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

Carter, a leading provider of logistics solutions in South Africa, began as a ride-hailing startup in 2020. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for people-moving services declined as residents stayed home instead of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. Recognizing an opportunity in the delivery logistics industry, Carter decided to pivot from people to packages. As the company grew, the need for efficient route planning became evident. Their in-house route planning algorithm could only handle up to 10 stops and required more computational resources on their servers than they had anticipated. This led Carter to seek a specialized solution for their route planning needs.

RVU, a leading tech company in the UK, owns several market comparison sites and apps. The company has grown through strategic acquisitions, which has led to inconsistencies in tech stacks as each acquired business comes with its own back-end architecture, integrations, and more. This inconsistency posed a challenge to RVU as it sought to provide a secure, single layer of consistency across all its brands. Furthermore, as users have grown increasingly reliant on price-comparison tools, their expectations around security and privacy have also increased. RVU needed a solution that would not only standardize operations across all brands but also fortify all of its brands equally in terms of security and privacy.

SeenThis, a Stockholm-based ad streaming company, was facing a series of challenges. The company, which works with 80 of the top 100 advertisers in over 40 countries, was dealing with an average of 40 billion requests per month from over 1,000 customers. Their proprietary adaptive streaming technology was designed to remove the limitations of conventional ad serving technology, but they were struggling with their existing first-generation CDN, which couldn't provide the necessary configuration for delivering custom content based on different variables. Additionally, their previous logging and monitoring system, which utilized open-source tools like nginx and RabbitMQ on AWS, was becoming slow and unreliable, making it difficult to manage the increasing number of requests. Furthermore, as environmental concerns became more pressing, SeenThis needed more detailed reporting capabilities to evidence their unique mix of performance and sustainability.

Shoptimize, a pioneer of AI solutions for direct-to-consumer (D2C) retail platforms, was facing challenges in scaling its services. The company needed to provide a seamless online experience for its users, regardless of whether there were 5,000 or 5 million users online. The company was also looking for a next-generation Web Application Firewall (WAF) solution that could offer performance and PCI-DSS compliance at scale. Their previous WAF providers were not able to meet the caching challenge and were too expensive for effective customer onboarding. Shoptimize needed a solution that could offer predictable costs, scale as needed, and integrate with their existing tech stack. They also required a low-latency WAF to block spam traffic and bad bots without slowing down or blocking desirable traffic.

Litium, a scalable ecommerce platform, was seeking to enhance its customer package by adding a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The company's goal was to provide its B2B and B2C clients with a fast, flexible, and scalable sales platform that could support their growth. However, the legacy CDN providers were not a good fit for Litium's needs as they were cumbersome and time-consuming to manage and service. Furthermore, Litium's customers, who are based around the world, needed a solution that could maintain backend operations in Europe while allowing sales in the US and other parts of the world without any degradation in response time.

One Medical, a membership-based primary care practice, was faced with the challenge of securing customer data in line with their cloud-first strategy. The healthcare industry is particularly vulnerable to identity theft, and organizations like One Medical have to manage a multitude of electronic medical records. The company takes the security and confidentiality of their customers’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII) seriously, adhering to industry best practices in software development, testing, and internal and external security practices. However, they needed a security solution that could scale with their cloud-first strategy, improve their overall security posture, and remain compliant with HIPAA. They also faced issues with false positives in their environment, which could potentially block doctors from performing critical functions such as submitting prescriptions. Other solutions they evaluated were difficult to deploy into their cloud-first technology stack and caused false positives.

LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform, was facing challenges in the fast-paced software development lifecycle. The company needed to balance the competing needs of speed and security. Speed was essential to improve products and keep users engaged, while security was necessary to ensure deployments did not cause disruptions or drive users to competitor apps. The company also needed to ensure that features could be rolled out without friction, or they risked their product's position in the app store rating. Additionally, LaunchDarkly required a solution to protect user experience in case of a disaster, without having to roll back code.

Brandfolder, a digital asset management platform, was facing challenges with its content dissemination feature, the Smart CDN. The company was initially performing eager image transformations, which involved creating different renditions of an image as soon as it was ingested. While this approach could potentially speed up request response times, it significantly increased the ingest time, causing delays for customers. Another challenge was the process of adding watermarks to images. Each image was individually watermarked by Brandfolder and stored until it needed to be served. This process was not only time-consuming but also increased storage costs. Furthermore, the company was looking to update their thumbnailing process, which involved generating thumbnails for all assets in their system. The existing process was creating bottlenecks and hindering scalability.

Storytel, a global leader in audiobooks, was faced with a significant challenge when developing their new homepage. The original homepage was built on an outdated tech stack, which was not conducive to the high-performing, optimized experience they aimed to provide their customers. The company wanted to leverage stale-while-revalidate cache control to ensure lightning-fast load times. However, during testing, they discovered that the page load times were over a second, which was unacceptable for a project of such high profile. The issue was traced back to their existing Content Delivery Network (CDN), which did not support the caching strategy they had designed. The CDN did not trigger the stale-while-revalidate process with every request, resulting in slow page loads. The vendor had no plans to change how this directive works, leaving Storytel in a precarious situation on the eve of a global rollout.

