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The company has a long track record of innovative technology solutions. For example, 3M helps its customers optimize parking operations by automating fee collection and other processes. To improve support for this rapidly expanding segment, 3M needed to automate its own data collection and reporting. The company had recently purchased the assets of parking, tolling, and automatic license plate reader businesses, and required better insight into these acquisitions. Chad Reed, Global Business Manager for 3M Parking Systems, says, “With thousands of installations across the world, we couldn’t keep track of our software and hardware deployments, which made it difficult to understand our market penetration.” 3M wanted a tracking application that sales staff could use to get real-time information about the type and location of 3M products in parking lots and garages. So that it could be used on-site with potential customers, the solution would have to provide access to data anytime, anywhere, and from an array of mobile devices. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M, upped the ante by volunteering to deliver the new app in one weekend. For Fox and his team, these requirements meant turning to the cloud instead of an on-premises datacenter. “My first thought was to go directly to the cloud because we needed to provide access not only to our salespeople, but to resellers who didn’t have access to our internal network,” says Fox. “The cloud just seemed like a logical choice.”

High cost of hosting dedicated servers regardless of usage of the systems and resources Time required to have application provision for each new instance for end user clientsTime and resources required to manage servers, back up, and IT infrastructure in data center End user clients requiring storage of data in their own countries End user clients asking for on-demand scalability of resources on servers End user clients asking for secured certified data center with required compliances as per their IT security policy 

As one of the biggest megatrends of the 21st century, urbanization affects both recent and established industrial countries. In the European Union, already more than 70 percent of the population live in an urban area. In Germany, the uninterrupted urban growth is likely to pose huge challenges for many municipalities in the future, in areas like traffic, energy, environment and health. For this reason, innovative solutions in terms of city planning and city development are required. Additionally, increasingly demanding citizens expect a high quality of life and improved citizen services. To address those challenges, traditional routes must be tested, old infrastructures modernized and administrative processes organized more efficiently.

Every day enterprises send out thousands of emails but can struggle to maintain visual and legal consistency in email signatures and many don't seize the opportunity to include marketing campaigns in company email signatures. With a rapidly accelerating number of emails being sent from mobile devices and websites, email signature management has entered a new level of complexity and is now also a matter of enterprise security on emails.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are approximately 1.7 billion people in the world suffering from a range of mental health conditions. This might be anything from acute anxiety and clinical depression to obsessive-compulsive disorders. The WHO believes there are 23 million people suffering from these and similar conditions in Egypt alone. However, one of the factors preventing people from receiving treatments are cultural values and social stigma: they say that either these conditions do not exist, or that if people are indeed suffering, they just need the willpower to overcome their afflictions rather than seeking specialized treatment.With an estimated 10,000 website hits per month, Shezlong needed a hosting platform that could not only provide a foundation for the service but also accommodate its open source architecture.

Based in Bolton, England, Ascribe is a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) and clinically focused IT solutions and services for the healthcare industry. Ascribe estimates that 82 percent of National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the United Kingdom use its products. With access to large volumes of data maintained by the trusts, the company wanted a BI solution that would help healthcare providers detect, predict, and respond more quickly to outbreaks of infectious disease and other health threats. Healthcare analysts typically work from data collected and coded when patients receive treatment in clinics and hospitals. “By the time they get that information it’s usually out-of-date,” says Paul Henderson, Business Intelligence Division Head at Ascribe. “The data has already been coded and stored in a record-keeping system, or it’s been collected from a hospital workflow, and that doesn’t always happen in real time.” In addition, huge volumes of potentially useful data existed in text files from sources such as unscheduled visits to emergency rooms, school attendance logs, and retail drug sales. The Internet offered another trove of untapped information including clickstream analysis and social media such as Twitter. “If you think about each clinician who struggles with getting timely, accurate data, and you compound it on a national scale, then it becomes an immense challenge,” says Henderson. “You have lots of small pieces of data coming in from multiple places, and it can be very difficult to aggregate and interpret.”Ascribe had previously worked on a solution to support the analysis of national emergency care attendance. The system was designed to monitor the daily number of people who visited emergency departments in the UK and raise an alarm when it identified unusual levels of activity such as a potential outbreak of an infectious disease. However, it was difficult to collect data from a rapidly growing number of healthcare providers, including mobile clinicians. In addition, clinicians were unable to use the exploding volume of unstructured data from patient case notes and social media feeds. “The processing power you would need to handle all of that information is beyond the capability of most organizations,” says Henderson. “A hospital can’t just stand up a server farm to process millions of case notes from an emergency care system in addition to other data.” To solve these problems, Ascribe decided to design a proof of concept that would create a standardized approach to working with healthcare data. The company asked Leeds Teaching Hospitals, one of the biggest NHS trusts in the UK, to participate in the project. Leeds can generate up to half a million structured records each year in its Emergency Department system. The hospital also generates approximately 1 million unstructured case files each month.Ascribe wanted to create not just a proof-of-concept BI solution for monitoring infectious disease on the national level, but also a tool that could be used to improve operations for local care providers. “Our goal was to find a way to make data flow more quickly in near-real time,” says Henderson. “We also wanted to augment clinically coded data with data harvested from case notes.” The company wanted to create a national knowledge base that both analysts following disease outbreaks and local clinicians could use to improve healthcare. Ascribe needed a highly scalable, end-to-end solution that could work with multiple data types and sources, as well as provide self-service BI tools for users.

