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Toyota Connected North America (TCNA) was in need of a flexible call center solution that could respond to customers’ needs and innovate quickly on a global scale. TCNA's Drivelink, a telematics platform, provides over 6 million drivers with access to emergency and convenience features. However, the technology powering many customer experiences was key to maintaining a competitive edge in a crowded industry. TCNA needed a solution that could scale in North America with more connected vehicles while maintaining high-quality experiences that often connected customers and agents in just a matter of seconds. They also needed a tool that offered direct access to data so that they could drive decisions quickly based on insights. Lastly, TCNA needed an intuitive tool that could integrate into Salesforce CRM and data-management tools.

Lozier Corporation, a leading manufacturer of products for retailers, was facing significant challenges due to its outdated ERP system. The system, residing on an ageing mainframe, was unable to deliver reliable business management systems, consolidated data, and efficient processes. The company's business processes were sometimes inefficient due to these disparate systems. For instance, digital orders from customers had to be processed manually by Lozier's team, which was not only time-consuming but also increased the risk of inaccuracies and errors. The leadership team at Lozier recognized the need for a modern ERP system and industry best practices to drive operational excellence and ensure the company's continued success in the retail industry.

CENIBRA, a major producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp based in Brazil, was facing several challenges. The company had a desire to transition from its legacy ERP system to SAP S/4HANA, but was struggling with establishing SAP standards to save time and money. The company also lacked process clarity for its complex supply chain management and was struggling to establish a single source of truth. There was a misalignment between the business and IT, and a demand for control and security for the company’s forestry process cycle. The increasing market demand and the need for modernization of IT systems made it clear that the company wasn’t keeping pace. Upgrading to SAP S/4HANA was a necessary step towards a modern IT infrastructure, but there was a risk of the cycle breaking down during the upgrade.

Hiiir Inc., a leading digital media company in Taiwan, faced significant IT challenges due to rapid growth in demand for its mobile marketing services. The company's on-premises solution was unable to keep up with the need for quick scalability. The procurement cycles for on-premises infrastructure were lengthy, reducing the company's agility and complicating budgeting as IT had to project its spend many months in advance. Furthermore, Hiiir lacked the necessary facilities to house a large datacenter and did not have enough IT staff to ensure optimal performance. The company needed a solution that would allow them to scale their computing capacity as needed to support their services, a requirement that could not be met with an on-premises solution.

Hudl, a software provider offering a video and analytics platform for sports teams, was facing a number of challenges. The company was experiencing significant business growth globally, with an increasing number of sports teams using their services to upload game video. This growth, at a rate of about 30 percent every year, required scalability to support and maintain. Additionally, Hudl was striving to provide faster video upload speeds to its customers. Many coaches were requesting quicker video uploads and faster access to videos for analysis. This posed a logistical challenge due to the large video files being moved over long distances. On a typical Friday night in high school football season, Hudl was uploading 39 hours of video every minute for encoding and processing. Lastly, Hudl was seeking a better analytical platform for internal data analysis. Their self-built data warehouse was complicated, expensive, and underperforming.

innogy Czech, a leading European energy company, was faced with the challenge of migrating its mission-critical SAP systems to a new location after the closure of its data center in Brno, Czech Republic due to flood risk. The company had to decide between moving its SAP implementation to a new data center in Germany or migrating to the public cloud, which would align with the organization’s cloud-first strategy. The company’s IT team saw an opportunity to transform operations by moving to the cloud, not only to keep up with future business growth but also to take advantage of the agility, flexibility, and management efficiency of the cloud. The company saw the shift from capital expenditure to operating expenditure as another potential benefit. However, the migration process was fraught with challenges, including the need to migrate dozens of terabytes of SAP data, complete a replatforming of the Linux operating system and Oracle database, and convert the data to Unicode, all without negatively affecting business activities and customers.

China National Building Material (CNBM), a company responsible for producing one out of every ten tons of cement in the world, was faced with a significant challenge. The company sought to enhance its sustainability and optimize its operations. The primary objectives were to manage its energy usage effectively, reduce operational costs, improve profitability, and minimize environmental pollution. The challenge was to achieve these goals without compromising the quality of the cement produced or the efficiency of the production process.

