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Kwarter, a platform that enables clients to build second-screen apps for televised events, required a highly elastic infrastructure to meet extraordinary spikes in demand during major events like the Super Bowl and the World Series. The company needed to keep a large number of servers on deck and proactively address issues in production to prepare for every possible scenario. To maintain high performance even with heavy traffic, Kwarter needed to track and analyze performance data on all of the company’s servers in real time. They needed a tool that would monitor multiple dimensions of the Kwarter platform, including error detection, server resource monitoring, cache time monitoring, latency monitoring on the app server versus the database server, and a good network map.

When Tobias Schmidt joined SoundCloud in 2011, he was struck by the sheer size of the company’s code base. With 15 - 20 coders all developing different parts of the code base, it was extremely difficult for anyone, especially a new employee, to understand that much code and how it might behave in a production environment. Usage on the site was growing exponentially month over month, and Schmidt’s team was constantly pushing out new features to keep pace with user demand. In many cases, that meant creating code to meet an urgent need, then leaving it untouched for months or even years. SoundCloud’s early features worked perfectly well for a small number of users. But in many cases, those same features wouldn’t scale as users became more numerous and more active. All of those coding changes, often made under intense pressure and in response to increased demand, made it difficult for the SoundCloud team to identify which lines of code might be the cause of poor site performance. Prior to using New Relic, team members would often email each other to diagnose any given problem, relying on limited internal data to achieve a very slow, very incomplete picture of the issue at hand.

Quizlet, an educational website, was experiencing exponential growth in its user base, putting extraordinary pressure on the company to keep pace with the growing demand. The company was expecting to welcome 150 million visitors over the next 12 months, many of whom were students who expected fast website performance. In addition to faster page loads, data reliability was a major consideration for Quizlet, as users were uploading large amounts of data every hour. The company needed a reliable storage system that was available all the time, with no unplanned outages. Quizlet knew that it needed a first-rate cloud provider that could scale quickly and easily to meet user demand. In order to keep the site running optimally, the company also needed superior analytics for quick diagnosis of performance issues in near real time.

HotelTonight, a fast-growing company that helps travelers find last-minute hotel reservations at discounted prices, faced a significant challenge in developing and launching their application in time for the holiday season. The company had a goal of being included in the iOS app store by December 2010, which meant having the application fully tested and ready to go by late November. With such an ambitious goal, the ability to rapidly debug performance issues was essential. The company's service has two components: the HotelTonight mobile app and the Extranet, an internal web-based application for development, customer service, and hotels participating in the program. The mobile app is the most heavily trafficked part of the service, and the Extranet is used by the internal team, customer support, and hotels participating in the service. Each day, hotels input their room availability and rates into the Extranet. The Extranet also produces history and usage reports for the participating hotels so they can easily view their history and success rates using HotelTonight. Some hotels also use third-party inventory and reservation systems gateways and APIs to load the evening’s available rooms.

Tribune Technology, a subsidiary of the Tribune Company, manages the digital operations of eight major daily newspapers, 23 broadcast stations and a number of national network site partners. The company serves approximately 400 to 500 million pageviews per month, mostly in publishing news content for consumers. The company's digital landscape is constantly changing, especially in terms of mobile websites and device applications. This results in an extraordinarily complex system that gets more complex by the day. Before using New Relic, Tribune Technology lacked the application instrumentation necessary to achieve real time insight into emerging issues. During production incidents, the company had trouble finding where application bottlenecks were occurring. The system monitors would fire, but the company couldn’t immediately tell what might be causing the problem. No consumer facing website can afford delays like that, so the company needed to find a more acceptable solution.

RunSignUp, a software service provider for race management, registration, and related activities, was facing challenges in managing its performance as its service and customer base grew. The company was using semi-manual scripts to manage system monitoring and alerting, which made it difficult to determine when the system was down and for how long. The company was committed to delivering a 99.9%+ uptime, but this was consuming a lot of resources and time. In addition to managing site availability, the team needed to manage site performance, which required understanding the response times end users experience. The tools they were using were not providing clear visibility into end user response times. Another challenge was the ability to handle traffic spikes when managing really big races. The company needed an automated performance management tool to provide visibility into performance.

