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Oxford Networks, a technology solutions provider based in Maine, United States, aimed to grow its new managed services business by giving customers access to the latest cloud solutions. The company needed to keep up with changing customer expectations and keep costs competitive. To keep its service offerings ahead of the game, Oxford Networks continually invests in leading technology solutions. This includes the latest IBM POWER8 servers, which support IBM AIX®, IBM i and Linux operating systems and serve as one of the company’s strategic hardware platforms.

Pearson VUE, the world's largest testing organization, was struggling with time-consuming manual release and deployment processes. The process involved dozens of steps and was causing frustration among the development and operations teams due to their inability to move code to production quickly. When a production issue arose, it was difficult to determine whether the code or the deployment was the problem. Given the nature of Pearson VUE's business, reducing production issues was essential. For instance, any problem in production could affect the speed at which a customer could grant a candidate a license to practice medicine.

Sparda-Datenverarbeitung eG (SDV) is the IT service provider for the Sparda-Bank Group in Germany. The group’s 12 banks employ over 7,300 people and operate more than 400 branches, serving 3.5 million customers and a total of 23 million accounts. Customers expect seamless access to banking accounts, and, particularly as use of mobile apps grows, always-on availability and fast system response become even more important. SDV wanted to boost the performance of systems that rely heavily on information from its core banking solution. Simultaneously, regulatory pressure is increasing. To comply with the new rules, Sparda-Bank Group needs tools to analyze vast amounts of data in large databases, compiling complex reports for internal controlling teams as well as external auditors. To manage these twin challenges, SDV wanted to increase system capacity and performance, yet reduce the total cost of ownership of its mission-critical applications in order to stay fully competitive.

Unisoft Infotech, a player in the highly competitive IT services industry, was facing the challenge of keeping up with changing trends and increasing customer demands. Many customers rely on Unisoft Infotech to support some of their most critical systems, including SAP applications. The company must deliver top levels of performance and availability for these enterprise applications and data—or it risks losing valuable business to competitors. In the past, Unisoft Infotech hosted core applications on in-house servers, and ran a small number of virtual environments on a hosted cloud platform. To take better advantage of the flexibility offered by the cloud model, the company wanted to move more customer workloads into the cloud. However, the high cost of its existing cloud service proved to be an obstacle.

The University Medical Center (UMC) Freiburg, one of the largest hospitals in Europe, relies on an IT environment consisting of more than 80 clinical, operational, and patient care applications. This application environment demands constant change, with ongoing application modifications and deployments. The integration architecture team at UMC Freiburg needed to connect the hospital’s business and patient care applications with its clinical and patient data storage systems to provide a full view of patient care in one location, resulting in better overall care. The team had to ensure that all new and modified applications interface effectively with the medical center’s two backbone systems, one for patient data storage and the other for clinical report archiving while maintaining consistent service for users. These systems must also comply with Health Level Seven International (HL7), which provides messaging standards for exchanging patient care and clinical information in electronic health records (EHRs).

Uttarakhand Power Corporation Ltd. (UPCL) manages the distribution of electricity in the state of Uttarakhand, India. The utility delivers power supply to more than 1.59 million consumers across 13 districts. UPCL’s distribution network covers a geographical area of more than 50,000 square kilometers, presenting a significant challenge when it comes to meeting Uttarakhand’s daily energy demand. The utility wanted to gain deeper insight into the performance of its network, so that it could better serve customers, cut costs and guarantee more reliable power supply. Lacking a proper asset management framework, UPCL found it difficult to accurately pinpoint faults or weaknesses in the network. The company also wanted to reduce instances of energy theft. By improving detection of spikes in electricity usage across its network, UPCL would be able to better identify anomalous consumption levels that could point to theft. These issues were compounded by poor availability of business information, as UPCL relied on third-party agencies to house power consumption data and manage billing. Without proper data and reliable access to customer records, UPCL had no way to track how many customer service requests it received and how many had been addressed. This exposed the company to fines and penalties from the Uttarakhand Electricity Regulatory Commission (UERC) for failing to meet established service levels in a timely fashion.

