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In 2014, AccorHotels began its €225 million digital transformation. The company was struggling with a best-of-breed IT environment made up of many developments, all of which were integrated with strong dependencies. The difficulties in bringing together Oracle and Salesforce applications illustrated the limitations of point-to-point integrations. To support the development of new services and deal with the growth in transaction volumes, IT needed to address four issues: simplification of both technical architecture and service ergonomics, openness of services for easy partner integration, scalability to cope with increasing load levels, and modularity to enable a truly service-oriented architecture.

DATABASICS faced a significant challenge in providing flexible and powerful reporting options to its customers. Their in-house reporting engine was limited, requiring developers to code base reports that could only be updated with product releases. As the company began to include more complex data such as credit card transactions, travel data, and P-card programs, customers demanded more robust reporting capabilities. The internal teams also needed to provide training, custom reporting services, and faster responses to customer inquiries. The existing system was not scalable and lacked the flexibility to meet these growing demands.

Dutch Railways (NS) faced the challenge of proving their capability to deliver reliable and better services to secure the next railway concession from the Dutch government. The company had to integrate various IT systems across nine different types of trains, each with its own IT environment, making maintenance expensive and complex. They needed a unified, scalable, and reliable platform to handle the onboard and onshore systems, ensuring synchronization and no message loss. The goal was to leverage real-time data from over 800 trains to improve customer experience and operational efficiency.

Market dynamics have been changing rapidly, with more people finding non-traditional distribution channels and becoming 'cord cutters.' The challenge for Fox Networks Group was to figure out where these viewers are and monetize their content accordingly. To achieve this, they needed to break down data silos, including third-party data, and leverage business intelligence tools to allow their business partners to work more effectively and efficiently. They also had a diverse array of legacy applications and different types of data repositories, necessitating the selection of best-of-breed tools for each layer of their platform.

Our customer experience (CX) orchestration platform gives clients four capabilities: listening to the voice of the customer, learning what customers are saying, sharing that information internally, and engaging with the customer to close the loop. Competing on price and products will eventually run its course, making customer experience a significant strategic differentiator. The ability to relate and connect with customers is crucial. We saw a market opportunity for a single, fully integrated, end-to-end architecture providing these capabilities.

As Yakult Market Analyst Egbert Jan Vierkant explains, in the first several years in Europe, Yakult sales grew steadily, but suddenly, after competitors began to enter the market, something surprising happened. “We had an extraordinary sales increase, especially in the Netherlands.” The company wanted to know why, but tools like Excel were not suitable. “We were suffering from time-consuming analysis, mistakes, and spreadsheets. We had multiple data sources that we could not bring together. We were spending time on gathering and collecting information instead of on thinking about the business.”

Since 2000, the credit card industry in South Korea has grown rapidly, with credit card charges accounting for almost 80% of family expenditures. With 22 credit card companies in the market, competition is fierce. KB Card's existing campaign system was limited, sending non-customized offers via text messages, which were often seen as spam. This damaged the company's reputation and customer satisfaction. The company needed a way to reach the right customer at the right time with personalized offers to stand out in a highly competitive market.

Macy’s needed to adapt to the increasing mobile traffic and provide a seamless mobile experience. The company faced challenges with optimizing their mobile site, which was not frequently used due to slow speeds and lack of optimization. The impact of not resolving these issues would be dissatisfied customers, decreased brand identity, lower sales, and higher customer turnover.

The media industry is undergoing massive disruption, with consumers and advertisers migrating to digital channels. News Corp Australia faced challenges with their monolithic platform, which was constrained in capacity, volume, and the ability to quickly adapt to market dynamics. The platform required large monthly releases, making it difficult for the business to respond swiftly to e-market changes. Additionally, the platform was resourced by a single team, making it hard to find and retain resources.

Some of the challenges that U Chicago Medicine needed to resolve were how to effectively share data across a large number of disparate systems. They had silos within technology as well as functional areas, and needed to change their culture. If they were not able to resolve these challenges, ultimately, the quality and safety of their care delivery system could be impacted.

ACTIVE helps organizers transform and grow their businesses. The company hosts the world’s largest directory of sports and recreational activities, facilities, venues, and classes—and collects all participant and event data so thousands of organizers can manage data and payments seamlessly and effectively. “Our goal is to help transform and grow event organizations everywhere,” says Kristin Carroll, vice president of corporate and consumer marketing. “We had an API. We just didn’t have the knowledge or resources to implement it to its full potential from development to monetization,” explains Ms. Carroll. The company was looking for ways to broadly share customer activities that would fit with its cloud infrastructure. Further, it wanted to replace ETL systems with APIs, increase IT efficiency while keeping costs below average, and implement a secure API management solution that could scale with global growth.

Argos, a leading digital retailer in the UK, faced challenges in scaling its API infrastructure to support its growing digital retail capabilities. With 1 billion annual visits to its website, Argos needed a solution to empower its APIs for scale, data security, and multichannel innovation. The company identified unexpected opportunities for API use in various channels and parts of the business, necessitating a robust solution to manage and secure these APIs across multiple platforms.