Henkel, a global leader in consumer goods and chemicals, was facing a significant challenge in optimizing its energy-intensive spray drying process in detergent production. The process was not only consuming a substantial amount of energy but also lacked the efficiency required for a streamlined production process. The company was in dire need of a solution that could modernize this process, conserve valuable resources, and contribute to its sustainability goals. The challenge was to find a system that could seamlessly integrate with their existing infrastructure and provide real-time insights for better decision-making.

Sophim, a manufacturer of natural ingredients for the cosmetics industry, was faced with the challenge of modernizing its automation systems. The company sought to upgrade its legacy automation systems to an Industry 4.0 solution in a managed, low-risk, and agile manner. The new solution needed to provide clean integration of IT technologies, with a particular focus on predictive maintenance. Additionally, Sophim wanted to leverage external engineering expertise without introducing project or solution complexity. The task of implementing this solution was given to Alliance system integrator partner Master Systèmes.

Amazon, despite being a leading-edge technology company, was still using Oracle databases for its data storage and management. The company was born before the advent of Amazon Web Services (AWS), during a time when monolithic, on-premises database solutions like Oracle were the norm for enterprise-scale data management. However, disengaging from Oracle presented significant challenges. Amazon had more than 5,000 databases connected to a variety of non-standardized systems, with ownerships and dependencies that were not centrally inventoried. There were also personnel-related risks, as many Amazon employees' careers were based on Oracle database platforms. Furthermore, Amazon engineers were spending excessive time on complex database administration, provisioning, and capacity planning. The company's rapid growth required more Oracle database shards, increasing operations and maintenance overhead. Additionally, continuing with Oracle would increase the millions of dollars Amazon was already paying for its license by a staggering 10 percent annually.

Cedars School of Excellence, a small Scottish preparatory school with about 120 students and 20 staff members, is known for being the first school in the world to introduce a 1:1 iPad-based learning curriculum. However, the school faced challenges in managing its complex iPad deployment and delivering certain parts of the curriculum and testing due to incompatibility of some critical applications with the iPad. The school's IT head, Fraser Speirs, had previously decided to run the school's device-management server, Jamf Pro, on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in 2013. Despite the benefits of this decision, the school still faced limitations in delivering certain parts of the curriculum due to the incompatibility of some applications with the iPad.

FICO, a leading predictive-analytics and decision-management software company, was facing challenges in rapidly developing and deploying its solutions, including its flagship FICO Decision Management Suite (DMS). The company, which provides services to 95 percent of the largest U.S. financial institutions, was traditionally an on-premises software company. This approach often resulted in years-long development and delivery timelines, hindering the company's ability to provide timely solutions to its customers. FICO wanted to focus on implementing its software rather than waiting for customers’ IT organizations to provision and build the underlying infrastructure for its solutions. Additionally, FICO needed to ensure strong security and compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other regulations in its operations.

Globe Telecom, a leading telecommunications service provider in the Philippines, was facing a significant challenge. The company was using Oracle applications in 90 percent of its services, but the cost was proving too high to maintain a competitive position. The company's IT team decided to shift towards the adoption of non-proprietary databases. However, the challenge was to find the best-fit open-source database and to ensure a smooth migration without any interruptions to service quality. Furthermore, Globe Telecom had to ensure that the new platform could handle telco-grade workloads, which are standard for the telecommunications industry but considered heavy in other sectors.

GumGum, a leading provider of programmatic, native, and social analytics software solutions, was facing a significant challenge in managing its data. The company generates more than 1 billion events, equivalent to approximately 6 TB of data, every single day. This massive amount of data needed to be processed continuously to eliminate bottlenecks and expedite decision-making for customers. The company was in dire need of a solution that could scale quickly to handle the rapidly growing traffic and data. The challenge was not just about managing the volume of data but also about processing it in real-time to provide valuable insights to customers.

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.

Retailers, particularly grocery chains, face a significant challenge when a major storm is announced. They must ensure their shelves are stocked to meet the community's preparedness needs, while also ensuring they can reopen quickly post-storm. Food Lion, a grocery chain, aims to reopen its doors within 24 hours of a storm impact. Retail Business Services, the services company for six major East Coast grocery brands in the United States, including Food Lion, had to devise a plan to achieve this 24-hour goal. The challenge was to have clear weather intelligence and a proactive emergency plan in place. The plan needed to include which stores may need generators and which associates in the areas surrounding the impact zones can be called upon to help reopen stores.

