STRATEC is one of the most innovative medical engineering companies in Germany. The development team was looking for a small but powerful object-oriented database that was available in “embedded mode” and would not require any database administration tasks from end users. The company develops and manufactures fully automated analyzer systems for clinical diagnostics and biotechnology. Main applications are blood group analysis, serological tests for infectious diseases, and immunoassays. About 90% of STRATEC’s products are licensed and sold through OEM customers, who market the systems under their own brands, including the chemical reagents.

Reliance Mutual, a UK-based life and pensions company, underwent a significant shift in its business model in 2003. Instead of writing new policies, the company started buying poorly performing existing life and pensions policies from other insurers. This aggressive growth strategy relied on the company's ability to aggregate these disparate policies within a single, highly efficient administration system that could turn the previously unprofitable into a robust income generator. The transition posed a two-fold challenge for Reliance Mutual’s IT department – to build and maintain a database capable of managing tremendous volumes of data, including migrating and integrating blocks of newly acquired policies – and to do so with a staff that had been dramatically reduced as part of a strategic review.

Pinnergy, a leading diversified energy services company, was facing significant challenges with its manual, double-entry invoicing process. The process was not only tedious but also time-consuming, taking between 30 and 90 days to get an invoice entered into a client’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system. The company's customers, which included a wide range of large and small oil and gas industry firms, did not rely on any common back-office system, making electronic invoicing a complex task. As Pinnergy’s business grew, the order management became even more complex with more customers to invoice and higher volumes of transactions to manage. The invoicing process became a bottleneck, resulting in high transaction costs and accounts receivable aging. Pinnergy officials knew that an electronic invoicing solution would dramatically streamline this process, but the challenge was to find a solution that could integrate with the diverse EDI systems of their customers.

Pediatrix Medical Group, a leading provider of maternal-fetal, newborn, and pediatric sub-specialty physician services, was facing significant challenges in its claims processing due to lack of data integration. The company works with multiple clearinghouses for insurance claims and receiving claims status reports, each of which employs unique and complex formats in generating reports. The lack of data integration between internal applications and clearinghouses caused breaks in information flow, slowing down the claims review and reporting process, and creating a disconnect between reporting and other process steps in the Pediatrix patient life cycle. As the volume of the claims increased, these challenges grew more severe, causing bottlenecks and delays in insurance claims processing.

C&K Market, a supermarket chain servicing Oregon and Northern California, was facing the need to transition from its legacy VMS platform to a new platform. The company wanted to adopt an open source database solution to take advantage of improved efficiencies, scalability, and low total cost of ownership. The company had been running Ingres on a VMS platform, which was being phased out. The efficient reporting and analysis of pricing and inventory – and effective control of costs – was all enabled through the Ingres Database, an enterprise open source database.

ISS Switzerland, a leading integrated facilities services company, was in need of a robust ERP back-office solution to support their payroll/HR, accounting, invoicing, and financial reporting needs. In the highly competitive market of facilities management, the company required a strong ERP system that would allow local management to run their business optimally. Additionally, the local entity needed to ensure that it could report its financials back to their corporate business in a timely manner and meet all the financial reporting requirements on an international level. After an exhaustive tender process where ISS Switzerland evaluated many other solutions, the company chose to work with Syslog and implement their ERP solution: Syslog ERP.

Verite Group was developing a packet reconstruction and network intelligence application, Netscope, which was expected to handle diverse deployment environments and large, complex data streams. The original designs for Netscope called for a relational approach, with the IBM DB2 PureXML to drive the application. However, during testing, it became apparent that the computational cost of retrieving and translating XML from the database into in-memory objects was prohibitive, to the point where enterprise scaling would be limited. Turning to an object-oriented approach, Verite looked to the Hibernate framework and ran simulations with both MySqL and PostGres powering the system. While the object approach proved the right path, the Hibernate setup put a drain on CPU and disk usage, to the point where it impeded performance at even modest network data volumes.

Unruly Media, a leading global technology platform for social video distribution and analytics, was faced with the challenge of providing its clients with real-time visibility into the social footprint of their videos. This included factors such as reach, shareability, and other elements critical to gaining a competitive business advantage. The company needed a robust solution that could handle the delivery, tracking, and auditing of billions of video views across thousands of social video campaigns for hundreds of brands.

