Employment Hero, a rapidly growing startup based in Sydney, Australia, was faced with the challenge of providing an exceptional customer experience. The company, which offers a suite of powerful employment tools to over 80,000 businesses worldwide, wanted to engage buyers on their terms. They used digital marketing strategies to attract prospects to their website, but they needed a way to interact with these prospects once they were on the site. They wanted to be fully aware of the customer's location, activities, buying stage, and preferred engagement channel. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow them to engage with customers in real time, track and monitor their behavior on the site, and make the sales cycle more efficient.

Proofpoint, a global leader in cybersecurity and compliance solutions, faced a significant challenge in enhancing its buyer experience to match its high customer satisfaction and renewal rates. The company aimed to drive more traffic to their site and create a better buying experience for their visitors. However, their existing chat solution offered little visibility into site traffic and lacked integration with their existing sales and marketing platforms. This made it impossible for them to operationalize, scale, or enable chat across all of their regions. They needed a solution that could deliver a friction-free and highly relevant buyer experience, improve response times, filter and route traffic quickly and accurately, and increase sales efficiency by integrating with existing platforms and automating previously manual tasks.

Augmented Human Lab, a research center at Auckland Bioengineering Institute, was faced with the challenge of inspiring curiosity for science in children, particularly those who lacked confidence in science subjects. The lab's founder, Suranga Nanayakkara, wanted to create a fun computer interface that could become an extension of a child's curiosity and imagination. This led to the birth of the Kiwrious project, which aimed to make science playful and exciting by using plug-in sensors that capture environmental phenomena. However, to spread the Kiwrious mission, especially in disadvantaged schools, Suranga needed powerful cloud solutions to free up his small team from mundane tasks such as server maintenance, enable unlimited scaling power, and protect the identity of pupils with world-class cloud security.

Autonom8, a US and India-based enterprise workflow management software business, aimed to help clients reduce costs and improve customer interactions through automation. The company provides a low-code SaaS platform that includes components like A8Studio, a chat platform, and an analytics module. However, the changing customer demands of enterprises, the rising cost of building software with experienced developers, and the need for customer journeys to evolve due to changing consumer habits and regulations posed challenges. Autonom8 initially deployed on a multinational cloud service, but the decision to opt for a microservices architecture that enables individual services to scale independently while running in a containerized environment demanded high-quality container orchestration. Furthermore, many of Autonom8's clients were financial institutions in India, legally required to retain data within the country's borders.

Avocados Don Goyo, a leading exporter of fresh Hass avocado, was facing significant operational challenges due to its reliance on on-premises infrastructure. The company's servers were located in rural areas, making them vulnerable to inclement weather and recurring power outages. This resulted in stressful situations for employees who feared potential damage to equipment and subsequent data loss. The company's access to its SAP systems was heavily dependent on weather conditions, which hindered its ability to manage operations effectively and explore new business opportunities. As a company aiming for scalability and international expansion, Avocados Don Goyo realized that relying solely on on-premises infrastructure was no longer viable. They needed to transition to a more agile cloud technology that could provide full availability of its SAP systems, regardless of weather conditions.

AVROTROS, a Dutch radio and television broadcaster, was facing challenges in engaging its audience through online media and mobile apps due to the limitations of its existing infrastructure. The broadcaster's infrastructure was not optimized for the scale that popular mobile apps work at, leading to outages and users being locked out of the app. This was a significant issue as AVROTROS aimed to foster a deeper connection with its audience by using every channel available. Additionally, AVROTROS had outsourced its back-end and was totally dependent on its suppliers, leading to stability issues and outages. The broadcaster needed a next-generation infrastructure to engage and retain its audience with next-generation apps and gain greater control and visibility into its infrastructure management.

Bareksa, an Indonesian fintech startup, was founded in 2013 with the mission to provide investment opportunities to the rapidly growing middle class in Indonesia. However, as the popularity of the platform grew, Bareksa found itself struggling to scale services during spikes in customer demand. This was a significant issue for a startup that relied on speed and 100% reliability to succeed. Additionally, its engineering team was spending a significant amount of time on DevOps tasks, such as provisioning servers and managing databases, leaving little time for creating innovative fintech solutions to grow the business. Bareksa was operating in a monolithic on-premise environment, with physical servers and a self-managed database, which was proving to be inefficient and time-consuming.