AstraZeneca's Medical Affairs team was initially satisfied with its custom-built, on-premise, .Net CRM system. However, over time, the system's functional limitations, high maintenance requirements, and escalating costs became increasingly problematic. The team needed a more robust system with enhanced reporting, planning, and management functionality. The new system also needed to facilitate collaboration with other AstraZeneca teams, partners, and external resources. Furthermore, the new system had to demonstrate its ability to decrease system maintenance effort and cost, increase system flexibility and usability, reduce the time required to make changes, increase scalability, ease system collaboration with partners, improve user productivity and performance, integrate easily with external data sources, and improve reporting efficiency.

Ferrer had been using a home-grown sales force automation system for years but recently started feeling the pains of outdated technology. The old system couldn’t keep up with the company’s changing needs and increasingly complicated sales structure - one which encouraged competition within territories. For Ferrer, it became mission-critical for the sales reps to have a complete view of one another’s interactions with HCPs across territories and over a mobile platform. The company also wanted a direct-to-pharmacy order management system built right into the CRM system – a capability that had been recently integrated into Veeva CRM. It was also important for Ferrer’s new CRM system to be intuitive and easy to use both for the sales users and administrators.

Before moving to Veeva Vault eTMF, IDDI was burdened with a cumbersome hybrid system of paper-based processes supplemented with electronic shared drives and e-rooms for sharing documents with its clients. Users turned to unsecured workarounds like email, and the complexity prevented effective collaboration with sponsors, independent data monitoring committees (IDMCs), and internal teams around the world. Paper documents proved too difficult to access and track, and the organization turned to shared drives to give sponsors access to content electronically. However, these shared drives were only accessible off-site by using a VPN. E-rooms were meant to provide more flexibility, but limitations in the e-room access control model created a new set of challenges and security vulnerabilities, leading to serious compliance concerns. Lacking true content management capabilities like workflow, reporting, and audit trails, these file shares functioned largely as document storage, and had to be cleared periodically to make room for new documents. Facing an impending audit, IDDI decided to print all electronic documents to create a paper-based TMF. Despite the time and effort expended to compile trial master f ile (TMF) documents from disparate sources, audit-readiness remained challenging.

MSD UK, a subsidiary of Merck, was struggling to find a replacement for its 16-year-old custom-built CRM system. The company had tried one of the leading client/server CRM systems, but it failed to meet their needs. MSD was specifically looking for a CRM solution with innovative mobile capabilities for eDetailing and sophisticated analytics. They also wanted a uniform CRM platform that could be implemented across all of Europe and grow with the company. The challenge was not only about replacing outdated technology but also about adapting their approach to stay ahead as the industry evolves.

Merz North America, a specialty healthcare company, was struggling with an outdated customer relationship management (CRM) system that was expensive to maintain and difficult to upgrade. The system was slow, unreliable, and caused the sales force to waste time and valuable opportunities with physicians. As the contract for the old system was expiring, Merz management decided to look for a new solution that offered world-class performance and reliability, modern functionality, and the flexibility to make changes quickly and inexpensively. They wanted a tool that would put their sales force at the forefront of the technology race.

Mundipharma sales representatives had been relying on an antiquated customer relationship management (CRM) system that had very limited functionality and was difficult to integrate. Outside of call reporting and expense recording, the on-premise CRM system didn’t meet Mundipharma’s growing needs, especially as it set out to launch a new analgesia product. The company had a manual system where all of their sales information, including physician lists, budgets, call tracking, and customer profiles, was stored in different areas. This forced reps to seek out all of that data to build their own lists and reports – a highly inefficient process. Mundipharma needed a modern solution that would better support their sales team and administrators.

Questcor Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company, was struggling with its existing client-server customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The company's two specialty care commercial teams, neurology and nephrology, found the systems clunky and inflexible. Questcor needed a more flexible solution that would be easy to manage while also offering life sciences-specific functionality relevant to a specialty pharma company. The company conducted a thorough search, reviewing most of the leading CRM solution providers. They were looking for a reliable, easy-to-use system that offered the right industry functionality for their specialty care teams and the flexibility to expand to other functional areas in the future.

Millennium Pharmaceuticals was facing challenges with their previous customer relationship management (CRM) system. The system was inflexible, slow, and unreliable, causing frustration among sales representatives and pulling technology managers away from strategic initiatives to fix system errors. The company needed a new system that was agile enough to handle the new speed of business in biotech, with an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface, a single integrated system for managed markets, medical science liaisons and sales reps, system integration with the company’s intranet for shared best practices, and additional industry-specific functionality.