VKB Group, Germany’s largest public insurer, was facing challenges in optimizing its software testing. The company's software development teams were experiencing slow test runs when evaluating new features for their mission-critical core insurance applications. The large volumes of data used for testing often resulted in incomplete test runs that had to be restarted, causing delays in productivity and potentially delaying the release of new functionalities. VKB Group aimed to streamline its internal workflows and enable software development teams to test new features and fixes with a smaller set of standardized data, helping to speed up cycle times and improve the agility of development processes.

Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the know-how and resources required for thorough IT system monitoring. Wittmann EDV-Systeme wanted to launch a solution to plug the gap – enabling it to improve its own competitiveness and that of its customers. IT landscapes are becoming ever more complex and outsourcing is gaining popularity, IT systems must nonetheless remain easy-to-use and extremely reliable at all times. Automated, round-the-clock system monitoring therefore represents an immensely valuable proposition for companies: downtime for business-critical applications can be avoided, and IT systems remain available at all times.

Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.

The European defense unit was facing challenges in quickly assimilating various types of data and exploiting information gathered by multiple rotating field teams. The teams were required to gather and combine various types of intelligence data for analysis and information exploitation to identify gaps and report them to headquarters. As teams rotated in and out, the unit needed to replicate the data stored on each team’s Intelligence Support Server (ISS) and distribute it to all necessary teams, ensuring that no data was lost during rotations and allowing those teams to share intelligence.

The bank's training operations were misaligned with company goals, leading it to transform its learning to better support the business, gain credibility and align workforce capabilities with objectives. The bank's globally fragmented learning model was not keeping pace with the greater business’s strategic imperatives, which included regional growth, core banking capabilities and a superior customer experience. With little concrete direction and no governance program in place, the firm’s learning program had unclear objectives, was inconsistent, involved duplicative processes and was costly. In addition to impeding the ability to drive business outcomes, these operational issues had combined with a lack of transparency to lower the learning organization’s credibility with the bank’s senior leadership.

The major US communications company was facing significant losses due to equipment theft from online and retail spaces as well as fraudulent insider billing schemes. These criminal activities were constantly evolving, requiring the company to stay highly adaptable and proactive in its fraud and theft detection and prevention efforts. The company was losing billions of dollars to the black market when smartphones were stolen and multiyear service contracts were not secured. Malicious acts including submitting incomplete invoices, overbilling and overcharging for a lesser product were also costing the company money. The company needed to improve its ability to ingest large volumes of data from multiple sources and integrate that data for visualization to improve its fraud prevention and detection platform.

The major US insurance company was facing challenges in pinpointing fraud quickly on submitted claims and strengthening prevention methods. With each investigator handling 35 investigations, the business needed to accurately and quickly ingest data from multiple sources, including policy, claims and medical billing data; Insurance Services Office (ISO) data; and public records data from the Thomas Reuters CLEAR database to build links and find relationships among fraudsters and the people and businesses they are related to. In addition to determining whether a claim was legitimate, the company believed that gaining insight into customers before granting them insurance would help prevent fraud. It sought a system to help bolster fraud prevention and detection capabilities.

The military team, stationed in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, was tasked with collecting, analyzing, and disseminating large volumes of data used to develop human terrain intelligence in the battle against insurgents. The team comprised five companies with subunits occupying their own areas of operation. The large geographical area involved encompasses a wide and varied population amongst whom the insurgents can operate. Each subunit passes data up the intelligence chain for fusion with other data and further exploitation. Previous methods of channeled data did not facilitate the rapid fusion of intelligence needed to drive intelligence-led operations. The team needed a solution that would ingest large volumes of complex data for analysis, minimize duplicate efforts, and maximize corroboration.