With AxFina’s desire to innovate and scale and regulatory requirements looming, they turned to Hungarian IT company DIGITAL Kft. to help them migrate the entirety of its IT applications to the cloud. Microsoft Azure became the ideal solution to ensure AxFina maintained security, regulatory compliance, and speed.

AxFina Holding S.A, an asset and loan servicer focused on Central and Eastern Europe, faced a significant challenge when it acquired Hungarian leasing company Lombard Lízing Zrt. The infrastructure of Lombard had reached the end of its life cycle and needed to be replaced within a few weeks. AxFina, with its ambition to innovate and scale, was also under pressure to meet regulatory requirements. The company had been hosting its IT infrastructure in Hungary with in-house datacenters, but this legacy system was nearing the end of support. AxFina needed an alternative solution that would not only significantly reduce costs but also support its growth across jurisdictions and product innovation. The company was looking at a potential expenditure of about 1.5 million Euros just in Hungary to replace the infrastructure.

Anglian Water, a company that supplies water and water recycling services to over six million customers across East Anglia and Hartlepool, was committed to efficiently managing and conserving water supplies. As part of its 'love every drop' commitment, the company aimed to raise customer awareness about the preciousness of water. A key part of their strategy was to implement a smart metering scheme across the entire region by 2030. However, the company faced the challenge of handling and securing the massive amount of customer data that would be generated. They needed a technology solution that could not only protect and secure customer data but also offer the compute and analytics capabilities to handle the huge quantity of data involved.

AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint and coatings leader, was facing challenges in improving the performance and productivity of its factory in Como, Italy. The company was using traditional methods of monitoring the performance of the machines involved in creating the powder coatings, which involved manual data recording with pen and paper every 15 minutes. This method was not only time-consuming but also inefficient in providing real-time data. The company also faced resistance from its factory floor operators, especially the older ones, who were apprehensive about the introduction of new technology and the changes it would bring to their work methods. The company needed a solution that would not only improve its data collection and analysis but also be user-friendly for its operators of all ages.

AIA Hong Kong & Macau, a leading insurance company, was faced with the challenge of providing a secure and trusted digital experience for its customers. The company had opened its digital platform, AIA Connect, to its customers, offering a single platform for managing all insurance needs. However, the company was faced with the responsibility of ensuring that this platform was secure and trustworthy. The company was committed to protecting its customers from complex sign-in processes and potential online fraud risks and security threats. However, the growing user demand and the need for constant innovation around AIA Connect created a trifecta of issues—a longer and less reliable customer sign-in process, a growing risk of security fraud incidents, and the slow rollout of new features and innovations. The core cause was the aging legacy in-house platform that managed user identity and sign ins, which was struggling with scalability and a lack of compliance to modern standards.

Airbus, a leading producer of aircraft and helicopters, was facing challenges in meeting the needs of its aerospace and defense customers due to complex and cutting-edge solutions. The company had to comply with highly restrictive regulations that precluded the use of public clouds, especially for its military and government sector customers. Additionally, many countries have strict data nationalization rules that also required a non-public option. Another challenge was the increasing complexity of aircraft, which escalated the volume of pilot training material to more than 6,000 pages of technical information. Pilots had to master all this during intensive multiple-week courses and recall it accurately for as long as they were certified for that aircraft.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), a global beverage company, was facing challenges in managing its technology platforms across more than 50 countries. The company had divided its business into six different zones, each managing its own IT processes, and had 16 corporate datacenters. This resulted in siloed information and operations, duplication of research efforts, and difficulty in embracing innovation company-wide. The company wanted to centralize its IT functions and move away from managing core infrastructure to focus on innovative services. Additionally, AB InBev was looking to develop a global analytics platform to gain valuable insights into the vast amounts of data harvested from each step in its manufacturing process.

The Arizona Department of Transportation's Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) was grappling with a 40-year-old system that was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain due to technical obsolescence. The outdated system lacked flexibility and was hindering the agency from delivering greater value to its customers. The MVD was keen on transforming its tools from being a roadblock to becoming a highway for delivering value. Another challenge was the siloed transactional model of ServiceArizona, which led to high degrees of inaccuracy, high risk of fraud, and the inability to detect fraudulent activities. The MVD was also faced with the challenge of securing state-appropriated funding for a large IT project.

