Ringling College of Art and Design faced a challenge of explosive data growth caused by high-resolution, digital file-based workflows. This created a demand for future-proof storage that could scale on demand. The college wanted to use technology to support art as a tool, so that students could be creative without having to manage technology or deal with interruptions to their work. A robust, reliable and transparent storage infrastructure was required to accommodate the college’s desire to give students seamless access to all their digital assets, regardless of platform or location. The college wanted to avoid the management, access difficulty, cost and complexity of siloed storage.

MLB Network, a 24/7 TV network for baseball fans, was facing challenges in managing its vast baseball video archive. The network required a high-performance disk cache to support tape migration for the archive while accommodating 7,000 hours of new content ingested weekly. They also needed to simplify complex, concurrent workflows to ensure seamless support for up to 40 post-production jobs concurrently. The network was also looking for a technology that could suit the needs of two sports TV networks. The immediate challenge was moving LTO-4 content into a disk cache and then rewriting that content onto T10KD tapes, while simultaneously recording and archiving new footage onto the T10KD platform.

Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) was faced with the challenge of speeding up data access times in parallel with continually improving algorithms that interact with data subsystems. They aimed to achieve this while maintaining optimal power consumption and system efficiency. The institution sought to break away from the conventions of the world's top supercomputers by incorporating elements and design points from containerization, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and Big Data.

Mount Vernon Mills (MVM) is a diversified manufacturer of textile and related products for various markets. They have a central philosophy of doing whatever it takes to satisfy the customer, which includes end-to-end automation of the exchange of complex business processes and transaction data. However, they faced challenges with their legacy EDI system which had become extremely expensive in terms of labor for the custom code needed to both use and maintain the software system. They also had to deal with 'Swivel Chair Integration', a time-consuming and error-prone process of manually transferring data from one application to another.

Woodstream, a provider of wildlife and pest control systems, lawn and garden products, and pet supplies, was informed by their legacy EDI system provider that their product would no longer be supported. This meant that Woodstream would have to go through a complete conversion and platform change to use the vendor’s supported solution. As the team was establishing requirements for a new system, they uncovered needs beyond traditional EDI. They needed an automated way to accept and integrate formats such as spreadsheets, flat files, and XML. They also pinpointed a need for A2A integration to automate and synchronize sharing of data between disparate applications and platforms for better reporting and improved internal business processes.

Citizen, a market leader in the mid-priced watch category in North America, was facing a challenge in responding to the demands of internal departments and external customers and partners quickly and cost-effectively. Their legacy EDI system was not efficient enough and required custom code for operations, which was time-consuming and lacked data visibility.

Maple Leaf Farms, America’s premier producer of quality duck products, has thousands of customers, ranging in size and type from large retailers and food suppliers, to small Chinatown restaurants and markets. While the restaurant owners may not use EDI and business integration, most of Maple Leaf’s customers rely on it for accuracy, speed and efficiency. In fact, Maple Leaf has 100 trading partners, and sends and receives 2500 EDI transactions per month in more than a dozen different transaction formats. The challenge was to handle the high-speed exchange of B2B electronic trading documents and rapid set up of new trading relationships, but also facilitate automatic integration of these documents in the applications, systems and processes used by the company — without custom coded interfaces.

C.R. England, the largest temperature-controlled carrier in the world, was facing a challenge in providing frequent, real-time communication and shipment status reports within the supply chain. The company needed to find a way to improve communication between trucks on the road, shipping, and customers, while also automating day-to-day EDI operations. The challenge was to do this quickly and cost-effectively.

The State of Iowa's Department of Administrative Services (DAS) was tasked with maintaining a database of debtors within a vendor-offset program. This required the integration of data from both inside and outside the state's network. In 2007, legislation was passed allowing county and city agencies to add their debtors to the database, leveraging the state's data processing power to secure payments of locally oriented debts. This new program required the database to pull information from dozens of different file types. The challenge was that thousands of files from local agencies were inundating the database with incomplete files and mismatched data.

The transportation industry is extremely fragmented with few standards and common practices. The flaw in the way supply chains have worked since biblical times is that every party in a transaction has partial data. By Truckl's metrics, 1 in 3 truckloads is flawed in some way. The shipment is late, or it never arrives. The order is partially shipped, or the wrong parts are sent. Nobody in the chain has all the data. In total, data gaps in the supply chain cost the world economy as much as $3 trillion. Mobile phone technology has the potential to correct this ancient flaw.