Allstate Insurance Company was facing challenges with its existing human resources applications. The extensive customization of the software had resulted in powerful functionality, but it was not user-friendly and introducing new functionality was time-consuming and often cost-prohibitive. The company wanted to enable the newest talent management solutions, at a more rapid pace, and keep operational costs low. The challenge was to deploy a new solution successfully and gain all the benefits of cloud-based solutions while ensuring that Allstate continued to retain a single integrated system of record.

The Austrian public insurance company, which provides health, pension and accident coverage to 260,000 railway workers and miners, was facing a dramatic increase in the percentage of the population suffering from type 2 diabetes. The lifetime costs per patient were averaging EUR150,000, prompting the company to shift its focus from traditional to preventive care. Effective screening, treatment and management of at-risk or already afflicted patients can slow or even halt the advance of type 2 diabetes. However, proactive treatment requires close cooperation between physician and patient, with success directly dependent on precise medication management and challenging lifestyle changes demanding a high degree of motivation. The insurer required a convenient way to monitor compliance on a daily basis, in near-real time, while offering ease of use to facilitate patient autonomy and participation.

The Brazilian retailer had a business-critical incentive compensation system that had 60 rules for calculating bonuses, and provided little flexibility in product promotion. The monthly processing time took 12 - 18 hours causing a rush to meet the payroll deadline. The compensation system was a 15-year-old COBOL program with very little documentation that depended on a single systems analyst to keep it running. There was a two-day window at the end of each month to collect and process all store transactions in order to determine incentive compensation. If a problem appeared, such as an unexpected or erroneous transaction volume or money value, the IT team would work around the clock to make adjustments and reprocess batches. Making timely updates to the compensation plan to meet constantly changing business needs was a challenge.

Textron, a multi-industry company, needed to plan for disaster recovery and business continuity. The company needed to understand how much resiliency it needed for any business continuity or crisis scenario. This required engaging business leaders and asking tough questions about worst-case scenarios. The company needed to consider all aspects of recovery, beginning with a roadmap of critical assets and obscure dependencies. The company also needed to assess the hardware and software required to restore those applications and test recovery plans to validate that recovery goals could be met.

COPROB, one of Italy’s largest sugar beet processors, was facing challenges in managing its large network of farms and expanding into new areas such as biomass energy. The company's existing systems and approaches were largely untouched by technology, with many processes being manual or overly reliant on department-specific expertise. This lack of technological integration was hindering the company's growth and ability to manage its operations effectively. The company needed a solution that could streamline its workflows, reduce complexity, and provide faster and more mobile access to detailed enterprise-wide information.

COPROB, one of Italy’s largest sugar beet processors, wanted to boost efficiency, tighten finances and build out its new biomass energy business. With 5,700 partner farms to manage, the company faced the challenge of managing growth effectively. The company's existing systems were largely untouched by technology, with many processes being manual or relying on a combination of spreadsheets, local technology solutions, and department-specific expertise. The company needed to produce data of sufficient quality to enable the predictive analytics capabilities required to support the new biomass business, and to ensure continued success in the core business. Managing the 5,700 partner farms was critical, since knowing the quantity of beet each farmer had planted and crop expectations has a direct impact on sugar beet and biomass availability.

Christian Cinema, a company that hosts the largest selection of faith-affirming and family-approved films on the Internet, was looking to move most of their 4,000 DVD titles to their online platform in the cloud for digital streaming. They needed a fast, secure, and reliable transfer solution to transport filmmakers’ titles directly to the cloud. Traditional technologies such as FTP were not viable due to network interruptions and latency over the WAN, which resulted in failed transfers. Shipping hard drives was also not a viable option due to the time it took for the shipments to journey from filmmakers located around the world to Christian Cinema’s headquarters. Plus, the files still needed to be uploaded to the cloud anyway, which would take additional time and effort.