Bedatadriven, a company that leverages data and analysis to achieve their clients' goals, was facing challenges with their core project, ActivityInfo. ActivityInfo is a database platform for humanitarian relief operations and development assistance, used by over 75 organizations across Africa and Asia. The platform was initially developed for UNICEF’s emergency program in eastern Congo and is now used to track relief and development activities across more than 10,000 project sites. The challenge was to ensure that the system was highly available, given the challenging environments that ActivityInfo users work in and the nature of the crises. They also needed minimal system administration, allowing Bedatadriven to focus on product development. The platform also needed to scale up and down according to the load, with minimal human intervention. They also required clear monitoring tools to help pinpoint performance problems.

BlaBlaCar, a leading long-distance carpooling platform, was facing challenges with its on-premises infrastructure. Initially built to support the French market, the infrastructure was struggling to keep up with the company's rapid global expansion. The company was experiencing issues with returning carpool search results consistently, processing payments, and connecting drivers and passengers. The engineering team was spending more time maintaining servers rather than focusing on enhancing platform features. The company needed a scalable, data-driven infrastructure that could support its growing global community and meet users’ needs in real time.

Hussle, an online marketplace for gyms and spas, faced several challenges in understanding user behavior and improving their product. Luke, the Product Lead at Hussle, was tasked with identifying and resolving issues that led to user churn, spotting bugs, and ensuring smooth launches of new features. The primary challenges included understanding why users were leaving the platform, identifying issues with new features, spotting broken user flows, and discovering bugs. The team needed to capture reliable feedback from users as they were leaving, which was a difficult task. Additionally, they needed to understand user interactions with new features and identify any issues that could hinder the user experience.

Engineering simulations are a critical part of designing and assessing infrastructure such as bridges, buildings, and aircraft. However, the industry-standard technology, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), is computationally intensive and often unfeasible for large-scale 3D simulations. These simulations require large amounts of RAM, often exceeding the capacity of a desktop workstation, and can take hours or even days of computation time. This is particularly problematic when time is at a premium and engineers need to perform hundreds or thousands of simulations for a piece of critical infrastructure. Additionally, attempts to integrate simulations within university courses have been unsuccessful due to the complexity of the tools.

Alcide, a cloud-native security leader, was facing challenges in securing complex and distributed cloud stacks for organizations. The modern cloud deployment was intricate with numerous moving parts and shifting parameters, making it difficult to operate and secure. The traditional security protocols were not sufficient for the evolving technology standards and the convenience of the cloud. Alcide aimed to provide a complete security solution specifically designed for cloud-based infrastructure, but the process of provisioning new clusters was manual and time-consuming, taking up to 2-3 days. This was a significant drain on their resources and time, which were already limited.

Allthecooks, a social media platform for cooking enthusiasts, faced the challenge of managing a rapidly growing user base. The platform, which allows users to find, rate, comment on, and post their own recipes, had to process hundreds of thousands of simultaneous API requests whenever popular chefs updated their content. The company, which started with just three part-time engineers and no external funding, needed a scalable and reliable infrastructure to support its growth. The challenge was not just about speed, but also about scalability. As the user base grew, the need for a more robust backend processing architecture became evident. Cost was also a significant concern as the company was using its savings to build the platform.

Alma, a fintech startup based in France, was founded in 2017 with the aim of providing an easy-to-use payment service that guarantees instant payment to retailers while allowing customers to pay in installments. The 'buy now, pay later' model, while beneficial for retailers in terms of increased conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and improved customer satisfaction, also posed significant risks. Retailers had to bear the burden of chasing debts and the possibility of late or cancelled payments. In France, such schemes were only viable for larger enterprises with extensive working capital and large credit lines. Smaller businesses were unable to afford the financial risks or secure the same level of support from their banks. Alma sought to address this challenge by developing an installment payment platform that would be accessible to a wide range of retailers and customers.

Alto, a ride-hailing company founded in 2018, operates with a unique business model where all drivers are W-2 employees and the company owns all the cars. This approach is designed to provide a safe, clean, consistent, and high-quality experience for every passenger. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining efficiency and competitiveness due to its smaller size compared to more established ride-hailing companies. One of the key issues was imprecise pickup points, which often led to delays and customer complaints. Drivers were often directed to incorrect locations, requiring extra driving time or contact with the customer to determine the proper pickup point. Additionally, the company had to manually input custom areas, locations from which riders frequently request a pickup that are not necessarily on the map yet. This process was time-consuming and inefficient.

