The company's Security Operations (SecOps) team was facing challenges in securing the network perimeter. The process was largely manual, involving maintaining a rolling list of IP addresses (i.e., blacklist) at the firewall level. Any new IP address potentially viewed as a rogue actor was manually added to the “bottom of the list” by a SecOps resource. This approach was proving to be inefficient due to the vast size of the IP address list, the manual efforts associated with its maintenance, and questions regarding both accuracy and currency. With the company’s network and data center operations growth and the resultant expansion of their threat landscape, SecOps was in need of a next-generation perimeter security solution that would better safeguard business and complement what the nGeniusONE and smart visibility solution was already providing to cross-IT resources.

The manufacturer was facing performance issues with their plant floor performance management service (PFS) application, which is crucial for specifying feature options for the equipment, tracking the building and assembly processes, performing quality checks at the end of production, and noting repairs if they were required. The IT staff had visibility to evaluate and troubleshoot issues with this application in the data centers. However, once it hit the carrier’s MPLS network, there was a gap in visibility into application performance in the production plants that complicated IT’s ability to assure quality delivery was maintained throughout the entire communications cycle. As issues with this application were increasing in some of the plants, it became a priority for IT to gain visibility to investigate and resolve the problems before production schedules were further impacted.

The customer, an intergovernmental organization supporting many countries, was encountering DDoS Attack traffic, threatening their capability to keep services running to their data centers. They maintain separate and distinct data centers throughout the globe, each with diverse needs. Initially, they had employed several protection strategies including services offered by their ISP and a cloud solution. This approach was somewhat successful, but some attack traffic was still getting through and becoming a nuisance. They approached NETSCOUT to explore a hybrid approach, combining a cloud solution to watch for volumetric attacks and on-premise devices to identify DDoS traffic designed to evade volumetric attack mitigation.

The global retailer was undergoing a digital transformation that included the introduction of a “centralized performance hub” concept for maintaining the health of their network, applications, and end-users’ experience. This data center transformation was to supersede the highly distributed model currently in place for both networking technology and monitoring infrastructure. In addition to improving monitoring visibility into their global application services, the IT team was expected to achieve certain CAPEX and OPEX savings as well. By concentrating resources such as monitoring tools, switches, and human expertise into larger regional facilities, the retailer could consolidate data services for HQ, distribution centers, and stores. Call quality was critical for this retailer to ensure that communications between buyers, distribution centers, and retail stores, as well as calls in the customer contact centers, were seamless and problem-free.

The pandemic’s arrival marked the start of increased complexity in the company’s client, network, data center, and cloud service edge environments. Shortly after COVID-19’s emergence and the company’s expansion of virtual private network (VPN) services to support thousands of employees moving to work-from-home (WFH) environments, IT Operations conferred with their NETSCOUT PSE resources about maximizing the use of nGeniusONE and nGeniusPULSE to better inform their investigation and resolution decisionmaking. That effort quickly resulted in IT Operations using VPN split-tunneling to ease WFH users’ access to UC&C services directly over the Internet. Longer-term, IT Operations’ remediation approach involved establishing nearly 20 VPN access points and Palo Alto Network (PAN) f irewall services in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud resources. That approach seemed to address their remote network bandwidth issues quickly and securely, but it also revealed a gap in how well IT Operations could visualize VPN and firewall services were performing in AWS. Performance over these network service edges in the AWS environment was critical to WFH employees’ success. With only NetFlow and MIB2 data available to them, IT Operations struggled to make sense of the discrepancies between the disparate, siloed data sources. Further, IT Operations was losing visibility into performance at one remote site due to blind spots in the traffic traversing from their wide area network (WAN) into AWS.

The pharmaceutical company was facing challenges due to its expansion and workforce transition which led to hundreds of remote sites with limited IT visibility. The company was undergoing digital transformations amid a global hybrid workforce transition which was challenging daily IT operations and strategic project advancements. The Network Operations (NetOps) team was leading efforts to diversify and expand business technology platforms to keep pace with organizational growth. As a result, strategic planning had been commenced for Cloud-based services, Equinix Colocated Data Centers (Co-lo’s), VMware virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) projects in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions.

