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La Sarine Health Network, a conglomerate of 12 publicly funded healthcare organizations in the La Sarine district of Switzerland, was grappling with the challenges of an aging population and the consequent complex healthcare demands. The organization relied heavily on digital systems for its service delivery, from back-office administration to managing patient data. However, their existing IT infrastructure, comprising two virtualized standalone servers with built-in storage, was proving inadequate. The servers were hosted at the region's residential care center and were unable to rapidly move virtual workloads from one platform to another, reducing flexibility and increasing the risk of downtime in a disaster-recovery scenario. Moreover, the onboard storage was nearing capacity, with utilization of around 85% on each server. The organization needed a solution that could offer quick and simple orchestration of storage as a single pool, allowing it to rapidly move workloads between servers and scale out its storage resources efficiently.

Ford Motor Company, a leading multinational automobile manufacturer, was facing challenges in managing its fleet of over 15,000 vehicles and assets, particularly with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. The management of autonomous vehicles presented unique challenges compared to traditional fleets, including the automation of dispatching and servicing. The company needed a flexible solution that could adapt to their evolving needs as they continued to learn and understand the differences between managing autonomous and traditional fleets. Additionally, Ford was looking for a partner who was willing to work closely with them, understand their specific requirements, and provide continuous support and improvements to the product.

Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Inc. (CCBJI), the largest Coca-Cola bottling company in Asia, operates a network of over 700,000 vending machines across Japan. The company collects a vast amount of data regarding the overall sales performance of each machine and how individual products perform per machine and location. Historically, CCBJI had to extract the necessary data for analysis from the core system, build their own mechanism to create a data warehouse using ETL tools, and perform various analyses. The sheer size of the data being produced posed several challenges for the company. These included the length of time needed to return the results of a simple query and the complex maintenance of such a legacy system.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is the only federal laboratory in the United States that focuses solely on renewable energy, commercialization, development, and research. The challenge NREL faces is how to realize high penetrations of renewable energy while achieving broad goals of reliability, resilience, and affordability. The complexity of the energy grid, with its numerous generators and variable load, requires sophisticated tools and visualizations to understand and manage. A fundamental challenge with renewable energy is its variability and continuity in both space and time, which poses challenges to traditional models. The question is how to take a phenomenon that’s inherently continuous and variable, and fit it into a discrete model space, whether it’s nodal or regional. The biggest question is how to ensure that the resource is properly characterized and preserved.

Premier Utility Services was faced with the challenge of managing their fieldwork operations, which included a large gas meter inspection and leak detection project in upstate New York. The project required the processing and management of large data sets, including data on over half a million gas meters. While Premier had turned to Fulcrum for help with data processing and management, they still needed a solution that would allow them to visualize and analyze the data at scale. The complexity of the application they needed was significant, as it had to handle vast amounts of data and provide useful insights for decision-making.

Globe Telecom, a leading telecommunications company in the Philippines, was faced with the challenge of automating business processes, fostering digital collaboration, and accelerating decision-making. The company's mission was to deliver a digital lifestyle to a nation with over 100 million people, many of whom were struggling with poverty and limited resources. To achieve this, Globe Telecom needed to transform its own digital culture and create new digital experiences. The company also aimed to spark a digital revolution that would bring quality education, financial services, and healthcare to millions of people at the tap of a smartphone screen. However, the company was using a lot of manual processes to serve its customers and needed to embed software within these processes or use software to create end-to-end processes.

Brennon Martin, an independent contractor in software design and full-cycle product development, was facing challenges in managing his professional connections. As a job seeker and consultant, he needed a tool to track, schedule, and manage his contacts and opportunities. Traditional CRM systems were not suitable as they were designed for larger companies with features such as managing team leads, sales pipelines, and customer support. Brennon needed a lightweight CRM system tailored for individuals. He also wanted a platform that could offer a full-feature web development environment and the option to build a native mobile app.

UniAquire, a business acquisition marketplace app, was founded by Clayton Stiver, who works in a mergers and acquisitions advisory role. The app was designed to cater to business owners, sellers, buyers, lenders, investors, and others involved in the business acquisition process. The challenge was to create an app that could facilitate the process of selling a business, selling a majority/minority position, or taking on debt. The app needed to allow users to upload detailed sell-side mandates and approve those wanting to view their business, as well as facilitate messaging between parties. Similarly, for those looking to buy a business, take a majority/minority position, or lend debt, the app needed to allow users to upload detailed buy-side mandates and receive immediate notifications if a sell-side project matched their buy-side mandate.