RXBAR was experiencing rapid growth and needed to make their shipping process more efficient and automated to keep up with demand. The company was relying on manual processes to put shipment bids out to their trucking partners, which often led to delays. Data was not always available to sales and customer service representatives when they needed it most. This hindered internal adoption of the company's new Salesforce CRM system, making it even more difficult to accurately assess and improve the sales and shipping process. RXBAR needed to provide all departments with a 360-degree view of the product across all systems.

Petzl, a company associated with adventure, exploration, and rescue, faced a challenge when they launched their B2B website. They needed an integration tool that would seamlessly connect their backend ERP system with their customer-facing portal. The goal was to provide retailers a real-time look at inventory availability without resorting to lengthy and complex hand-coded integrations. Additionally, they needed to connect ERP data with both the B2B customer-facing portal and Salesforce CRM, provide ongoing real-time synchronization of data, and provide a single view of all account data within Salesforce for access by sales team members.

Winona Health, a community-owned healthcare provider, was facing a challenge in managing over 3,000 incidents related to patient and visitor safety each year. The existing incident management software was not capable of integrating with the board-mandated Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) program. The separation of the incident management program from ERM was reducing the value of the program as incidents were manifestations of risk. The organization needed to track their risk mitigation activities back to their effort on hospital incidents to understand which controls were most effective and where to provide additional resources. The implementation of a new system presented logistical challenges as well. The client had just 45 days between signing their agreement with LogicManager and the end of their contract with the previous incident management solution. Any downtime in employees being able to report patient safety incidents would cause huge regulatory and liability concerns.

REN’s significant domestic and international growth coupled with a drive to further improve performance and quality of service lead to them commissioning two new datacentres in 2018 to host the country’s critical information and telecommunications systems. REN’s original datacentres were siloed, hundreds of kilometers apart, and focused on Disaster Recovery (DR) as the primary use case. Provisioning new applications or VMs took two to three weeks, involved stitching together disconnected technologies, and was both manual and error-prone. In addition, a focus on Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning rather than application architecture, a lack of telemetry and analytics, and the understandable difficulties of knowledge sharing amongst distributed employees and contractors gave the team at REN significant challenges as they tried to position themselves for future growth. Faced with technical debt and legacy processes, REN recognized the possibilities offered by implementing a unified approach to application orchestration and automation. Their new mission was to achieve a single end-to-end workflow with complete visibility to all stakeholders.

The large multi-campus state university had a diverse and open IT operations structure, with each college and administrative unit in charge of its local IT needs. A centralized IT services team focused on offering shared access to certain IT services, including hosted private cloud for dozens of groups and hundreds of end users. The university's virtual machine (VM) hosting service had built its own homegrown portal to serve the university. However, due to new IT priorities, the homegrown portal was no longer a key initiative moving forward. This triggered the need to find a new approach for self-service VM hosting and private cloud that was less brittle and easier to maintain. The IT team was ready to get out of the “wrench-turning” business of manually provisioning applications and VMs to university end users, many of whom had non-technical skillsets. These users often needed access to IT services after hours or on weekends and desired a self-service approach to provisioning. It was time to find a way to reduce service ticket volume, centralize hosted VM platforms, and up service delivery.

MercadoLibre, the largest online marketplace in Latin America, was facing challenges with visibility into their distributed applications and dynamic hybrid cloud infrastructure. They had been using various open source tools to monitor their framework, but these disparate solutions made it difficult and time-consuming for them to correlate telemetry data from across their stack. The constant changes being made by separate teams in a shared hybrid cloud environment proved to be too dynamic for these basic monitoring tools to handle. They needed a tool that was purpose-built for monitoring multiple applications in a dynamic hybrid cloud infrastructure.

As SimpleReach’s platform grew, teams began spending more time tracking and comparing performance metrics during infrastructural updates. Their existing open source monitoring tools created a disconnect between development and operations teams, making it difficult to assess the performance implications of frequent changes in the production environment. The underlying problem was a familiar one: a disconnect between development and operations. “The developers didn’t realize how the changes they were making were affecting the production environment,” Lubow recalls. “Some of the impacts were significant, and the need for frequent changes in both application and system software was making the situation untenable.”

Neto was looking to move its existing legacy infrastructure to the cloud in order to drive automation and support their customers’ growth. However, their existing monitoring tools were unable to scale dynamically and could not track services across ephemeral infrastructure components. This posed a challenge as they needed a monitoring solution that could provide real-time visibility across a highly-automated environment. Prior to moving to the Amazon public cloud (AWS), maintaining and scaling Neto’s legacy infrastructure was slow, reactive, and prone to technical difficulties. Neto’s infrastructure environments often drifted out of sync, making it hard to increase capacity or deploy changes to production without engaging in manual, time-consuming processes.