The company, a North American manufacturer of highly specialized technology for government and commercial customers, was facing challenges in maintaining the integrity of its infrastructure operations. Their network environment, which supports numerous primary branch office locations and remote sites, relied on multi-vendor routers and switches, with a recent introduction of VMware virtual servers. Despite having multi-vendor Unified Monitoring and NetFlow Monitoring tools to assess network and remote site performance, the IT team was not satisfied and wanted to enhance their abilities to assure manufacturing operations health through improved visibility into their remote environments, WAN utilization, and NetFlow traffic, as well as comprehensive monitoring of the devices operating in these locations.

The energy utility company had a gap in performance visibility for their VMware vSphere and ExpressRoute to Azure. They needed to assure the performance of applications and services at substations. The company had implemented NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management to ensure performance and availability of critical applications. However, visibility concerns included their VMware vSphere virtualized environment and around their firewall access points. Both areas seemed to have performance issues regularly and required visibility that could be shared with vendors and security for better, faster collaboration around the problems. Additionally, as they had adopted Office 365 for business services, they experienced a gap in performance visibility which made troubleshooting user problems a challenge.

The company, a multi-billion-dollar communications company with millions of consumer and business subscribers across a globally distributed environment, needed a visibility solution to monitor and secure data centers, contact centers, retail stores, and network edge environments. They were challenged to scale visibility in their high-speed data centers while undergoing tool consolidation. Some of the most compelling issues driving visibility with NETSCOUT solutions included: Availability and performance of customer-facing web sites and portals, quality and performance consistency for service representatives on customer calls in contact centers, avoiding and quickly troubleshooting quality issues, VPN performance, security, and access availability for remote employees to corporate services, quality employee user experience in remote offices with all applications hosted in corporate data centers or SaaS / UCaaS provider environments, and availability and performance of customer records and product inventory applications for sales agents in retail stores using local wi-fi.

The service provider was facing performance issues that were impacting their internal communications and customer interactions. They needed a solution that could monitor and troubleshoot issues in their data centers, contact centers, retail stores, and network edge environments. The performance of their network and applications was crucial for their operations, and any disruptions could impact their revenue, customer care, and reputation. The IT team was using a performance management tool, but it had several limitations, including the inability to analyze data from all devices in a single screen and lack of support for their digital transformations like cloud and virtualization initiatives.

The biopharmaceutical company faced several challenges. They needed to increase visibility and network interconnectivity to support strategic mergers and acquisitions. They also aimed to consolidate tools and integrate operational processes of the network and security teams by implementing a holistic strategy to monitor performance under one vendor. The company also needed to provide the network and security teams with recommendations for additional instrumentation based on NetFlow analysis and identified gaps in packet-capture. They also had to manage additional instrumentation at co-los, regional offices, and new manufacturing sites as the business expands and the need for performance management visibility increases. Lastly, they had to support the migration of specific in-house applications to the cloud by monitoring traffic and analyzing packets before, during, and after the transition, and adapt reporting processes to meet strict compliance regulations in various geographic regions.

The company had embarked on an aggressive digital transformation plan to migrate most if not all of their services in the cloud. Thousands of applications were in use to support their many product lines, manufacturing, and sales operations. Quality of experience was extremely important for employee productivity and customer service. For the last few years, their legacy environment had leveraged nGenius Enterprise Performance Management visibility for real-time network and application performance monitoring, management, and reporting. Countless times it had proven valuable in identifying the source of degradations - quickly avoiding broad disruptions that could negatively impact customers and employees. The plan developed for their future environment included migrating many corporate applications to AWS Cloud, moving network access closer to employees in their territories by implementing Equinix colocation data centers hosting VPN services, adopting several new software as a service (SaaS) applications, including Microsoft Office 365 and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) applications like MS Teams, and upgrading to SD-WAN at their remote offices and factories around the world to improve connectivity.

Nova DBA, a data services provider, faced a significant challenge when its clients experienced multiple cyber attacks on their corporate websites. The existing solution was unable to provide useful data for incident detection and response, leaving the company without real-time visibility to identify Indicators of Compromise (IoC) and understand the nature, source, or severity of the threat. The company's clients had experienced network-based events in their AWS infrastructure that caused network slowdowns and availability issues, raising concerns about the security of their critical applications and data. The cybersecurity team lacked visibility into the network attack vectors they were facing and had no tools or framework to detect, monitor, and classify these threats.