The founder of Datalogz, Logan Havern, was frustrated with the outdated and complicated modes of logging and collecting data. Traditional data management systems were not only expensive, costing thousands of dollars, but also time-consuming, taking months to implement. Moreover, these systems often resulted in data disorganization and required complicated IT procedures. The data documentation was usually confusing, commonly located in a spreadsheet or a word document. This led to a lack of a centralized repository for teams to organize their data dictionaries, answer essential questions, provide up-to-date data notifications, and publish recent work or analysis.

Resmo, a tool that gathers configuration data from Cloud and SaaS tools using APIs, faced a significant challenge in managing the large volume of network calls resulting from collecting data from thousands of APIs. The traditional approach of logs was too verbose and difficult to query, while aggregated metrics lacked sufficient context for detecting and diagnosing specific issues. Resmo utilized tracing, which provided a better view of the flow of requests and their associated responses. However, the volume of spans generated by Resmo's data collection was excessive, and the usual approach of sampling could cause blind spots, making it difficult to identify issues on non-happy paths of execution that happen rarely. Furthermore, many vendors charge by the number of ingested events and the volume of data per GB, which can be costly without any sampling. Only a few vendors allow custom SQL queries on the data.

Innowatts, an AI-enabled SaaS platform, was facing the challenge of managing and analyzing data from 40 million meters worldwide to provide near-real-time energy analytics and actionable business intelligence to utilities and retailers. The company needed to aggregate meter level data to create reports and recommendations for customers. The goal was to help energy providers be more predictive, proactive, and connected, unlocking grid edge opportunities, increasing customer value, and accelerating the transition to sustainable energy solutions. The challenge was not only to manage the massive data sets but also to provide insights and recommendations based on usage patterns, such as suggesting better electricity plans or products like electric vehicle battery storage.

TELUS, one of Canada’s leading telecommunications companies, faced significant challenges with their Optik TV service, specifically with their customer-facing application, Showcase. The application, which acts as a central hub of personalized content for Optik TV customers, was initially built on Redis open source. However, TELUS experienced an outage that negatively impacted the customer experience, leaving key menu options unavailable and requiring significant time to fully restore all services. The outage put the Showcase service on standby for a full day, resulting in a hampered user experience that lasted up to 24 hours. The incident raised concerns among the leadership about the reliability of the existing system and the need for a more robust solution.

Chef Nicole Miami, a South Florida-based healthy meal delivery service, was facing significant challenges in optimizing their delivery operations. The company was managing its routes manually, which involved a labor-intensive process of navigating the website’s backend, extracting data, sorting addresses, and maintaining separate Excel sheets for each driver. This process was not only time-consuming but also introduced the risk of costly human errors. The company was struggling with identifying duplicate addresses and ensuring route accuracy, particularly amid the high volume of deliveries. The absence of real-time adaptability left them vulnerable to unforeseen driver emergencies or vehicle issues, resulting in frequent last-minute disruptions. Efficient resource allocation was also a challenge, hampering their ability to optimize delivery routes effectively.

Arab Maritime Petroleum Transport Company (AMPTC) was in need of an effective solution to manage the environmental performance of its fleet and comply with evolving Greenhouse Gas (GHG) regulations. The recent introduction of the Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) posed significant challenges to tanker owners like AMPTC. The company was seeking a solution that could help it navigate these sustainability regulations with ease and achieve long-term reductions in CO2 emissions. AMPTC conducted intensive market research and analysis to find the most efficient solution for its fleet of tankers.

VitusVet, a client-engagement platform for veterinary practices, was facing the challenge of building real-time notifications at scale for their Connect app. The app was designed to facilitate communication between vets and pet owners, but the development of an in-house system for real-time notifications would require substantial resources and time. The company needed a solution that would allow them to quickly and efficiently manage their day-to-day operations, improve customer communication, and ensure that pets receive the highest-quality care. The challenge was to find a way to enable reliable, real-time communication between veterinary practices and pet owners without having to build from the ground up, which would be costly and time-consuming.