NK.pl, a popular social networking service in Poland, was facing a challenge in keeping pace with the changing preferences and behaviors of its 13 million users. The traditional transaction database used by NK.pl was not powerful enough to process the 250 terabytes of data generated by its users in a timely manner. When product managers attempted to run queries against the data, which was spread across 1,500 servers, they faced query response times of three to four weeks. Such slow response times were unacceptable to NK.pl because the data was outdated and meaningless by the time it was received. To optimize product features, marketing efforts, and the experience of its social network members, NK.pl needed a system that could perform both simple and rich queries quickly for intra-day analysis and response in an extremely cost-effective manner.

With its business growing, Peerless needed a more consistent, flexible platform to modernize its production environment and support future expansion. The company began exploring commercial off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and underlying databases. While companies in similar situations often go straight to proprietary vendors, Peerless decided to build its own ERP solution from the ground up. With a team of just a half-dozen developers, Hamilton’s department set out to develop a fully featured business platform that would automate every aspect of the company’s business processes – from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution – in order to enable a highly optimized just-in-time manufacturing process. To support this environment, Peerless required a flexible, scalable database environment that would be easy for developers to optimize around the evolving ERP platform.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the manufacturing industry. The replacement of expensive PLC-based devices with cost-effective IoT-enabled devices has become a norm. Global Shop Solutions, a provider of a popular ERP solution for over 40 years, faced the challenge of meeting customer demands for IoT-enabled options. They needed a lightweight, embedded database solution that could interact efficiently with the Actian Zen database, the core of its ERP solution. The challenge was to find a serverless database that could be embedded within these inexpensive devices to store and process information. Using a tool like SQLite could meet the need for a small-footprint serverless database capable of collecting data, but sharing the data with any server-based database would require a middleware layer to transform the SQLite data into a format that another database could ingest.

Hannover Life Reassurance Company of America (Hannover Re) was facing a significant challenge in onboarding new insurance clients due to the high volume and variety of data and file formats. The existing custom-coded solution was unable to efficiently ingest, transform, or normalize all the data for downstream consumption within the firm. This inability to handle the variety and volume of information slowed down data ingestion and transformation, subsequently delaying downstream analysis by other teams at Hannover Re. The company needed a solution that would not only improve data integration and management but also enable teams to access and use the information without the constant intervention of the IT department.

Lufthansa Systems, a leading full-service IT provider for the airline and aviation sector, faced the challenge of providing a robust and stable database platform to support its own planning and routing software. This software is not only used by Lufthansa but is also licensed to hundreds of airlines globally. The database platform needed to be reliable, capable of real-time data availability, and cost-effective. The challenge was to ensure high levels of uptime and stability, crucial for the smooth operation of thousands of flights and the satisfaction of millions of passengers worldwide.

PredictX, a leading provider of predictive expense analytics, faced a challenge when a client required greater insight into their Employee Generated Spend (EGS). The client needed a solution that could provide a comprehensive view of various expenses, ranging from office equipment to meal delivery and entertainment. The challenge was not only to control costs but also to ensure good governance and accountability to shareholders. PredictX had a solution that could meet these needs, but it was not cloud-based. The client had a specific requirement for the solution to be deployed on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) due to its security and governance features. While PredictX had plans for a cloud-based offering in the future, they needed to expedite this process to meet the client's needs.

Lechler GmbH, a German mid-sized company specializing in the manufacture of nozzles and custom spray technology solutions, needed to revamp its company-wide manufacturing technology solution. The company aimed to improve its business processes, enhance and extend its reporting options, and ensure flexibility in its database administration. The ultimate goal was to continuously improve customer service and minimize the time from order to delivery. Prior to the implementation of the new system, Lechler was working with a large data processing center which was very inflexible.

Pinnergy, a diversified energy services company, was struggling with an outdated, manually-driven invoicing process. Invoices moved from the dispatch system through customer signoff and then had to be entered into customers’ online electronic data interchange (EDI) systems. This process was tedious and involved significant duplication of effort and data, increasing the potential for errors and disputed invoices. As Pinnergy’s business grew, order management became more complex, with more customers and a higher volume of transactions moving through multiple applications with various data formats to support and no common standard for data exchange. The invoicing process became a bottleneck, resulting in high cost per transaction and high accounts receivable aging.