Total Marketing Services, a global energy player with a presence in over 100 countries, faced a significant challenge in maintaining consistent service levels due to its vast global reach. The company's operations varied across regions due to differences in local regulations, business maturity, and IT infrastructure. A key issue was the lack of visibility on transport orders from the loading phase to the delivery phase, leading to a high volume of customer inquiries about delivery status. This not only increased administrative tasks but also negatively impacted customer satisfaction. The company's digital roadmap was also difficult to implement due to the sheer number of affiliates. Total's supply chain activity involved numerous mass flows by pipe, train, and ship, and the company needed modular solutions that could be deployed quickly and easily, work across similar business contexts, and cater to the specific needs of each country.

Eltsoft LLC, a company that builds mobile language learning apps for iOS and Android, was looking for a way to earn more money from the free versions of their apps. Their most popular app, English Grammar, was downloaded by more than a million people in nearly 120 countries. However, the company wanted to deliver high-quality, language-relevant ads worldwide—an important capability because Eltsoft’s users live all over, from the United States and Europe to Asia and South America. They needed a simple platform that could help them monetize their apps while ensuring a positive user experience.

A major ad agency was facing significant measurement gaps across publishers and platforms despite running brand lift studies with nearly every provider. The agency was preparing for an upcoming campaign for a large consumer technology client that would be running across desktop and mobile social platforms, including YouTube, as well as TV, sponsored content and earned media. The agency needed a new partner to access a complete view of delivery and impact. This single-source measurement must prove its impact across a variety of attitudinal and behavioral metrics, including ad awareness, message association, brand favorability, positive brand perceptions, likelihood of purchase, site visits, search activity, and actual purchase behaviors.

MedNet Solutions, a provider of eClinical solutions, was in the process of migrating its Electronic Data Capture (EDC) product, iMedNet, to AWS. As part of this migration, the company needed to implement reliable, scalable security measures to meet customer requests and HIPAA compliance requirements. The company was looking for a Web Application Firewall (WAF) security solution that could monitor and secure their web-based application, iMedNet. Several WAF competitors met the requirements but required the traffic to be routed through their proxy servers, which would necessitate the execution of a BAA agreement and higher costs.

Coca-Cola, a global beverage company, has been seeking ways to balance its rich history with a relentless pursuit of innovation. The company has been using Alteryx, a data analytics platform, for various projects including geospatial intelligence, time series forecasting, and predictive modeling. One of the significant challenges was to gain insights from the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine, a touch screen fountain that allows users to create their own mixture of flavors. The company wanted to predict components that would require maintenance and understand the best product mix in different regions of the country.

audibene, a rapidly growing hearing care company, was struggling with the volume of data generated by their online tools. They needed a way to effectively track, visualize, and act on their marketing and sales data. Despite using Tableau as their central business intelligence platform, data was still being used and stored in silos across the business via Excel sheets and third-party tools like Salesforce. These third-party solutions lacked the structure and functionality to easily analyze data, leading to low adoption rates across the business. The siloed data also led to longer and more complex decision-making processes. audibene wanted to bring data to the masses and provide greater transparency across departments, but they needed a platform that could help drive adoption rates and self-service usage.

Velasca, a direct-to-consumer brand, faced several challenges. These included gathering the right data to know who buys which products and when, collecting omnichannel insights from both online and offline channels, managing inventory and adjusting production to meet changing demand, analyzing customer service to gauge customer needs, pain points, and solutions, and monitoring performance marketing to better build and optimize campaigns in real time. Despite having multiple data tools, they struggled with siloed data that couldn't be synced across teams and platforms, manual processes that wasted valuable time and resources, supply chain problems that threatened to interrupt the direct-to-consumer experience, and out-of-date analytics that were not readily available or usable.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has grown into one of the most valuable and most recognized sports franchises in the world. With its rise in popularity, the need for a greater focus on security became apparent. A key challenge UFC faced was to ensure staff security with a control system designed to eliminate unauthorized access to and throughout its offices and facilities. While UFC’s office facility had an access control system in place, it was inadequate and did not offer the extensive functionality and versatility of a premium access control system. There were considerable reliability concerns.

Epsilon, a global marketing company, helps Fortune 500 companies drive growth through data-driven marketing solutions and is a leader in data privacy and security. With platforms connected across Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premises resources, Epsilon recognized the need to efficiently establish connectivity and continue to secure data-in-motion between platforms. To solve for this, Epsilon chose to build an Amazon Web Services (AWS) global transit architecture. To implement this architecture, Epsilon decided to overhaul its cloud networking strategy and start from scratch. They began by prioritizing business requirements, specific technical challenges, and implementing a solution that could scale as fast as its AWS resources.