CoStar Group, a leading provider of commercial real estate information, analytics, and online marketplaces, has been expanding its reach through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). As of October 1, 2019, CoStar has spent approximately $2 billion acquiring a total of 27 organizations, each with a unique cloud presence and varying levels of cloud competency. The challenge for CoStar is ensuring the security and compliance of its constantly growing and evolving cloud footprint, which spans across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). When growing through M&A, CoStar must be able to understand the cyber risk of the acquisition target, integrate the newly acquired resources, and maintain the ability of these acquired entities to accelerate innovation through the use of cloud services without the loss of control.

Domino’s Pizza, the world's largest pizza company, relies heavily on technology for its online ordering and delivery services. The company's security operations center operates 24/7, and one of the biggest security challenges they face is phishing. Spear phishing, in particular, is a significant threat due to the craftiness of threat actors. The company also has a wide attack surface due to its domestic and international markets, making threat hunting a critical task. The company wanted to train its security operations center (SOC) analysts to think like attackers, as many analysts focus solely on detection and response and lack understanding of the tactics used by attackers.

The Community Policing Department of Port Alberni, in partnership with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was faced with the challenge of efficiently managing volunteer resources. The department's volunteers were tasked with delivering awareness letters to crime victims' residences every month. The challenge was to optimize volunteer time and ensure quick delivery of these letters. The department needed an easy-to-use delivery app or software that would automatically optimize routes, reducing the need for manual planning and scheduling. The app also needed to be compatible with the department’s iPad devices. The department plans routes once a month, with approximately 20 stops. Stops are often added based on crime stats, requiring a solution that could automatically update stops and adapt the route to ensure the volunteer drivers are still on the shortest, quickest, and most efficient path.

The client, a charity assessment organization based in the UK, was faced with several challenges. Firstly, they had to comply with the stringent security standards and controls set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Secondly, they aimed to develop a robust web and mobile application to expand their global reach and response. Additionally, they required a document management system with task workflow and task management capabilities for digital data recording. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization faced connectivity issues as their business users struggled to access internal applications from home. Their existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) setup lacked a secure method for remote connection.

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly altered the global workforce, leading to the rise of remote working. This shift has brought about new challenges for businesses, including managing workflows and projects, and intercompany communication. Apollo Studios, a South African company, recognized the need for automation within its business during the lockdowns. The company wanted to automate many processes to streamline operations within its portfolio of companies. In 2021, Apollo Studios began offering customer automation services with custom development to finance and auto insurance clients. However, as the company expanded its automation services, it realized that the current solution used for automation needed to be more sustainable for scaling the business model.

Utility companies often face disruptions due to severe weather conditions. High winds can damage power lines, causing power outages for thousands of customers. Ice and snow can lead to burst pipes, resulting in water shortages. Extreme heat can strain the gas system, leading to service disruptions. Most companies rely on a combination of disjointed systems and manual processes to react to these hazardous conditions. However, for Evergy, a utility company responsible for 1.6 million customers across Missouri and Kansas, this approach was not sufficient. They needed a more reliable, centralized solution to stay ahead of weather disruptions and ensure the smooth operation of their services.

Uber, a leading ride-sharing company, was seeking ways to enhance its operational efficiency and drive revenue growth. The company recognized the significant impact of weather conditions on its operations, including factors such as rain, snow, winds, fog, temperature, and air pollution. However, the challenge lay in accurately predicting these weather elements and integrating this data into their decision-making process in real-time. The company also faced issues with weather data coming from multiple sources, leading to inconsistencies and confusion. Furthermore, Uber needed a solution that could provide historical weather modeling to understand past trends and predict future weather impacts on their business.

Colony Tire, a leading tire distributor and automotive service provider in North America, was facing a significant challenge in managing logistics across its over 25 locations. The company's executive vice president, Andrew Bergeron, highlighted the need for a reliable partner that could provide a robust solution for their logistics management. The company was looking for a solution that not only had a strong track record of satisfied customers but also had experienced engineers and the ability to provide 24/7 support. The company's existing POS system provider, ASA Tire Systems, had a partner relationship with Royal 4, which was a critical factor in their decision-making process. However, the company needed more than just a partner relationship; they needed a comprehensive solution to their logistics challenges.