NWN Corporation is a managed service provider that serves both the public and private sectors and that has rapidly grown to more than 600 staff members and 13 worldwide locations. The company prides itself on delivering tailored solutions to fit each client’s specific needs and situation. As part of evolving IT to serve the business, more companies are adopting or planning to adopt advanced technologies in virtualization, converged infrastructure, and cloud platforms. While efficiency of service delivery typically increases with these technologies, the additional IT environment complexity often means organizations need external expertise. This continues to drive the case for managed services, for which NWN is a leader because of the breadth and depth of their service offerings. One such new offering is NCloud Hosted Collaboration (dial tone, presence, video, contact center enterprise) from their NWN-built public cloud, and is based on Cisco Unified Communication software running on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware and Cisco Nexus networking equipment supported by VMware vSphere virtualization software and EMC storage. To support new customer growth for this service, NWN needed to find a scalable, highly customizable monitoring solution that also provided complete coverage for the large base of existing managed service customers.

Flow International Corporation, a world leader in the development and manufacturing of ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) waterjet technology and a leading provider of robotics and assembly equipment, was facing challenges in complying with Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Section 404 requirements. As a publicly-traded company in the United States, Flow International is required to publish information in their annual reports concerning the scope and adequacy of the internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting. Documenting and testing financial controls had proven difficult in the past and they were looking for a better performing solution that would work easily with their new ERP solution, Microsoft Dynamics® AX. The company needed a solution that could simplify their SOX compliance efforts while maintaining strict security standards, ultimately saving time and audit costs.

The customer, a global market leader in the production of fresh berries, faced challenges with their complex global structure. They needed a tool that would simplify the process of adding users and handling segregation of duties to eliminate security concerns and ensure clean audits. The company had 86 entities, including a research arm and multiple entities in Europe, the U.S., Mexico, and Chile—each with unique processes. They moved European operations to Microsoft Dynamics AX on-premises in 2015, with the Americas following in 2016. However, problems arose when it came time for the upcoming audit. Auditors pointed out several issues: There was no way for the company to provide auditors with the information they needed, Segregation of Duties (SoD) were handled manually and therefore were not being sufficiently enforced, and there were several weak or undefined processes, and with the many entities, there were security risks around how the users were being managed.

Smith+Nephew, a leading medical technology company, was facing challenges with their aging GRC tool for SAP which needed to be upgraded or replaced in 2019. The existing SAP tool required manual work, making the management of user access within systems a laborious process. The team had to use Excel spreadsheets to check which roles had access, determine whether conflicts existed among them, create SOD reports, and decide how these conflicts should be mitigated. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, prompting the need for a more streamlined and automated solution.

M&M Excavating, a family-owned company based in northern Michigan, was facing communication problems related to equipment. Obtaining accurate and timely repair requests and meter readings from the field to the shop presented a significant challenge. The company was also using a less robust field tracking application and was generally satisfied with its estimating software. However, the deficiencies of these systems became more apparent as they explored the solutions offered by B2W Software. The company was also looking to improve the manual data entry process into the Foundation accounting system, which was a time-consuming task.

Alan’s Excavating, a commercial and municipal site grading and preparation services provider based in Augusta, Kansas, was in need of a specialized software for estimating and bidding. The company had been operating since 1979 and was looking for a solution that could help them save money by catching mistakes and allow them to bid more jobs in less time. The company also required a solution that could scale according to their needs.

American Asphalt, a regional market leader in paving and materials, has experienced significant growth since its inception in 1986. The company has always been committed to staying ahead of the curve with technology, techniques, and management practices. However, as the company grew, it faced challenges in maintaining the speed, accuracy, and standardization of its bids without increasing the size of its estimating team. In the late 1990s, American Asphalt made the investment to bring B2W Estimate software into the business, which made an immediate impact. However, continuous development and improvements within the product itself and the expertise of the estimators using it were required to keep up with the company's growth.

Bituminous Roadways, a company that started out in 1946 as a three-man crew doing residential asphalt work in South Minneapolis, had grown significantly over the years. With over 100 employees and a wide range of commercial and industrial projects throughout the greater Twin Cities area, the company was facing challenges in managing estimating and bidding. They had been using spreadsheets, but as the workload increased, so did the complexity of the bids. The company needed a solution to standardize bids and reporting capabilities that would allow management to quickly view estimate summary information from across the company. Additionally, they were in need of a field tracking and analysis solution to improve their cost tracking ability, having been using pencil and paper for too long.

