digital payments. The bank noticed a significant increase in mobile payments, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the percentage of customers using this method rising from 4.4% to 23%. As part of its digital transformation journey, BBVA aimed to offer its customers an exceptional range of services and a great banking experience. The bank was already using Google Maps Platform to help customers find their nearest branch or ATM locations, but it wanted to further leverage the potential of Google Maps Platform solutions. BBVA's mobile banking app was used by 71% of its customers in Spain, and was accessed more than 120 million times a month. The bank wanted to provide more information about each customer transaction to offer a better financial experience for digital customers.

Assurance IQ, a direct-to-consumer platform offering personalized health and financial wellness solutions, faced a significant challenge in its early days. The company's data team was small and struggled with a scattered internal view of the business due to disconnected reports in siloed tools. They were using Excel, SQL, and other in-house tools, but lacked a true business intelligence (BI) platform. This resulted in inefficient use of time and a lack of a complete real-time view of the business for decision-making. Leadership lacked critical insight, and there were constant challenges around trust and consistency of the data. The data team wanted to ensure that each team member was looking at the same clean, accurate data and wanted to empower employees to explore the data on their own. However, the visualization tool they were using lacked version control and standardization.

Bank Rakyat Indonesia (Bank BRI), one of the largest banks in Indonesia, was faced with the challenge of increasing financial inclusion among unbanked Indonesians. The bank had an ambitious target of having 84 percent of Indonesians participating in the banking system by 2022. However, the bank's legacy technologies were proving to be a hindrance in achieving this goal. Each of the bank's products had their own public APIs, which were difficult to manage, secure, and monetize. Additionally, the process of onboarding new partners using host-to-host and VPN technology was time-consuming, taking up to six months. The bank also faced the challenge of reaching a largely rural population, with an estimated $8.3 billion in currency being held outside the banking system.

Benetton Group, a globally recognized fashion company with a network of 4,000 stores, was faced with the challenge of improving its online customer experience during the COVID-19 pandemic when physical stores were shut. The company had already digitized its shopping experience and built a marketing data lake to understand its customers better. However, it sought to enhance its recommendation tool for online customers and provide a more personalized, real-time shopping experience. The existing content management solution had a built-in recommendation tool, but it lacked sophistication. Benetton Group wanted to leverage advanced analytics and AI to gain detailed insights into shopping patterns, store performance in a multichannel environment, and how to localize recommendations for a global customer base.

Alpred SL, a Spanish information services company, faced the challenge of transforming a traditional print newspaper, Estadio Deportivo, into a sustainable, digital sports media brand. The company aimed to create a free, continuously updated, 100% digital sports news platform for Spanish-speaking sports fans worldwide. However, the existing infrastructure of Estadio Deportivo was entirely on-premise, and its content management system (CMS) was designed for both print and online versions, which was obsolete and no longer fit for Alpred's purposes. The company was dealing with constant setbacks, errors, and outages, which made it difficult to manage. Moreover, the sports world moves fast, and Estadio Deportivo’s services needed to be constantly available and handle considerable traffic peaks, especially on match days.

ARD, the world’s largest public-service broadcaster network, was facing challenges in keeping up with changes in how users consume content. The organization's previous hosted data center infrastructure was 10 years old and had a monolithic architecture, which resulted in a development turnaround cycle of three months. Video content was distributed without being tailored to particular devices. In 2018, ARD decided to change the monolithic infrastructure for its video delivery platform to improve the user experience, regardless of how users were watching or listening. The challenge was to build a new platform that could cover all touchpoints, support a truly digital-first strategy, and improve the user experience on a global scale.

Banco Davivienda, Colombia’s third largest bank, was facing a challenge in improving its customer ratings due to its continued reliance on manual processes. Despite having a reputation as a banking innovator and a trusted financial services provider, the bank recognized the need for a digital transformation to enhance customer interaction and drive efficiencies. The bank identified six transformation projects, including a sales performance model, sales digital support, self-learning, digital and effective meetings, digital workflows approval, and project management. However, the bank needed a technology partner to support this transformation and help change the way people worked, drive efficiencies, and improve performance.

bolttech, an international insurtech business, was launched in 2020 with the aim of building a leading, technology-enabled ecosystem for protection and insurance. The insurance sector has traditionally been slow to embrace trends such as hyperconnectivity, and bolttech saw an opportunity to change this. The company's technology strategy involved enabling both supply side insurance carriers and demand side business partners to connect seamlessly to its exchange. However, bolttech faced challenges in finding an API management solution that could provide a superior integration experience with its partners across Asia, Europe, and the United States. The solution needed to support growth in traffic, promote a thriving developer ecosystem, and provide efficiency benefits from the deeper connection between systems and components.