BigBasket, India's largest online food and grocery store, faced two primary challenges. The first was creating awareness about its services and offerings, a common issue for any E-commerce brand. The company needed to focus on user reachability to increase its customer base. The second challenge was to grab its customers’ attention through the right channels in a timely manner and with the most relevant content. As one of the first movers in the grocery delivery segment, standing out from the crowd was crucial for BigBasket. They needed a solution that would allow them to reach more devices with their offerings and provide a personalized customer journey.

In many industries such as industrial manufacturing and logistics, there are many needs for identifying, detecting and classifying products or objects. Traditional detection methods based on artificial vision are prone to fatigue, and cannot always guarantee high detection efficiency, and due to the physiological limit of the human eye itself, it is difficult to achieve high standards in terms of speed and accuracy. Therefore, the traditional manual detection method restricts the development and improvement of the productivity level and has been difficult to meet the needs of production. More and more sorting robots based on machine vision are widely used in various industrial production lines. That is, the target image information is obtained through the industrial camera, and the sorting of the grabbed target is completed. The traditional industrial robot visual sorting system uses classical computer vision theory, such as invariant distance, template matching, SURF feature and other algorithms to identify and locate workpieces, which has higher requirements on the scene environment, workpiece shape and background colour. The workpieces and objects on the on-site conveyor belt may have complex shapes and different postures and are densely placed together. In this case, the classical visual recognition and positioning algorithms cannot meet the requirements of high recognition rate and high precision.

Power supply is critical to Five Star Call Centers. They’ve built a solid reputation for providing consistent, reliable, and friendly customer care, and a loss of power could wreak havoc on their business. To prevent service disruptions, the company has an uninterruptible power supply on-site, as well as a backup generator.The generator was necessary, but almost never used, and there were monthly expenses to maintain it. GridPoint recognized the opportunity to help Five Star turn an idle resource into a revenue-producing, grid-interactive asset.

The owners of Eco-house 3.0, located in Serra Espadà, Spain, had a vision of creating a sustainable, energy-efficient, and comfortable home using a prefab wood modular system. They wanted to leverage a 100% digital process to ensure a flexible construction that could be transformed over time if necessary. The challenge was to design and build a bio-climatic and technological house that would be respectful to the landscape, fully automated, and energy-efficient. The construction process had to be quick, clean, and precise, with no room for errors. The house was to be built in record time using a 100% digital process, which posed a significant challenge. The design and construction process had to be shared in real time with the client, who was located 300 kilometers away from the offices of NOEM, the design and construction firm.

Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest telecommunications company, was seeking to create a comprehensive disaster recovery solution for its IPTV and over-the-top (OTT) networks. The company had two geo-redundant data centers in Taipei and Tainan, servicing customers in the northern and southern regions respectively. The challenge was to achieve multiple layers of geographic redundancy, allowing each regional data center to failover to its respective backup regional data center, without any failover between the northern and southern regions. Each distinct user base was to be managed independently, but with synchronization of all content ingestion occurring in the northern data centers, then being synchronized with southern data centers. The company also needed to ensure that each of the data centers could failover transparently to the end subscriber in the event of a major failure or natural disaster.

They needed an experienced and committed technology partner to support them with the migration and modernization of their dated solutions in order to enable new products, services, revenue streams and scalability to deliver more value to their customers. Their solutions critically lacked scalability and proper performance leading to poor business productivity and user experiences.Among the technical challenges, the client faced the need to modernize their:legacy IT landscape that was composed of classic network drives and a Lotus Note-based email.complex multi-farm scenario, including SharePoint Online and on-premise

Bosch security systems have quite a good number of resellers through which they sell security devices. For all of their security devices, they have pre-installed SIMs/CDMA’s in them.Now for each customer to have its own login and competitive prices for each operator was a big challenge. They offer the same services for each customer and therefore every customer needs visibility and spends the same amount of money for each device.

The case study presents a variety of challenges faced by different companies across various sectors, all of which required enhanced global connectivity solutions. Talk-Cloud, an e-Learning platform, was experiencing exponential growth and needed rapid deployment of new network nodes to maintain customer satisfaction. A global gaming company required a solution to quickly and easily provision servers around the world to meet user needs. ZEGO, a live streaming service provider, needed to rapidly deploy and connect 22 core and edge PoPs in Europe, America, and Southeast Asia to better serve their 500+ million users. A global social and digital media company based in North America and Europe lacked a hybrid cloud interconnect solution for the highly regulated and unique Chinese market. Lastly, AdTiming, a data-driven ad mediation platform, needed to rapidly scale to rising user demand while improving user experiences and reducing operating costs.