The Endless OS Foundation, a social welfare nonprofit, has been working to bridge the digital divide by increasing access to affordable devices and building software that reduces the need for high-speed connectivity. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the digital divide, causing a surge in demand for online educational content. As a result, the Foundation saw an increase in downloads and updates, leading to a spike in egress costs. Their existing content delivery network (CDN) was unable to provide efficient solutions, and they were experiencing CDN dead zones in regions like Southeast Asia, Central, and South America, where they have a significant number of users. The quality of their service was inconsistent, and costs were continually increasing.

Filestack, a low code content API platform, was facing challenges in scaling their rapidly growing file management service. They were in need of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that could support their expanding services in a reliable, cost-effective, and fast manner. Their service involved image transformation, which resulted in multiple versions of the same file, and they needed a way to invalidate these versions quickly. They also required customization at the edge, a large number of powerful and strategically located Points of Presence (POPs), and the ability to handle large file sizes. Additionally, Filestack was struggling with the management of Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates, a task that was distracting their team from product development. They were also considering dropping a premium feature, CNAME, due to the burden of managing a certificate and private key for each customer.

Maritz, a holding company providing a range of services to Fortune 500 companies, faced a significant challenge in enhancing its security posture to support PCI DSS requirement 6.6. Several of its business units accept credit card information, necessitating annual reporting on PCI DSS compliance. The company decided to implement a web application firewall as an additional layer of security for its PCI environment. However, with numerous business units and applications, each with different technology stacks, Maritz needed a single product that could be deployed across all current and future hosting environments, whether physical or virtual, on-premises or cloud-based. The company had previously used an open-source solution that required extensive manual effort to operate, so they were looking for a solution that offered ease of use, automated blocking, and simple deployment.

Atresmedia, a leading communication group in Spain, has been expanding its streaming package since its launch, which is a key line of business for the company. The company has turned to live streaming for broadcasting important events, such as sports finals or elections, which have high ratings. Users expect an experience similar to that of broadcast television, with no delays and zero latency. To cater to the increased traffic levels generated by live events, it was crucial for Atresmedia to prepare its entire infrastructure and partner with a CDN to support it, ensuring zero downtime, even if they experienced a tremendous spike in the number of users. The main challenges of live streaming that Atresmedia wanted to address were avoiding latency, improving the quality of the user experience, offering a reliable and scalable architecture that is able to absorb large and unpredictable traffic spikes, reducing the costs associated with live streaming, and having greater control in order to make autonomous, quick changes through API or UI.

kommadesign, a young and visionary company based in Viborg, Denmark, specializes in providing retail solutions, product design, conference design, and trade fair design. With over 15 years of experience, the company has worked with international brands such as adidas, Timberland, Menu, Sony, egetæpper, and vifa Denmark. However, operating in a highly competitive business environment, kommadesign faced the challenge of maintaining quality control over their processes and effectively utilizing their resources. The company needed to offer their national and international customers the best solutions and highest quality at the right price. To achieve this, they developed a four-phase model for their assignments, which required a tool that could facilitate the process from idea generation to implementation.

KOZ Architects, founded by Christophe Ouhayoun and Nicolas Ziesel in 1999, had been using 2D design software for their architectural projects. However, they found the process of designing a project in plan, then modeling it for communication, and making a specific model for thermal simulation to be inefficient and time-consuming. This challenge was particularly evident in their 'Tête en l’Air' project, which involved rehabilitating a social housing unit and creating 15 new wooden buildings. The project required a high level of detail and precision, which was difficult to achieve with 2D design software. Furthermore, the collaboration with carpenters, who think in 3D from concept to execution, highlighted the limitations of their existing 2D design tools.

The Akbank Academy Recreation Center (AARC), located on the Akbank Şekerpınar Campus on the outskirts of Istanbul, was faced with the challenge of revitalizing the existing bank headquarters. The goal was to create a mixed activity program that would make office work more attractive for the campus's 2,800 employees and improve their quality of life. The program was to include a variety of activities such as sports, culture, recreational facilities, and a mini market, which were otherwise difficult to accommodate in the immediate environment. The project was prestigious for Akbank, but it was also fraught with challenges. The design phase was under a tight schedule, and the architects had to deal with constant revisions, negotiations with numerous decision-makers, and obtaining permissions from local authorities. These issues persisted even during the construction phase.

The TRX Public Realm project, located in a 70-acre district in the city center of Kuala Lumpur, aimed to seamlessly integrate into its neighborhood. The project's centerpiece is a 10-acre park designed across multiple levels, including the roof of a shopping mall. The park's design aimed to create visual and physical connectivity between the mall and the park, integrating it into the urban fabric. The park was also designed to be porous to the larger landscape around it, allowing for a public space that is fully integrated into the urban fabric. The project faced challenges in implementing complicated civil infrastructure projects, such as box tunnels with super-elevations, which are more challenging compared to other types of building projects. The project also aimed to reduce any possible redundancies and uncertainties that would eventually lead to project cost overruns.