Booksy, a world-leading appointment management platform, was facing a significant challenge in scaling its infrastructure to match its rapidly growing user base. With its client base doubling every year, Booksy needed a scalable architecture to handle the increasing number of bookings. Initially, Booksy was built using on-premises servers, which led to a series of scaling issues. When extra capacity was required, the team had to wait several weeks before new servers were assembled and online. Maintaining the data centers was a lot of work and took their focus away from coding. Furthermore, they needed to do more coding to meet the demands of scaling up, such as refactoring code for larger architecture. The Booksy application ran on a monolithic architecture, making migration to a more scalable solution a complex task.

Auto Avaliar, a leading B2B automotive eCommerce platform for used vehicles in Brazil, was facing challenges with its legacy data center infrastructure. The company was poised to expand into new markets, but the existing infrastructure could not cost-effectively or efficiently scale to support additional users, new applications, and evolving security requirements. The company needed a reliable, secure, and fast cloud-based platform to support its growth and meet its security needs. Furthermore, Auto Avaliar required a knowledgeable partner to assist with the migration to the new platform and provide ongoing consulting services.

bonprix, an online international fashion and homeware retailer, was facing challenges with its traditional on-premises data warehouse setup based on Teradata and a data lake based on Cloudera Hadoop. As the amount of raw data the company collected grew, storage costs rose. The company also had to deal with the complexity of managing two different systems for structured and unstructured data. This not only made data comparison difficult but also hindered the enhancement of their machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. bonprix wanted a solution that would allow all their data to be in the same place, be more cost-effective, and enhance their machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Aerospike, an open-source, flash-optimized, in-memory NoSQL database, was looking to push the boundaries of Google's speed on Google Compute Engine. The challenge was to meet high throughput, consistently low latency, and real-time processing, which are characteristic of future cloud applications. The team at Aerospike was inspired by Ivan Santa Maria Filho, Performance Engineering Lead at Google, who demonstrated 1 Million Writes Per Second with Cassandra on Google Compute Engine. The goal was to benchmark Aerospike's product performance on Google Compute Engine and see if it could scale with consistently low latency, require smaller clusters, and be simpler to operate.

Almundo, a leading travel technology company and omnichannel agency, was facing a challenge in transforming its ecosystem into a more collaborative model. With operations expanding throughout Latin America, the company had over 800 professionals and more than 330 travel experts working in various areas of the business. The goal was to create a more coordinated work environment that would have a positive impact on productivity. However, the company was relying on legacy tools that were not conducive to collaborative work, distributed access, and productivity of work teams. The challenge was to find a solution that would meet these specific requirements and help the company maintain its leadership position in Latin America.

Asahi Group Holdings, a global corporation with a diverse portfolio in food and beverages, was facing challenges with its legacy systems. Back in 2014, the company lacked the necessary environment and tools to carry out its vision, which was affecting daily operations. The IT department was becoming a cost center, with the team focused on updating tools daily. As part of their growth strategy and mission of creating “a winning Asahi”, the company needed to modernize its business systems. Extending the life of existing assets and moving to a new environment became a priority. However, the company had limited resources to achieve this.

Auchan France, a multi-format and phygital retailer with over 600 locations and 60,000 employees, was facing challenges with its massive data management system. The system was responsible for handling data from 500 applications used across the business. The company was relying on on-premise infrastructure to manage data, but it was struggling with speed, monitoring, and scalability issues due to the rapid growth of its operations. The company was processing approximately five million data flows daily through its database and various applications covering business intelligence, supply chain, financials, B2B, human resources, and more. The platform team at Auchan was seeking ways to maximize the value of the data exchange system and improve access to business intelligence.