Arla Foods, the fifth-largest dairy company in the world, faced significant challenges with its data management. The company had a complex, spaghetti-like structure of data systems, each with unique upkeep and management challenges. The cost of maintaining these systems was growing, and employees were spending more time managing the systems than gaining insights from the data within them. The company had thousands of different applications, but none were transferable, creating a highly inefficient set of siloed solutions. Furthermore, the company was using Microsoft Power BI as a visualization tool, but without proper data architecture, the tool quickly became overloaded and began to fail. The company recognized that its current process was not working and set out to find a solution that would both save it money and move its business forward.

Aberdeen City Council, serving over 227,000 residents, embarked on a digitalisation project with Microsoft to improve service delivery and achieve time and cost efficiencies. The council supports more than five thousand workers who use either a desktop or laptop computer. Prior to the digitalisation project, these users had a mix of nearly 100 different makes and models of devices. This diversity of devices posed a challenge in terms of management and efficiency. The council needed to streamline this to a handful of optimal devices that would not only improve productivity but also simplify the management process for the IT team.

ABN AMRO, the third-largest bank in the Netherlands, was facing challenges with its on-premises servers. The bank, which processes a diverse and complex range of data daily, needed a more efficient and reliable way for its teams to access and contribute data. The bank's existing system, while secure and capable of handling millions of transactions daily, was not providing the speed and reliability required for efficient data access. The bank's data types ranged from business process management, HR systems, financial systems, customer systems, marketing systems, and commercial systems, to recorded conversations and correspondence with clients. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle this high variety of read patterns, duplicate data, and maintain control.

The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), an independent public body funded by the UK government, works with millions of employers and employees every year to improve workplace relationships. The organization's mission is to enhance organizations and working life in the UK through the promotion and facilitation of strong industrial relations practice. However, to effectively deliver its services, ACAS needed a resilient technology platform. Without such a platform, the organization would be unable to contact its customers and provide the services they desperately need. In 2018, ACAS decided to adopt a 'cloud-first' approach following a digital strategy review. The challenge was to find a cloud solution that would not only align with their digital strategy but also ensure paramount security.

AccuWeather, a leading global provider of weather forecasts, was faced with the challenge of providing custom weather-impact predictions for business customers. Businesses wanted more than just weather data; they wanted predictions of how the weather would affect their operations. Initially, AccuWeather provided this service on an ad hoc consultative basis, which was labor-intensive. Customers would share their sales history data, and AccuWeather would have a data scientist clean the data and create a custom model. However, this process was not scalable. AccuWeather wanted to automate this service, allowing customers to upload their data online and generate an automated prediction. However, they were concerned that the analytical tools they had at the time wouldn’t allow them to provide high-quality predictions.

Achmea, a leading insurer based in the Netherlands, was on a mission to become an all-digital insurance provider. However, several of its business-critical workloads, including its data warehouse and fraud management applications, were hosted on an aging SAP HANA appliance on external on-premises infrastructure. This infrastructure was reaching its end-of-service date, and to continue operating on-premises, Achmea would have had to make a significant capital expenditure to replace the hardware. Additionally, to stay up-to-date, the company would have needed to refresh the entire platform and infrastructure every four years. The company's aim to become the digital insurer for the Netherlands by 2025 meant that continuing with physical hardware did not align with the company's overall strategy. Achmea's on-premises systems were running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, a successful operating system deployment that the team wanted to continue to use. Therefore, they needed a cloud solution and a provider that would work effectively with its existing infrastructure.

Worms Safety, a leading global alliance of specialists in safety and quality management, was facing a significant challenge in consolidating financial data from its 30 group companies. The company had recently introduced a new Xero financial management system and was seeking a solution to automate the consolidation process. The goal was to improve management reporting with interactive dashboard capabilities, which would enable the company to better meet compliance goals, exploit business potential, and develop a competitive advantage. The existing process was labor-intensive, requiring 10 days of manual spreadsheet maintenance each month, and lacked the depth of analysis and reporting options the company needed.

Adaptive Biotechnologies, a commercial-stage biotechnology company, has been working on harnessing the biology of the adaptive immune system to transform disease diagnosis and treatment. The company has built a proprietary immune medicine platform that decodes the genetic language of the adaptive immune system. However, the challenge was to synthesize this vast system of biology and tap into the full value of the massive clinical immunomics database generated. The company needed high-scale compute resources and machine learning capabilities to unlock the full potential of the research data. The immune system's complexity and the sheer volume of data generated by Adaptive’s dynamic clinical immunomics database, which includes more than 47 billion immune receptors, posed significant challenges.