Banca IFIS, an independent Italian bank specializing in financing enterprises, faced a challenge when new Italian banking regulations imposed a demand for a higher level of security and data protection. The bank had to evolve its core business application to meet these new challenges. The main issue was the limited time frame available to implement the new version of their application to meet the timeline given to the bank. In less than one year, they had to deliver a cost-effective and scalable solution, a fully unicode enabled database and application to support Banca IFIS expansion, high availability, and a secured infrastructure fulfilling disaster recovery targets imposed by new banking regulations.

British Friendly, an income protection mutual company, was running an outdated version of the Ingres database (v2.6) for their M2000 insurance application. The company wanted to upgrade to Ingres v9.2.3 to benefit from the database’s new functionality and new hardware. However, they only had one administrator to manage the M2000 insurance application and lacked the internal resources needed to both upgrade to v.9.2.3 or continue to monitor the Ingres database to ensure their applications and associated systems continue to run smoothly. Furthermore, the company needed to ensure that their internal risk levels were not compromised by upgrading their internal systems.

Echelon is a pioneer and world leader in control networks and embedded control networks, which connect machines and other electronic devices. They needed an embedded database compatible with the object-oriented application model. A predecessor of LNS was introduced in 1991, using procedural code and an embedded record oriented/ relational data storage toolkit. As object-oriented programming began to emerge, the team realized that using object-oriented programming was the most productive way to add features and power to the system. At the same time, the team realized that the record oriented storage toolkit was an obstacle to object-oriented development and a big usability problem because it exposed the embedded database structure to their broad OEM programmer community.

The Federal Railroad Administration is expecting railroad freight traffic to double by 2020. However, the U.S. railroad infrastructure cannot be expanded to keep pace with this demand. Railroads are confronted with meeting this demand in some other way. GE Transportation Systems, the global technology leader and supplier to the railroad industry, is addressing the problem with RailEdge® Movement Planner, an object-oriented software system incorporating the Versant Object Database. GE Transportation’s customer, Norfolk Southern Railroad, operates 2,500 trains per day over a 21,000-mile system serving every major container port in the eastern United States. Norfolk Southern expects to increase railroad capacity, velocity and efficiency with no new tracks, to increase average network train speed 10 to 20 percent, and to save millions of dollars in capital and expense.

The Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU) of the University of Oxford is involved in extensive bioresearch and healthcare studies. They extract and analyze data related to the causes, prevention, and treatment of chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and strokes. However, they faced a significant challenge when they realized that their existing database platform could not cope with the large data volumes involved in their research. The legacy platform struggled with complex queries, especially when they involved several thousand fields. The analytics could take days, which was not acceptable for the fast-paced research environment. They needed a solution that could handle high-speed analytics and deliver results within extremely fast timescales.

The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), an executive agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was facing the challenge of keeping pace with rising regulatory challenges without increasing costs. The organization’s mission encompasses ensuring the safety, effectiveness, and regulatory compliance of plant protection products used by both industry and amateur gardeners; regulating a market worth around £450 million in the UK and a similar figure in overseas exports; and shaping UK policies on pesticide issues – all with a staff of only 200. Technology plays a vital role in making this possible. Most recently, Park’s group was called on to deliver a particularly high-profile project – enabling the electronic delivery of all services, followed by the introduction of a complete, end-to-end electronic workflow for the entire new product application and approval process.

The Rohatyn Group (TRG), a hedge fund based in New York, needed a solution to manage risk in the highly volatile market of hedge funds. Information about positions, pricing, and risk is critical to investment decision-making. For tactical decision-making, TRG provided analysts immediate access to the information they needed in a format that they could use through a self-service data access environment. However, the combination of market volatility and a desire to do more strategic analysis drove the need to understand how their positions had performed over time. While the existing solution provided the interactive analysis TRG was looking for, it did not have the historical data. They wanted the user tools to remain the same and the query responses to be interactive, but they needed to do the analysis on more than 1000 times the data.