CinePostproduction, a leading postproduction facility in Germany, was faced with the challenge of speeding up the ingest of media files and the delivery of large Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) to cinemas throughout the DACH region. The transition from 35-millimeter film to digital cinema posed a significant challenge for the company. Despite the shift to digital, the most common method for distributing DCPs remained the physical shipment of specialized hard disks via courier or satellite delivery. This method was not only slow and unreliable, but also costly. The challenge was further complicated by the large volume and size of the media files: DCPs typically range from 100GB to as large as 400GB. For its TV and cinema postproduction business area, CinePostproduction needed to send data sets between 150GB to 1.5TB per feature film, which occasionally needed to be transferred globally.

As movies have transitioned from 35 mm film to digital cinema, film producers and distributors are looking to find better ways of delivering films to cinemas for viewing. Traditional satellite and courier delivery models were proving to be slow and expensive. CinePostproduction GmbH saw an opportunity to disrupt the film services industry and leapfrog its competitors by creating a faster, less expensive way of transferring large media files to theaters.

As Cinedigm’s business continues to grow, the company is faced with the dilemma of how to retrieve more content from production companies and disseminate more content, and faster, to their distribution partners located across the country and even internationally. Presented with full-length HD films, often uncompressed or in ProRes or other high-res versions, Cinedigm needed a transfer solution that could accommodate very large file sizes while maintaining speed, efficiency and security. Along with receiving content from producers and delivering to distribution partners, Cinedigm also needed a faster transfer mechanism for their internal business needs. Files needed to be quickly delivered to storage facilities located in Dallas and Chicago as well as content sent from New York to their sister office in Los Angeles for sharing and collaboration. Shipping media content on hard drives back and forth across the country and internationally was too costly and time-consuming, while FTP presented challenges with speed, bandwidth consumption and reliability. Cinedigm sought a faster, more dependable solution to shorten the end-to-end delivery workflow.

The City of Marietta, Georgia, had a public-facing digital presence that it needed to defend against a continual assault of potentially malicious digital incursions. The volume of anomalous network activity, ranging from simple irregularities to serious security breaches, required constant, resource-intensive vigilance, which taxed the city’s small security team.

Clarks, a fast-growing shoe retailer, needed to continually provide the business with feedback about which products are a hit with customers, and use those insights to inform future designs. The company extended the SAP solution supporting its UK business to include its US and Asian operations, enabling it to avoid the overhead of managing multiple systems and simplify analysis of its enterprise-wide operations. However, the company faced challenges with its existing storage infrastructure, which was impacting batch processing times and potentially affecting operations.

The Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) was under pressure to increase the value it offers. The business wanted greater support in attracting and retaining high calibre people, managing performance and ensuring talent was developed through appropriate learning opportunities. There was also a drive to reduce costs, improve efficiency and improve quality of service. As far as the provision of basic HR services was concerned, CFS had a number of challenges. Its general HR administration system was located in-house while the payroll system was outsourced. The two systems were linked by batch interfaces which impacted the timeliness and accuracy of information, a particular challenge when creating the monthly payroll. There was no self-service access to HR information and details were gathered on paper forms or through emails and then keyed into the in-house system or sent to the payroll provider for keying. Management information, insight and analysis were difficult to obtain and the cost of running the two systems was high.

Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.

Coca Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) was running its business on a multitude of different technologies. Manual searches and information delays were creating operational bottlenecks and business inefficiencies. CCBCC would manually enter the equipment services work order into their legacy system when work orders arrived via phone or fax from their customers. This process was time consuming and open to error, and so CCBCC began to question the potential cost of these errors. CCBCC needed to quickly accept and return information electronically without error and focus on software replacement as a means to improve cross-application and system integration. They needed a flexible and robust system to integrate internally with SAP as well as other existing systems.

Coop Estense, a retail company, needed to ensure compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) across all its endpoints. The company had to manage patches, control network access, and guard against potential intrusions. Initially, the company used a manual approach, deploying patches and firewall rules necessary for compliance. While this approach brought compliance into the company, maintaining it in the long term proved to be complex. The company needed a solution that could automate compliance across all endpoints without adding to the management burden of the IT personnel.