Apiiro, a cloud-native application security platform, was faced with the challenge of providing complete visibility of all application components to security and development teams. This was crucial in order to map the application attack surface and proactively remediate critical risks before releasing to the cloud. The complexity of security issues was increasing as software development accelerated and businesses used agile models to deploy more apps at a faster rate. Traditional application security tools were proving ineffective in improving a company's security posture due to the intricate combination of multiple factors that contribute to risks. Furthermore, Apiiro needed to ensure near-perfect uptimes to deliver resilience and grow its business on Google Marketplace.

Arab Bank, a leading financial institution in the Middle East, recognized the need to innovate and modernize its services to maintain its market position and attract new customers. Despite its strong presence in the market, the bank faced challenges in responding quickly to the growing consumer market and the small and midsize enterprise (SME) sector. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where Arab Bank operates, has a largely unbanked population, with a significant portion interested in new digital tech capabilities. The bank also had to deal with legacy systems and applications, which made it difficult to release new features and functionalities frequently. Furthermore, Arab Bank had to navigate regulatory constraints such as data residency rules in the countries where it operates.

The Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), responsible for managing all harbor-related infrastructure for the city of Hamburg, faced significant challenges in securing its vast IT infrastructure. This infrastructure included 350 kilometers of fiber cable, 850 routers and switches, 500 servers in two data centers, and thousands of computers and smartphones running over 600 applications across 63 separate locations. The HPA IT managers identified several security challenges, including over 100 local administrators managing applications without support or follow-up, applications without a designated owner responsible for security or lifecycle management, and a flat network structure focused more on performance and flexibility than security. Additionally, HPA workers were not optimally aware of best security practices, leading to concerns about unidentified network exposures.

Forge Global, Inc., a leading fintech company, was facing challenges in managing and processing large volumes of complex corporate documents. The company's existing manual and semi-automated document processing pipelines were unsustainable due to their lack of speed, cost-efficiency, and scalability. The task of processing clients’ corporate documentation could not be outsourced due to security and compliance concerns. The documents often contained sensitive information and any data extraction process had to comply with privacy laws and regulations. The company's leaders recognized the need for a more advanced and automation-focused solution to expedite the processing of incorporation documents, automatically extract data from them, and generate incorporation reports. They sought to partner with an AI solutions provider and technology consultancy to design and build the desired platform, while maintaining the security and compliance of its document- and data-centric operations.

CNH Industrial, a global leader in capital goods, was on a digital transformation journey with a focus on improving their customer experience. The company was seeking innovative solutions to optimize their spare parts management business across the 12 brands within the group. The challenge was to find a solution that could support the end-to-end supply chain, monitor changing customer needs, and align the supply chain with those needs in real-time. CNH Industrial needed a powerful processing, SaaS-based solution that could provide real-time visibility and collaboration across their supply chain, enhance collaboration across dealers and stakeholders in multi-tier networks, and maximize parts availability to minimize machine downtime and total cost of ownership (TCO).

Brand24, a popular social listening platform, was facing a significant challenge with its conversion rates. The company's CEO, Mike Sadowski, noticed that the conversion rates were considerably lower than the industry standard. The primary issue was a high bounce rate on the sign-up form for Brand24’s free trial. The bounce rate was much larger than anticipated, indicating a leaky funnel. Two main culprits were identified as causing the high bounce rate. Firstly, a promo code field was confusing users, leading to a high abandonment rate. Secondly, the sign-up form had too many distractions, causing users to click around chaotically, visiting the blog, looking into pricing again, and hovering over links.

Playtika, a leading Game-Entertainment company, faced significant challenges in scaling the production of real-time machine learning. With over 10 million daily active users, 10 billion daily events, and over 9TB of daily processed data, the company's existing batch and web services deployment methods were unable to scale to meet their needs or produce predictions in real-time. The REST APIs in their ML Pipelines led to service exhaustion, client starvation, handling failures and retries, and performance tuning of bulk size for batch partitioning. Playtika’s event-driven ecosystem required a solution that could support real-time streaming of their production models and scale without downtime. They also needed a solution that could integrate with various processes including Airflow and Spark, and handle bursts, peaks, and fast creation of new ML Pipelines.

Body & Fit, a leading sports nutrition and dietary product business, was facing challenges with its existing ecommerce platform. The company, which processes almost two million orders a year and offers more than 3,000 items, was planning a strategy of rapid growth, aiming to double its presence from seven to twelve countries. However, scalability was a challenge on its existing ecommerce platform, and weak integration between components made it difficult to track customer journeys across touchpoints. The company needed a solution that could deliver excellent customer experience, potential for global expansion, continuous optimization, and personalized content. Furthermore, Body & Fit wanted to create a unified customer journey by combining data from multiple sources, including its ERP, ecommerce solution, event-stream processing, frontend interfaces, online marketing, customer service solution, and analytics.

