X

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.

China Minsheng Banking Corp., Ltd. (CMBC), one of China's leading retail banks, was faced with the challenge of meeting rising customer expectations for 24/7 banking services while keeping costs under control. In an increasingly 24/7 world, customers expect online and telephone banking services to be available whenever they need them. Banks that fail to provide seamless customer service risk losing market share to competitors. CMBC wanted to outperform its competitors by ensuring that its business-critical systems were online and available to customers at all times. Specifically, CMBC wanted to ensure non-stop availability of the mission-critical system it relies on to calculate the fees it charges for each transaction, as any delays or interruptions could have far-reaching consequences for customer satisfaction and the bank's reputation. The system supports billing and accumulation for CMBC's front-office operations, arrearage and inquiry statistics for the back office, and periodical and protocol billing for the entire bank, making 2.5 million calculations each day.

China Steel Corp. (CSC), Taiwan's largest steel company, faced a significant challenge in upgrading its IT environment. The company saw the generational shift as an opportunity to transform its corporate structure and better utilize its extensive historical data. However, the task was enormous, involving the rewriting of nearly 200 applications. The challenge was further complicated by the need to ensure that the transition from COBOL to Java did not disrupt the company's daily operations. The company needed a solution that would allow it to carry out real-time analytics, optimize pricing, better manage its supply chain, and increase revenue.

1-800-GOT-JUNK?, a full-service junk removal company, was facing a challenge in personalizing its communications to increase customer loyalty and revenue. The company's email program was primarily composed of batch and blast messages, lacking a strategic approach, segmentation, or customer experience consideration. The company aimed to transition to more automated, cross-channel programs that would convert first-time buyers into loyal customers and significantly drive revenue. The company also wanted to implement a customer loyalty program and a call center program to boost customer engagement.

Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP), a global provider of business outsourcing and human capital management solutions, was faced with the challenge of equipping its workforce with the latest technology in a cost-efficient manner. The company considered leasing equipment as a viable option, but the management of thousands of contracts quickly and simply was a daunting task. The ever-shortening development cycles of IT equipment also posed a risk of turning capital expenditure into sunk costs. Additionally, ADP was seeking to improve its existing lease management approach by enhancing insight into costs, expiration dates, and maintenance. The company was also preparing for new, more complex Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) standards that would require all leases to be added to the balance sheet.

Afrostream, a subscription-based Video on Demand (VOD) platform, needed to efficiently and reliably transfer African and African American content from major film studios and content producers around the globe to the IBM SoftLayer® data center in San Jose. The company faced a logistical challenge due to its globally dispersed team and content providers. Afrostream's main office is located in California, the technical team is in Nantes, France, its IBM SoftLayer storage server is housed in IBM’s data center in San Jose, California, and Afrostream’s content providers and viewers are globally dispersed. Afrostream needed to ensure content could be reliably and efficiently moved across continents. This process was further complicated by the large volume and size of files that needed to be transferred, with digital files typically varying between 10 gigabytes to 1 terabyte each. Traditional transfer methods such as FTP were too slow and unreliable due to technical limitations, resulting in poor performance and susceptibility to network interruptions and latency over the WAN.

Balluff, a world-leading manufacturer of sensor solutions, was facing challenges due to growing data volumes. The company's sales and business development reports were taking longer to produce, and processing tasks scheduled to run overnight were almost running into business hours. This was negatively affecting information availability and application performance. The company needed to accelerate access to information to support its sales and business development functions. Balluff wanted to optimize its entire IT environment, including software, servers, and storage, to increase the performance of its transactional SAP ERP environment and boost productivity of its business users across all departments. The company also aimed to improve decision-making with faster, more accurate business analytics capabilities for its data warehouse.

The retailer aims to become a global brand, open new stores and expand overseas. The company needed a way to enable dramatic growth without soaking up time, energy and effort on IT. The retailer had adopted cloud services as the best way to enable its business ambitions. Embracing cloud helped the company avoid CapEx on infrastructure, and removed the need to hire and retain a large technical team. In particular, cloud services effectively bring vendors’ technical maturity into the company, a useful bonus for a young business. The retailer chose to implement Oracle Financials, hosting the applications with IBM, and selected Oracle Retail Management System as the next step.

The European manufacturer was under pressure to grow while also meeting aggressive cost reduction targets. The company's workplace services were decentralized, with each region using its own systems and little consistency in operating processes, standards, or performance metrics. Real estate management operated separately from facilities management with little coordination between the two functions. The company deployed 65 different point solutions with virtually no interoperability between the tools or corporate enterprise systems. There was a critical need to change course in workplace management.