Poiesz Supermarkets, a family-owned business established in 1923, faced significant challenges in managing their logistics operations. With 69 supermarkets and over 5,000 employees, the company needed a robust and flexible system to manage their warehouse operations. The central warehouse in Sneek, which supplies all stores with 25 trucks, required a system that could handle inbound, outbound, and replenishment operations efficiently. The company also needed a system that could adapt quickly to new requirements, such as the registration of temperature upon receipt and other vital requirements. Furthermore, the company aimed to improve stock accuracy and control expiration dates upon receipt to minimize loss.

OEConnection (OEC), a provider of high-quality technology solutions to automakers and their franchised dealers, was facing a significant challenge in their lead generation process. Despite investing considerable time and resources into generating leads, the results were marginal at best. The company needed to focus more on qualified leads to maximize opportunities, but without increasing their headcount. This posed a significant challenge as it required a more efficient and effective approach to lead generation and engagement, without escalating costs or requiring additional personnel.

The multinational industrial manufacturer, with operations in over 170 countries, was grappling with significant supply chain shifts. The company's product portfolio was becoming increasingly complex, and its customer base was rapidly expanding. The planning processes for mold capacity, blade manufacturing, transportation, and installation at customer sites were disjointed, leading to cost and inventory issues. The Wind Turbine division, in particular, lacked visibility of constraints and costs from mold capacity planning to installation at customer sites. The planning teams were unable to collaborate across multiple functions due to fragmented business processes and supporting systems. The legacy processes and tools resulted in time-consuming planning and reporting efforts by planners, based on snapshots of data, leaving little time for intelligent planning and decision-making.

Greenyard Fresh, a leading global supplier of fresh produce and logistics, faced the challenge of managing the residue monitoring process for thousands of product samples daily. The company, with an annual turnover of 3.2 billion Euros and 8000 employees, needed a system that could alert them if residues exceeded the permitted amount. The challenge also included the need for advanced analyses on the collected data to provide numerous insights. Furthermore, Greenyard Fresh wanted the ability to share anonymized information with its partners to collectively enhance understanding about processes, product quality, and food safety.

Walters-Dimmick Petroleum, Inc. (WDP), a marketer of Shell petroleum products, operates a large network of Shell-branded retail facilities across Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. These facilities not only sell Shell gasoline but also incorporate convenience stores, fast food restaurants, car washes, ATMs, phone card services, and other services. The company faced a significant challenge in managing more than 58 locations, each of which required a secure Internet connection for email access and corporate communications. When WDP replaced its dial-up service with broadband, it needed a solution that could provide secure, high-speed DSL across all its locations. The company also sought a solution that could meet and exceed the requirements for PCI compliance, which includes protecting systems containing cardholder data from Internet threats, securing transmission of cardholder data across public networks, enforcing access and authorization policies across networked systems, providing application protection for Web-facing systems, delivering real-time security updates, and simplifying management, reporting, and analysis of security systems.

Andiamo Partners, a data-driven recruiting firm, was facing challenges with their proprietary system used for tracking and managing candidates. The system, while functional and customizable, required internal development for any changes, which was both time-consuming and costly. As the company grew, the system failed to scale with it, leading to issues such as lag time, slow performance, and difficulties around business intelligence. Whenever a report was needed, their developer had to create it, often rendering the report irrelevant by the time it was completed. The team realized the need for a more efficient system that could connect with their various plugins and integrations without the need for hiring developers.

The customer, a large provider of single-family home rentals in multiple U.S. markets, was facing a challenge to increase incremental revenue and productivity during the off-season. The company manages and owns tens of thousands of properties and has a national team of 27 inside sales agents who manage between 10,000 and 20,000 leads per month. These leads are generated by traffic to the company’s website, Trulia, and other online real estate listing sites. Despite using Marketo’s marketing automation suite for driving inbound leads and scoring them, along with Salesforce for tracking and managing sales activity, the sales teams lacked sufficient information to engage, qualify, and convert the leads. The company had set two key corporate goals: to reduce customer acquisition costs and create 6,000 rental opportunities by the second quarter of the year.