Kythera, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, was facing challenges in managing clinical documents and facilitating business processes for the development of its newest product candidate. The company had 26 studies already on file along with four active clinical studies, resulting in thousands of documents to share, manage, and store. Kythera had been using a patchwork of different document repositories and systems for each functional area, including a file share system for TMF documents and a SharePoint-based system that was difficult to access and use for internal collaborators and external partners. Multiple versions of documents changed hands with no reliable document accountability. The resulting errors slowed study processes and added risk. Exchanging documents by couriers internationally only added to the inefficiency. Kythera’s legacy system was also extremely difficult to manage and update. Without the luxury of a large internal IT team, Kythera required a turnkey system that integrated clinical, regulatory, and medical affairs document management and didn’t require dozens of staff to implement and maintain.

The global biopharmaceutical company was preparing for the launch of two blockbuster drugs and needed to supplement face-to-face interactions with digital engagement across brand, medical, and sales teams. The challenge was to expand the ability of their representatives to reach customers through their preferred channels while ensuring compliance.

With two blockbuster drug launches on the horizon, a global biopharmaceutical company sought a new way to reach healthcare professionals (HCPs) to supplement face-to-face interactions and educate about new products. Giving field teams the ability to send personalized email to customers would increase engagement and deliver valuable scientific information outside of office visits. At the same time, the company had to ensure its teams only sent approved, compliant content to HCPs. They needed an email solution that was built for life sciences.

Coloplast, a Danish multinational company, was facing increasing pressure from regulators to adequately link claiming documents to promotional materials and provide a full audit trail. However, fragmented systems and processes made it difficult to achieve full visibility into their promotional materials. They were using an inefficient custom Microsoft SharePoint solution and simply sent Microsoft Word documents to auditors over email. The company relied on multiple, siloed systems and processes to manage their content. The company used email for many content management tasks and had no central repository for available content. This limited visibility into where and how assets were being used.

The company’s UK and Ireland affiliate had been handling promotional material management through a paper-based, manual process. Brand managers struggled to efficiently collaborate on materials both internally and externally with advertising agencies. The process of reviewing, approving, and disseminating each new promotional piece was complicated. The manual handoff of drafts and revisions between stakeholders had become counterproductive, with team members unknowingly duplicating efforts or missing corrections made in previous versions. Medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) reviews diminished productivity, with final approvals taking as long as 40 days*, on average. An impending office move would physically separate stakeholders, too, making it virtually impossible to execute this paper-based process.

Exom Group, a global contract research organization (CRO) for the life sciences industry, was experiencing rapid growth. With each additional sponsor came more clinical trials and corresponding documents to manage. The company was using an electronic data capture (EDC) platform with limited document management functionality. Users had to waste time logging in and out of the EDC system every time they needed to access the TMF rather than being able to upload documents in process. Exom was also challenged by a pattern of missing, duplicate, and unauthorized documents, while signatures and timestamping had to be performed manually. Exom wanted to provide investigator sites and sponsors with a single access point for all clinical information to streamline collaboration and ensure TMF completeness.

Sanofi Pasteur MSD was growing rapidly, and with each new affiliate came another disparate customer relationship management (CRM) system. After a few years, the company amassed a number of different systems that created silos between teams. Duplicate content was re-created in each region. Promotional reviews, still done on paper, slowed progress. And customer engagement suffered. In order to transform its commercial operations worldwide, Sanofi Pasteur MSD determined it needed a single, global solution with multichannel capabilities and integrated content management to provide a holistic view of the customer and drive orchestrated engagement. The timing was right, too, as Sanofi Pasteur MSD prepared to launch new vaccines across Europe.

In the early 2000s, Teva Pharmaceuticals began acquiring various companies to expand its business. As the company grew, it needed to harmonize its commercial go-to-market strategy across regions and divisions, share best practices, and capture a comprehensive view of the customer. However, due to the acquisitions, the company was challenged with disparate customer relationship management (CRM) systems worldwide – more than 35 different, siloed systems in Europe alone – impacting visibility across the enterprise. Teva needed a unified CRM system globally that was configurable to meet local requirements and support all teams across generic and branded drug products. In addition, a variety of interaction preferences from different customers and the proliferation of handheld technology sparked an increase in the number of communication channels required to market Teva’s drug therapies. This drove Teva to search for a CRM solution that would enable coordinated multichannel execution and provide complete visibility into interactions across all channels for a complete view of the customer.