Auto Trader (UK), the largest digital automotive marketplace in the United Kingdom, was facing challenges with its existing infrastructure. The company's infrastructure was previously deployed from its own data centers via a private cloud. The company wanted to improve its security and encryption, and create a more agile architecture to enable faster innovation. Auto Trader (UK) wanted to upgrade its security layers and implement mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) authentication between its apps. However, retrofitting these changes to its previous infrastructure would have been difficult due to the complexity of modifying hundreds of applications and building additional elements. The company also wanted to optimize its CPU allocation, which was previously uniform across all instances due to the inability to accurately measure the impact of changes.

autoRetouch, a Germany-based company, provides an automated image processing platform for fashion image producers worldwide. The shift to e-commerce has increased the demand for high-quality product images, which often require edits such as background removal and skin retouching. For retailers with hundreds of product lines, manually editing each image to perfection is a time-consuming and costly process. autoRetouch aimed to revolutionize this process by making it more time- and cost-effective. However, to train and run the models for its custom-developed machine learning algorithms, autoRetouch required powerful CPU and GPU processors that need to be available on demand. The platform had to be available around the clock and scale from processing a few images to hundreds of thousands, in seconds.

AVEVE Group, a Belgian agricultural supplier, was facing challenges in coordinating its diverse businesses spread across more than 50 companies and 400 locations. Each of these companies operated independently, running its own administrative processes, leading to a siloed work environment with little communication between different parties. This lack of a unified platform for information and resource sharing was hindering productivity and efficiency. AVEVE Group was looking to centralize and standardize its processes, requiring a robust platform for collaboration. The company also aimed to shift from individual bookkeeping to a shared service center for managing finances for the entire group, necessitating increased inter-company communication.

Balgrist Campus, an internationally renowned research institute for musculoskeletal issues, was facing challenges in expanding its research on lower-back pain. The Integrative Spinal Research (ISR) group at the campus was gathering data from patients across a broad range of symptom durations, using an on-premises cloud setup linked to a network of supercomputers to process and analyze the information. However, this setup had limitations. The growth of the ISR research team and the success of their projects presented problems, including the need for more workstations and increased computing power. The expense of purchasing additional infrastructure and the desire for a more cost-effective solution led the team to seek alternatives.

Band Aid 30, a global philanthropic initiative aimed at raising funds for Ebola relief, was faced with the challenge of organizing a live performance featuring dozens of top music artists. The project was to be executed in less than 14 days, with a small team of two web developers, Mukesh Randev and Jonathan Horne from Adtrak, a UK-based media agency. The task was to deploy a website that could handle heavy traffic from millions of followers of the participating artists. The website was to be hosted on Google Cloud Platform, a platform that was relatively new to the developers. The challenge was to ensure the website remained online and could handle the anticipated heavy traffic, while also being cost-effective.

BharatPe, a fintech company founded in 2018, aimed to make digital payments more accessible for over 10 million small offline merchants and kirana store owners in India. However, the company faced challenges in managing the massive amounts of data generated daily from payment processing to business analysis. Prior to using Google Cloud, BharatPe managed its legacy data warehouse with limited capacity to run a large number of queries. The company ran key performance indicator (KPI) reports, without the ability to understand real-time data patterns. Loading three months of data for quarterly reports took more than 30 minutes on the legacy system, and in some cases, queries failed because the system could not scale to support analytical needs. Additionally, BharatPe operates in a multi-cloud environment for disaster recovery and needed a data platform that could run queries against data, regardless of where it resides.

Blockchain.com, a leading cryptocurrency software company, was facing significant challenges in managing its large databases. The company's primary products, Blockchain Wallet and Blockchain Explorer, required complex calculations on hard-to-access data across vast databases. As the popularity of cryptocurrencies grew and the company expanded to cover other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Stellar Lumens, securely maintaining these databases became a major undertaking with significant resource overheads. The company was spending a lot of time and resources on maintaining and managing its infrastructure, which was affecting its ability to focus on domain-specific challenges and deliver a peerless user experience across all products.

Bloomreach, a leading Commerce Experience Cloud, faced significant challenges as it grew rapidly since its launch in 2015. The company's growth began to strain its bare-metal IT infrastructure, affecting both development and stability. The company experienced server failures and poor connections with their data center provider, which threatened the reliability of their service. Furthermore, with the advent of GDPR regulations and a global client base, Bloomreach had to prepare for a more complex security environment. Their existing infrastructure was not capable of handling the upcoming challenges, and they needed a solution that could provide scalability, stability, and security.