Bonnier Publications, a Copenhagen-based media company, was facing the challenge of transitioning from a print to a digital multi-format business model in an ever-changing media environment. The global magazine industry was shrinking every year, and Bonnier knew that this digital transformation was critical for its survival and growth. The company set a six-month deadline to achieve this goal, with the challenge being a complete overhaul of its customer data and the way it engaged with customers online to maximize ecommerce conversion rates. The initial target was to gain 25,000 new subscriptions. Bonnier's success largely depended on its reader base, with B2C business accounting for 75% of its revenue. Therefore, it was crucial for the company to understand its readers and their preferences.

Book Creator, a self-publishing tool, aimed to shift its focus towards serving the K-12 market and enhance student engagement by unlocking their creativity. The company wanted to provide a platform where students and teachers could collaboratively create and publish ebooks and learning materials. However, with a small team of 13, they faced the challenge of reaching millions of students and handling high-variability workloads. Additionally, they needed to comply with strict data access management requirements including GDPR in the European Union and FERPA/COPPA in the U.S. The company also wanted to rapidly develop new features while reducing the complexities of storing data and scaling access to it.

Boxed, a leading digital wholesaler, was founded in 2013 with the aim of making bulk shopping easy, convenient, and accessible for consumers. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., Boxed experienced a significant increase in traffic and demand on its platform. The shift towards online grocery shopping, which had been gradual, suddenly accelerated, and Boxed needed to scale up its infrastructure and data processing to keep up with the flood of orders that nearly doubled during the pandemic. With the large increase in concurrent users on the site, Boxed’s database was hit with thousands of read/write operations per second, specifically for operations like creating new user accounts, adding/removing items to cart, and checking out. These actions required writes to its database, and Boxed had to scale up the resources available to its database to handle this increase in operations per second.

Icebreaker, a clothing brand that uses merino wool from New Zealand, faced a significant challenge in managing and deciphering thousands of customer feedback forms. The company used Wufoo, a tool for creating customized forms, to collect feedback from customers about their shopping experience. However, the process of extracting, formatting, filtering, organizing, and sometimes translating the information from these forms was time-consuming and inefficient. As a result, the customer's voice was only being heard about once a month. The team needed a way to automate this process to ensure that customer feedback was promptly and efficiently addressed.

The County Court of Victoria, which hears about 12,000 cases a year, was struggling with an overwhelming amount of paperwork. The existing legacy case management system was not comprehensive and was difficult to use. The court needed to modernize its high-volume paperwork management but was unsure of where to start or which technology to use. The first process that needed attention was the directions correspondence workflow, which generated hundreds of pieces of correspondence that had to be individually printed and assigned. The next challenge was the convoluted manual process of auditing and compliance, which required pulling files from different locations and was difficult to manage due to lack of a top-down view of all activities. Lastly, the court faced the challenge of collecting information for cases that had a plea or trial which may not be recorded in the case management system. The existing method was antiquated and fragmented, requiring hard copy questionnaires to be transposed and typed into spreadsheets.

The Dow Chemical Company, a USD60 billion enterprise composed of a worldwide network of 13 business units, faced challenges in setting and achieving enterprise-wide goals due to its decentralized business structure. The company needed to meet the differing facility needs of its various businesses while also increasing office and lab space capacity use to 90 percent and improving capital planning, real estate lease management, operations, maintenance, and energy consumption on a global basis. The Lab and Office Facilities Management (LOFM) group at Dow, which provides facilities management services and solutions that support more than 20 million square feet of lab and administrative office space worldwide, was tasked with driving these initiatives. However, reporting in all of these areas was manual, disconnected, and spreadsheet-driven, making it difficult to leverage data effectively.

Anorbank, the first fully digital bank in Uzbekistan, faced the challenge of implementing a comprehensive digital banking system during the pandemic. The bank needed to provide services without requiring customers to visit physical offices, aligning with the modern lifestyle of increased mobility and preference for digital technologies. The bank's strategy required a unique platform that could process requests quickly while maintaining an individual approach to each client and guaranteeing data security. The bank's team, 70% of which consisted of IT employees, was tasked with the continuous development of this platform. The challenge was not just to describe procedures in Word documents, but to create complete digital processes. This required integration with various IT systems, making the project complex due to the number of users, different groups of bank users, and the large number of required integrations.