ABC Compounding, Inc., a specialty chemical manufacturer of industrial cleaning supplies, was facing challenges with its existing ERP software, ProcessPro. The software had become undersized and lacked key functionality needed to meet the company’s growing demands. The company needed planning, scheduling, and Material Requirements Planning (MRP) features, which were lacking in their previous ERP software. They needed a scalable, fully integrated, enterprise solution that was easily adaptable to their requirements.

Bayer Crop Science, the agricultural and environmental branch of Bayer Corporation, had a sprawling Salesforce ecosystem that was integrated with mobile applications, master data repositories, and the Bayer ERP system via a custom point-to-point (P2P) integration pipeline. This approach was challenging and costly to manage and scale. Data was held in silo systems that were difficult to access, slowing down product development and other projects. The complexity of the system also made it difficult for Bayer to resolve faults, leading to project delays that negatively impacted the business. Bayer needed to establish a scalable, consistent, futureproof integration strategy that is repeatable throughout the business to reduce development time and increase speed to market. They also needed to integrate multiple ecosystems around the globe with mobile applications, data repositories, and their SAP ERP system, and deliver a single view of the customer to stakeholders across the organization.

Sasa Singapore, a leading cosmetics retailing group in Asia, was facing challenges with its legacy IT systems which were nearing the end of their useful life. The company was continuously looking for innovative ways to contain costs and streamline operations. The Commercial Manager for Sasa, John Seah, decided the time was right to consolidate and simplify the corporate data center. The company evaluated a number of options including Nutanix, and eventually selected SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure for the retailer’s next-generation IT implementation.

Allina Health, a not-for-profit healthcare system, is dedicated to the prevention and treatment of illness and enhancing the health of individuals, families, and communities throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. The organization has a comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system, Epic, which plays a key role in its success. However, Allina Health is also part of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) Innovation’s Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model, which requires a strong information infrastructure to manage and visualize the enormous amount of data that will eventually be reported to the government. The goal of this infrastructure is to bring all medical and patient information together, enabling Allina to evaluate its performance, identify areas for improvement, and discover ways for clinicians and care teams to deliver better care to patients.

Design Within Reach (DWR), a multichannel modern furnishings retailer, was struggling with its data management. The company’s sales and inventory data was often analyzed using Excel, and occasionally with custom built reports using SAP’s Crystal Reports. This led to inconsistencies in data analysis as different people used different processes to create reports. The IT team was also burdened with doing one-off pulls from the company’s databases. DWR needed a solution that was flexible enough to be used by all Area Managers, regardless of location, and easy enough that they could find answers on their own, despite their levels of technical ability.

CN, one of the largest railroads in North America, was facing application performance problems and response time delays in its IT network. The network supports over 22,000 employees who rely on it for various operations such as tracking shipments in real time, processing customer service transactions, fulfilling order requests, and ensuring the efficient and safe operation of the company’s extensive, automated rail system. The company uses a variety of NETSCOUT Intelligent Data Sources in combination with several nGenius analysis modules to monitor their wide area network (WAN) links and 1,800-1,900 Cisco switches and routers. However, they were unable to pinpoint the root cause of the performance issues they were experiencing.

The company was undergoing a transition to a Software-Defined Network (SDN) using a phased approach based on the recommended practices defined by their technology provider for this project, Cisco. The project involved the design of a next-generation leaf-and-spine architecture supporting 100GB network speeds, use of Cisco Equal-Cost Multi-path Routing (ECMP), and new VMware ESX virtual servers. The IT team knew they needed a technology-neutral partner to assist their efforts in closing any blind spots that surfaced in the transformed SDN environment, including both east-west and north-south traffic paths, providing 'over-time' trend analysis and reporting into business service performance before, during, and after the move to SDN, and ensuring business communications continuity and coordination across a multi-phase SDN implementation.

Omni Hotels & Resorts, a luxury brand in a highly competitive market, recognized the importance of every site visitor as a cost-effective means for customer acquisition and revenue generation. They identified the leisure and business travel content of their websites as opportunities for new customer acquisition. Many vacation and retreat packages required human-assistance during the booking and checkout process. The company had been relying primarily on telephone, and some email, as the communication vehicles for customer service. Due to the high volume of inquiries, customers would sometimes wait to obtain the assistance required to book their vacation. Omni wanted to provide an alternative means of engaging with customers and prospects in order to improve customer service and conversion rates, while maximizing the opportunities each site visitor represents for the brand.

After a major merger, DJO grew from $400M to nearly $1B in revenue, as well as increased in employee size by more than 60 percent. Starting with one IT department, DJO, LLC now had multiple IT departments with numerous support channels and a veritable hodgepodge of support tools. This led to confusion, lack of productivity and increased support costs. IT leadership, with the assistance of systems integrator and trusted advisor RightStar Systems, determined that they needed a single, streamlined solution that would enable each support desk to support employees in any location, so they began an evaluation of what they coined, “borderless support” solutions.