Custom Profile, a profile extruder based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was in growth mode. They had recently moved into a newly constructed building, and the company was continuing to expand and hire new employees. But as its extrusion business naturally developed, it became painfully clear that Custom Profile’s enterprise software was failing to support its basic needs. The company was trying to run a competitive business through four different software systems. A combination of homemade software, Access™ databases, QuickBooks™ and Excel™ spreadsheets was resulting in several system crashes a day and costly data entry errors from duplicate information entry into both Access and QuickBooks. Additionally, customer service was struggling as sales orders took a costly amount of time to produce due to a lack of easy access to accurate production data, plus shipping was cumbersome, delayed or inaccurate. In short, the pieced-together legacy systems did not support the basic needs of a growing business.

Donnelly Custom Manufacturing, a short-run manufacturer, was facing challenges with its outdated OS/2 operating system and various software packages. The company's growth was outpacing the system's capacity, and the manual system of scheduling and managing the shop floor was becoming too cumbersome. The existing system's limitation on the number of people who could be in the same module at the same time had become untenable. Furthermore, Donnelly's customers and suppliers wanted to communicate and interact through electronic means, which Donnelly's system could not adequately support. The company needed an ERP system that could support higher levels of connectivity and excellence.

Miniature Precision Components, Inc. (MPC), a leading tier-one supplier for major automotive manufacturers, was facing challenges due to its outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The system had been heavily modified over the years to accommodate the company's specific requirements and add third-party functionality. However, these modifications hindered easy and cost-effective updates, leaving MPC's system about three years behind current technology, even as the company paid for regular system updates. The system was also restrictive and disjointed, making it difficult to reconcile and manage data. MPC needed a new ERP system that could support its mission of delivering top-tier quality to the major automotive manufacturers, provide real-time data, and integrate all segments of the business.

Double H Plastics, a manufacturer of high-quality plastic cores for the paper, film, and foil converting industry, was facing challenges due to its growth into the food packaging industry. The company was using a Unix/DOS-based system called Tiny Term, which lacked real-time data and system integration across its enterprise. This was causing inefficiencies and delays in their operations. The company realized it was time to modernize and thoroughly evaluated multiple ERP vendors before selecting IQMS for its familiarity with Double H Plastics’ industry and its comprehensive functionality that required no third-party applications.

Sturgis Molded Products Company (SMP), a Michigan-based injection molder, was facing challenges with its outdated, multi-system ERP software. The company serves a variety of high-demand markets, including the medical, automotive, consumer, industrial, and heavy truck industries, and needed to be meticulous in its manufacturing performance and agile in its ability to optimize plant operations. The old ERP system was not able to support the company's growth and SMP wanted to move to a true Windows-based solution and add a quality system and preventative maintenance software. The cost to retrofit the old ERP system was high and it would require multiple third-party vendors to meet the company's growing business needs. SMP needed a single-source solution that would enable it to exceed its customers’ quality and delivery expectations, while gaining operational efficiencies that would directly benefit its bottom line.

Steinwall Scientific, a precision thermoplastic molder, was facing challenges due to its outdated DOS-based operating system. The system, while advanced at the time of its development, had become obsolete and was causing the company to become vulnerable and rigid. The system was unable to keep up with the company's growth and modern standards. The company's internal software, named Putty, and IBM's accounting software were standalone systems and as the company expanded, the inability of the two systems to communicate became a significant bottleneck. The company tried to upgrade to a new system called MISys, but after two years, found it wasn't robust enough, especially when it came to creating a Bill of Materials (BOM).

Top Die Casting Company, a leading provider of aluminum die castings and plastic-injected moldings, was hindered by an outdated, home-grown enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The old system was slow, especially when multiple people were using it, and had evolved through several different in-house programmers and stages of company growth, resulting in the loss of critical information such as production history and employee data. The company needed a single-source, centralized ERP system that could provide real-time data accuracy to everyone in the company, from the shop floor to the top floor.

Nissen Chemitec America, a leading manufacturer serving automakers, was managing enterprise operations with an AS/400-based system, which was eventually replaced with an ERP software that promoted its design for automotive manufacturers. However, the latter system, while conforming to automotive customers’ stringent requirements, hindered Nissen Chemitec America’s ability to advance lean manufacturing principles. The company was looking for a more tailored ERP solution— one built specifically for contract manufacturers serving the automotive industry. The previous system was cumbersome, required heavy data entry, and blocked the company's lean efforts due to the maintenance required. The company needed a fully automated system that not only adhered to the automotive compliance requirements like electronic data interchange (EDI), Labeling, and quality functions, but was also robust as well as scalable.