The Bank’s in-house analytics solution, Netezza, had reached its end-of-life cycle and was not going to be supported by IBM or its channel partners. The Bank needed to create one data repository for all positions across all asset classes, enabling ad hoc analysis of positions and their sensitivity to market factors. The Bank also wanted greater visibility into its risk exposure. It knew that presently, managing client risk and exposure was at 20th-century levels. For example, risk and opportunity value was analyzed via batch data dumps once a day. The Bank needed greater insights, delivered in sub-minute intervals, multiple times a day. It also had additional criteria that had to be met, including improved price/performance levels, ease of development and maintenance, durability, and a palatable TCO.

Bucap, a leading document archiving and management services provider, was faced with the challenge of managing and archiving massive amounts of data for public, private, and governmental organizations throughout Italy. The company needed a flexible, scalable database that could enable quick and easy customization of applications in response to evolving business requirements. The data may not be touched for decades, but some of it may be required at a moment’s notice. Bucap’s customers needed assurance that their data was secure and that they could access it without delay if and when necessary. In 1995, Bucap realized that meeting the company’s growth goals would depend on smart investments in IT. They needed to build an archiving solution that would be scalable, reliable, highly available, and easy to maintain to support all the business processes of storage, indexing, retrieving, and displaying documents at the service levels they wanted to offer their customers.

A large global bank was faced with a significant challenge when support for its analytics solution, Netezza Twinfin, ended. The bank needed a new analytics solution that would not only replace Netezza but also deliver deeper insights faster, scale with the bank's growth, and keep costs low while delivering high performance. The bank required a solution that would support a single data repository for all positions across all asset classes, facilitating ad hoc analysis of positions and their sensitivity to market factors. The bank also wanted a solution that could ingest, analyze, and act on massive volumes of both structured and unstructured data in short order. The bank had long desired deeper and more timely insights into its risk exposure, as Netezza provided risk and opportunity value analyses only once per day via batch data dump. The bank aimed for a solution that could deliver insights in sub-minute intervals throughout the day. Performance, scalability, reliability, and cost were also critical factors in the bank's decision.

Superior Energy Services, a Houston-based company serving the drilling, completion, and production-related needs of oil and gas companies worldwide, faced a significant challenge in improving its working capital by reducing days sales outstanding (DSO). The company had grown by acquiring hundreds of smaller firms, each operating autonomously with their own unique ERP systems. This resulted in a decentralized IT infrastructure with over 100 different product and service lines. The lack of a unified system led to inefficiencies, particularly in invoicing. Individual units within Superior were invoicing the same customers independently, which was both inefficient and time-consuming. This fragmented approach also increased the overall number of days it took for Superior to collect payment for its services, negatively impacting the DSO key performance indicator (KPI). The challenge was to streamline this process without imposing a centralized system or specific mandates on the individual units.

Unit4 C-Logic, a Bruges-based company, was in search of a high-performance accounting solution that was easy to manage and designed around Belgian accounting rules. The company wanted an embeddable, performance-oriented database that could operate optimally without ongoing administration. The challenge was to find a database that could deliver high performance, extensibility, and scalability without requiring the active involvement of a database administrator (DBA). This was crucial as their target customers were small-to-mid-sized accounting firms, which typically do not have sophisticated (and costly) database administration skills. The company needed a database that could reliably deliver a high-performance experience without the ongoing attention or cost of a DBA.

Unruly Media, a London-based advertising technology firm, was faced with the challenge of delivering actionable, real-time insights to its clients to help them make decisions about expanding the social footprint of their critical video campaigns. The company needed to provide insights on where the video is running, who is viewing it, who has tagged it, and who is sharing it. The challenge was to provide these insights in real time, not days or weeks later. Unruly Media needed to tame the unruly stream of real-time data and enable clients to make use of it.

Netwrix Corporation, a market-leading visibility and governance platform for IT environments, was facing several issues due to their archaic data management system of copying and pasting data between datasets. This process did not scale as the company grew to a $20 million company and it quickly became clear that the company needed a better solution. The company faced three main challenges: eliminating errors in their copy and paste method, scaling their processes, and improving data integrity. In order to solve these systematic problems, Netwrix needed an efficient and effective enterprise planning software that could allow them to smoothly integrate with Salesforce.