The global COVID-19 lockdowns during 2020 and 2021 accelerated the growth of online sales, leading to a 34% increase in e-commerce purchases in the U.S. alone. This surge in digital activity led brands across all industries to reassess their digital presence. As businesses look to maximize revenue from e-commerce, the global search engine optimization service market is expected to be worth more than $100 billion in 2025. Botify, an enterprise software company, faced the challenge of helping its customers drive sustainable traffic and increase online revenue in this rapidly evolving digital landscape. The company needed to analyze vast amounts of data, optimize websites for search engines, and provide actionable insights for website improvements.

Bounce, a smart mobility solution in India, was faced with the challenge of making daily commutes stress-free, time-saving, reliable, and convenient for its users. The company, which operates a scooter sharing mobility app, needed a location solution that could scale rapidly and provide accurate location information to its growing customer base. The motorized scooter, being the best selling vehicle in South Asia, was the chosen mode of transport for Bounce. However, the company needed to guide users to the nearest available scooters, provide unmatched location accuracy and information, and quickly scale to serve a growing customer base of more than 2.1 million people. Bounce officially launched its mobility app in September 2018 in Bangalore, one of the largest cities in India with a metropolitan population of more than 10 million. The app was so popular and easy to use that within two years, it had spread to bustling Hyderabad and a host of other cities.

Engineering simulations are a critical part of designing and assessing infrastructure such as bridges, buildings, and aircraft. However, the industry-standard technology, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), is computationally intensive and often unfeasible for large-scale 3D simulations. These simulations require large amounts of RAM, often exceeding the capacity of a desktop workstation, and can take hours or even days of computation time. This is particularly problematic when time is at a premium and engineers need to perform hundreds or thousands of simulations for a piece of critical infrastructure. Additionally, attempts to integrate simulations within university courses have been unsuccessful due to the complexity of the tools.

Alcide, a cloud-native security leader, was facing challenges in securing complex and distributed cloud stacks for organizations. The modern cloud deployment was intricate with numerous moving parts and shifting parameters, making it difficult to operate and secure. The traditional security protocols were not sufficient for the evolving technology standards and the convenience of the cloud. Alcide aimed to provide a complete security solution specifically designed for cloud-based infrastructure, but the process of provisioning new clusters was manual and time-consuming, taking up to 2-3 days. This was a significant drain on their resources and time, which were already limited.

Allthecooks, a social media platform for cooking enthusiasts, faced the challenge of managing a rapidly growing user base. The platform, which allows users to find, rate, comment on, and post their own recipes, had to process hundreds of thousands of simultaneous API requests whenever popular chefs updated their content. The company, which started with just three part-time engineers and no external funding, needed a scalable and reliable infrastructure to support its growth. The challenge was not just about speed, but also about scalability. As the user base grew, the need for a more robust backend processing architecture became evident. Cost was also a significant concern as the company was using its savings to build the platform.

Alma, a fintech startup based in France, was founded in 2017 with the aim of providing an easy-to-use payment service that guarantees instant payment to retailers while allowing customers to pay in installments. The 'buy now, pay later' model, while beneficial for retailers in terms of increased conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and improved customer satisfaction, also posed significant risks. Retailers had to bear the burden of chasing debts and the possibility of late or cancelled payments. In France, such schemes were only viable for larger enterprises with extensive working capital and large credit lines. Smaller businesses were unable to afford the financial risks or secure the same level of support from their banks. Alma sought to address this challenge by developing an installment payment platform that would be accessible to a wide range of retailers and customers.

Alquería, a Colombian conglomerate of over 24 companies with more than 4,000 employees, faced significant challenges in integrating teams across different cities and locations into a collaborative environment. The company aimed to increase its digital employee base, further digitize its processes, enhance collaboration and productivity in internal processes, and improve security levels to reduce information leaks. The main obstacle to growth was identified as technological barriers, which needed to be broken with cloud solutions for the company to scale. The challenge was to incorporate tools that did not exceed the limit of what was possible, while efficiently allocating licenses and resources for each employee role.