Teenage Engineering, a Swedish company, specializes in creating compact, powerful synthesizers, including a series of small, battery-powered synthesizers known as pocket operators. These devices, which are roughly the size of a pocket calculator, can be connected together to produce and record a variety of music genres. The company's mission is to make synthesizers accessible to everyone, with a simple interface, animated LCD displays, and affordable price points. However, the design process of these devices presented a challenge. The company handles everything in-house, from electrical and mechanical engineering to industrial design and software development. The main challenge was getting the balance right between ECAD and MCAD software tools. The company's designs usually start on the MCAD side, building up the overall electromechanical look and feel. An ultra-tight tolerance chain was key when bouncing designs back and forth between Altium and MCAD.

Protecting a dynamic workforce and client trustWith corporate parents like Microsoft and Accenture, IT consultancy Avanade was literally born to deliver digital innovation and results for clients and their customers through the Microsoft ecosystem. 4,000 clients in 24 countries later and now the #1 Microsoft services company in the world, Avanade is creating the digital future, which at times entails first overcoming the limitations of the digital present and recent past.The future of work is heading outside of the office. To be most effective for clients, the vast majority of professionals work outside of offices at client sites, airports, hotels, and everywhere else they can leverage the cloud to deliver the ubiquity clients need.A highly mobile workforce means that it’s very difficult to use traditional security methods to protect endpoints, workstations, and clients, since it’s very difficult to enforce mechanisms and security controls when users are off the corporate network, Security solutions like firewalls or web proxies don’t help protect endpoints when they’re not actually in the office, which created unacceptable risk.

Plugue Telecom, a wireless ISP serving the Brazilian state of São Paulo, faced a significant challenge in providing Wi-Fi connection to the municipality of Americana. The region's tropical climate and lush vegetation made it difficult for Wi-Fi signals to penetrate, making it challenging for residents and businesses to access reliable internet for browsing, video surveillance, security applications, and voice and data streaming. The dense foliage made it difficult to cover the municipality's many houses and small businesses with reliable, high-capacity band delivery, especially in non-line of sight (LOS) situations.

The Ceramic Factory - Botevgrad, a leading supplier of construction materials in Bulgaria, was experiencing growth in line with the booming construction industry in the country. With this growth, the company faced the challenge of visualizing its manufacturing processes, particularly those involving its furnaces and the transportation line for the produced bricks. The company also needed to monitor and report on these processes to manage downtime and increase productivity. As the business expanded, the company realized the need for robust, premium solutions to meet its visualization, control, and reporting needs. The solution had to integrate with the company's existing VIPA PLCs, approximately 150 I/O points, and KEP OPC Server for Siemens PLCs. It also needed to work with the company's Microsoft Access database and its desktops and servers running Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

Air Selangor, a large water distribution company in Malaysia, was grappling with a high rate of non-revenue water loss, which stood at 33.3 percent in 2017. The company's aging infrastructure was a concern, and it was keen on reducing leaks and bursts and identifying the causes of pressure surges to mitigate the damaging transients that could reduce the lifespan of its pipes. The company used various techniques to identify leaks and bursts, but the response time was not quick enough to minimize the runtime of leaks/bursts and the disruption caused. The remote geographical location of its trunk main network often led to a long runtime of leaks before discovery. Pressure transients were known to be an issue within the network, but without information on their sources or causes. The company also noticed that leaks often recurred on the same pipelines, causing concern and harming the utility’s reputation. Air Selangor was actively seeking innovative ideas for continuous monitoring to identify leaks and pressure surges earlier, reduce non-revenue water loss, and improve customer relations.

A global Network Equipment Provider (NEP) was facing a challenge in improving the efficiency of software development and maintenance of Radio Unit products. The transformation to 5G and the increasing device connectivity introduced new 5G radio frequency bands, antenna types, and varying physical radio unit packages. This led to an increase in the number of required Radio Unit products. The NEP wanted to ensure a faster time-to-market and efficient software maintenance for the Radio Unit portfolio.