Additiv, a leading catalyst for change in the financial services industry, was faced with the challenge of upholding the highest standards of security and compliance while operating within a highly regulated industry. The company decided to move its infrastructure to Azure, but this transition needed to strictly adhere to compliance regulations across multiple locations. The challenge was not only to ensure a seamless transition but also to leverage the benefits of digitalization to offer its clients innovative, flexible solutions that can easily scale and adapt to their specific needs, no matter where they’re located.

Adobe, a leading software company, recognized the need to transition from simply creating beautiful content to understanding how people engage with that content. This understanding would allow businesses to refine their interactions with prospects and customers. To achieve this, Adobe introduced Adobe Experience Cloud in March 2017, a set of tools that complements Adobe Creative Cloud. However, as Adobe migrated more products to a SaaS model, it faced the challenge of finding a reliable and secure cloud platform to host its growing portfolio of cloud offerings. Adobe also needed to ensure that its open-source software-based products would be fully supported on the chosen cloud platform. Furthermore, Adobe had to address customer concerns about running their mission-critical applications, which include petabytes of confidential customer and sales data, in the cloud.

The Rural Investments Financing Agency (AFIR), a Romanian government agency, is responsible for supporting farmers and companies to access grants and an average of 2 billion euros yearly of European Union (EU) funding for rural development projects. However, a vital internal forecasting task to manage these grant projects required a lot of manual intervention by AFIR’s employees. This process was not only slow but also prone to inaccuracies. The organization was keen on increasing the accuracy of spending and financing forecasts, as this would not only help its users but also boost its own operational efficiency. The process was paper-heavy and complex, and according to Daniel Ifrim, IT Director at AFIR, it was 'far from optimized'. The team needed a solution that would transform this process into a fully paperless and online system, and reduce the time taken to produce a report with spending and financing forecasts.

AGC Group, a global glass manufacturer, was seeking to transition from on-premises hardware to a cloud-based infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. The company aimed to improve cost efficiency and gain scalability benefits. Given AGC's presence in Europe and Japan, the migration to the cloud needed to be handled meticulously. The company was looking for a partner that could help with an on-time, on-budget infrastructure build. AGC also wanted to move away from managing its hardware on-premises and migrate to a scalable platform on Microsoft Azure. The company was seeking a partner who specialized in customized services to assist in hosting AGC’s landscape on Azure, which would allow AGC to accelerate business growth in North America.

AIA Singapore, a subsidiary of AIA Group Limited, is a leader in life insurance and financial services. The company has been serving generations of Singaporeans since 1931. AIA Singapore had moved many of its vital Java-based workloads to Azure, including an interactive point of sale (iPoS) system. However, the company faced challenges with unpredictable spikes in traffic and underutilized on-premises servers. The company wanted to improve the scalability of the system and attract Singapore’s top technical talent. AIA Singapore also wanted to create more robust web experiences and more innovative digital tools to provide customers with the best service experiences. The company's legacy Sybase database could no longer support the new kinds of big data business intelligence. Scaling up capacity in AIA Singapore’s existing on-premises environment was costly and left a lot of underutilized server capacity.

Air Astana, the flag carrier of Kazakhstan, was facing significant challenges with its financial reporting process. The company, which operates both domestic and international services across 64 routes in Eurasia, was struggling with a time-consuming and resource-intensive month-end closing process. Generating account cards and trial balances took from 40 minutes to more than one hour per report. At the end of the month, the finance department often had hundreds of reports in the queue. The company's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system was only capable of processing ten reports at a time, creating a bottleneck and slowing down the entire process. The company needed a solution that could generate reports in less than a minute to boost productivity and efficiency.

AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint and coatings company, has been at the forefront of color matching for two centuries. However, the company faced challenges in keeping up with the rapidly evolving color trends in industries like automotive and interior decor. The traditional method of color prediction, which involved complex mathematical models, was no longer efficient or innovative. The paint industry was under immense pressure as new colors emerged daily, and manufacturers constantly sought new finishes to gain a competitive edge. AkzoNobel's color prediction process, which involved deciphering multiple physical elements influencing color, was complex and time-consuming. The company needed to innovate and adapt to meet the modern demands and expectations of its customers.

Albertsons Companies, a major supermarket chain in North America, was facing the challenge of modernizing its operations to meet the rapidly changing market demands. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for this transformation as online orders surged by 240 percent in a few months. The company needed to operate and innovate faster to stay competitive and meet the growing customer demand for online shopping. Albertsons decided to migrate its on-premises data center to the cloud to leverage the scalability, flexibility, resiliency, and agility offered by cloud technologies. However, the company needed expert assistance to ensure a smooth and successful transition to the cloud.