Brosamer & Wall, a construction company based in Walnut Creek, California, specializes in structural concrete construction, bridges, viaducts, flood control, and water transfer structures. The company was looking for a solution to make the bidding process faster, easier, and more accurate. They needed a user-friendly software that could easily create, manipulate, and adjust bid items. Additionally, they wanted to have access to state-of-the-art server technology without the cost and IT effort necessary to maintain it themselves. The company was also looking for a solution that could seamlessly import Excel spreadsheets and manage and analyze bids from subcontractors.

Chesterfield Associates, a leader in marine construction and related projects, was facing challenges with their existing estimating and bidding solution. The company was losing time and effort due to the lack of flexibility and depth of features in their previous software. They needed a solution that could provide faster turnaround times, more consistent and professional proposals, and the ability to handle changes in plans or specifications with ease. The company also wanted to establish customized task and crew templates for recurring types of work and set up their own item databases, along with the bid items required by municipalities and other customers.

Continental Paving, a New Hampshire-based company that provides paving, site work, and materials for commercial developments, roads, highways, and airports, was using spreadsheets for estimating. While this method was satisfactory, it prevented estimators from easily and efficiently tapping into their prior estimating efforts. This limitation prompted the decision to switch over to specialized estimating software. The company evaluated several packages, including Hard Dollar (Now InEight) and HCSS, and was introduced to B2W Estimate solution by B2W founder and owner Paul McKeon.

C. R. Jackson, a company providing diverse services in South Carolina, was using HCSS Heavy Bid to manage estimating and bidding. However, the system did not integrate with its accounting software, which led to inefficiencies. The company began to evaluate competing systems and was impressed by the fact that B2W Estimate integrates with all major accounting and project management software packages. The company decided to switch to B2W Estimate to improve its operations.

Before purchasing B2W Estimate in 1999, C.S. McCrossan was using spreadsheets for estimating and bidding, and a lot of estimators were doing bids by hand. The company knew that a standardized system was needed to get everyone on the same page. The company had previously used StreetSmarts reports, printed and filled out by project managers, with paper time cards to manage their field tracking needs. This process had its share of problems, from the risk of costly errors to the lack of timely data reported.

Dallas 1 Construction and Development, a company providing a wide range of utility and sitework services in the greater Tampa, Florida area, was looking for a more efficient and unified way to manage their estimating and field tracking processes. They had been using B2W Estimate for over a decade but were still relying on a spreadsheet-based system for field tracking and analysis. The company wanted to take their field tracking and analysis to a higher, unified level. They also wanted a system that was easy to use and intuitive, with a low learning curve and the ability to bring new employees up to speed quickly.

The DDS Companies had been a long-time client of B2W Software, utilizing Estimate to ensure their bids are accurate and efficient. However, as the company grew in size, scope of construction and engineering services, geographic coverage, and utilization of B2W Estimate features, the need to simplify the process of preparing bids became more pressing. The company's founder, Sean Donohoe, had been using his own privately developed spreadsheets to prepare bids, but this method was becoming increasingly cumbersome and inefficient.

Gerber Construction, a Utah-based concrete construction specialist, was facing challenges with its estimating and bidding process. The company was seeking a solution that would enhance profitability through more efficient and accurate estimating and bidding. After evaluating Timberline, Gerber Construction thought it had made a decision, but then decided to give B2W Software a shot. The company was immediately impressed by the fact that B2W Estimate is optimized for multiple users, allowing any number of estimators to work on the same estimate at the same time with no performance degradation—a major benefit for a large company.

Hoffman Bros., Inc., a leading excavation company in Michigan, was facing challenges with tracking costs in the field. The company, which employs over 100 construction professionals and operates over 100 pieces of equipment, was using a combination of manual forms and custom Excel spreadsheets for field tracking. This system had been in place for decades, making the collection and interpretation of data time-consuming and inaccurate. The company needed a new solution that would save time, reduce the potential for errors, and eliminate redundant data entry by field supervisors and accounting personnel.