The life insurance company aimed to increase its life insurance sales in the United States by 260 percent. To achieve this, the company made an agreement with a large distribution company. Under the agreement, the organization would begin offering its life insurance products to the distribution company’s more than 130 member firms and their customers. As part of the agreement, the insurer needed to launch a new product line, including a new web portal, within just 18 months. Meeting the deadline posed a tough challenge, and the company decided to shift from waterfall to agile development to accelerate its development processes.

This telecommunications services company had long used myriad point products to meet its security and compliance requirements. However, as the company worked to address new regulatory mandates that help protect the personal data of European citizens, it saw an opportunity to strengthen its security posture with an enterprise security solution. This new approach would help staff more effectively identify suspect behavior patterns and anomalies across the environment, and stay ahead of threats to safeguard company information. However, with multiple business units, offering different services across the globe, the company needed a platform that could address each business unit’s specific needs.

The public safety organization was facing a challenge in bringing criminals to justice efficiently due to the lack of collaboration among law enforcement officers (LEOs) across the country. The isolated working of police forces inhibited them from sharing records and evidence in a timely manner. Without a comprehensive view of crime and investigation records from across the nation, police forces struggled to link suspects with unsolved crimes. The lack of timely intelligence and collaboration between police forces had caused the primary suspect of a high-profile murder case to go unidentified for two weeks. This highlighted the need for a secure, centralized police intelligence system that could help improve the efficiency of investigations.

UBM, a leading global events business, was undergoing a significant strategic transformation named 'Events First'. As part of this transformation, the company was preparing to complete the largest acquisition in its history - Advanstar, a US-based events and marketing services business valued at more than USD970m. The company faced the risk of human capital flight if it was unable to effectively engage top talent with the new strategic direction. UBM needed to make significant structural, process and systems changes, uniting its previously autonomous regional businesses. The challenge was to ensure all of its employees were engaged and aligned with the new future vision.

Going to hospital can be intimidating for young patients, whether going in for a routine examination or major surgery. Alder Hey Children’s Hospital wanted to use technology to reduce patients’ anxiety about their hospital experiences. The hospital considered this when it built its new facility, taking care to keep the architecture and décor light and whimsical. But the organisation wanted to do more than make its facility welcoming—it wanted to make the entire hospital experience less stressful for patients and their families. The hospital aimed to keep surprises to a minimum for young patients by providing them with information tailored to their needs.

Balluff, a world-leading manufacturer of sensor solutions, was experiencing slow access to finance and business reports which threatened productivity and potential growth. The company's SAP Business Warehouse solution serves around 500 concurrent users, and the aim was to transform personal productivity and enable real-time enterprise-wide information insight. The company needed to speed up information availability to support its sales and business development functions with real-time information for better insight into markets and customers. Without timely, accurate information, the company risked making poor investment decisions and was unable to deliver the best possible service to its customers.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative, one of the largest electric generation and transmission cooperatives in the United States, was struggling with data management. The company's data was held in dozens of systems, spreadsheets, and people’s heads, making it difficult to make informed decisions. The company recognized that its reliance on complex manual processes represented a serious risk to the business. In strategy meetings, staff were often unable to agree on the figures that they were meant to be analyzing. Too much time was spent trying to determine which system, spreadsheet or expert truly had the right information about a given issue – and this lack of visibility hampered the organization’s ability to make smart decisions.

Coherent Path, a personalization pioneer, aimed to help its retail clients leverage their customer data to deliver experiences and offers optimized for the entire customer journey, not just the next step. The company wanted to differentiate itself from rival firms by moving beyond simplistic ‘you may also like’ recommendations to a position where it can help its retail clients maximize both near-term revenue as well as the lifetime value of their customers. The extreme complexity in terms of the number of products and channels made it hard for retailers to understand their customers’ behavior and preferences, particularly if they were only using nearest-neighbor statistical analysis.

Columbia Sportswear was undergoing a large-scale ERP systems implementation and substantial business process transformation, which threatened the viability of its existing finance reporting and planning processes. The company was at risk of losing its ability to execute core financial processes without a significant level of time-consuming manual intervention combining data sets from the disparate ERP systems. The company needed a solution that would not only maintain the flow of information to key decision makers but also enhance it. In addition to streamlining information delivery, Columbia Sportswear wanted to find a solution that would provide deeper insight into the performance of various parts of its business, helping to enable better corporate decision-making.