HSS Hire, a leading tool and equipment hire company in the UK, needed to upgrade its database infrastructure to incorporate transaction encryption functionality for secure credit card transactions. The company had developed an online platform, HSSlivehire.com, which tied into an early version of the Actian X hybrid database. However, as the platform grew, so did the demands on the database. The company faced the challenge of not having designed its core database with online payment in mind. To provide an environment that was 100% secure for accepting credit card transactions through its website, HSS needed to upgrade its database. However, the company lacked the internal IT resources and expertise to perform the database upgrade.

TimoCom, Europe’s leading provider of freight and vehicle exchange services, was faced with the challenge of managing 450,000 freight offers per day and 30,000 warehouse/logistics options with efficiency and security. The business was complicated by the varied operational and regulatory requirements and languages of different countries. Company leaders recognized early on that sustained business growth would require improved performance and deeper insights into its international operations. In the transport and freight forwarding industry, orders tend to be large and represent a large investment on the part of the customer. Criminal organizations sometimes monitor and prey upon transport networks, attempting to steal valuable freight in transit.

In the depths of the 2008-2009 economic downturn, Autometrics faced a significant business challenge. The recession had hit the automotive and travel industries hard, and Autometrics felt the pinch. The company needed to completely reinvent itself to survive. Autometrics had access to a phenomenal array of U.S. auto industry data from sophisticated third-party sources, that, when combined with auto manufacturer data and intelligently analyzed, could help predict buyer behavior and deliver real impact to manufacturers’ and dealers’ bottom lines. However, many potential clients were not only reluctant to give up their internal data but also reluctant to trust it to a cloud environment.

Axiell, a UK-based company that designs, develops, implements, and supports systems for libraries, archives, museums, and other community resources, was looking to expand its services to all 33 boroughs of London, a growth rate of almost 200 percent. The company's existing system, a 64-bit Solaris system, limited scalability and was not able to support the increased workload that would come with this expansion. Axiell needed a system that could handle the increased workload without causing slowdowns or failures. Additionally, many of Axiell's customers are run by local government agencies, which are under pressure to control costs. As a result, Axiell was looking for a less expensive but technically superior platform that could help it increase service without increasing costs.

Badoo, a global networking site, was facing challenges in understanding the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and assessing the impact of their reach. They were using a hard-coded, custom-built analytics solution that was limited in functionality and could not provide the level of detail needed by the marketing and finance teams. The previous solution lacked the ability to perform detailed analytics and could not provide actionable insights based on events occurring among their user base.

BBP AG is a software and solution vendor specializing in the integration of interbank applications. The company's middleware, IGTplus, connects financial institutions to payment transactions, securities trading, and processing systems. BBP offers this middleware on an in-house or ServiceBureau basis for a range of financial networks including SWIFTNet, the trading, clearing and settlement systems of the SIX Group, as well as FED and CHIPS. The company serves more than 200 financial institutions, making it the largest SWIFT SB in the world. Product reliability, security, and control are top priorities for BBP. The company must be able to guarantee continuous interbank connection availability and 24x7 access to their business-critical application, along with unshakable security and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

The CIV, a subsidiary of the Dutch Police and a center of excellence for football hooligan management, was created in 1986 after particular heavy riots and violence related to football. The CIV needed to find a way to track previous football related violence, maintain a record of trends among offenders, and keep a database of all known football hooligans. As a result, it created the Hooligan Tracking System (VVS in Dutch) to gather information regarding incidents of violence, hooligans’ backgrounds, effects of actions, previous convictions, and trends in behavior. Cost management is key to any IT project in the public sector. The ability to integrate and allow access to the system was central to its success as a national and pan-European knowledgebase. As Hooligans travel through Europe for games, the VVS also understood the important of supporting multiple European languages, using Dutch and English as the default languages.

Cypress Semiconductor Corporation is a diversified supplier of high-performance, integrated circuits for network infrastructure and access equipment. The company’s manufacturing processes are intensive in both scale and precision, as its billion-dollar wafer fabrication plants conduct and log dozens of intricate manufacturing processes. If its machinery sits idle, the company has serious production problems. If the measurement specifications are off by a fraction of a millimeter, that’s trouble, too. “If you botch a wafer lot by executing a wrong step or mismanaging precision controls, you’ve literally destroyed a million dollars worth of wafers,” said Robert Price, DBA Manager at Cypress. “If any aspect of the system goes down, it will cost you.” This need for reliable, consistent performance has led Cypress to demand absolute perfection from its databases and related services. Simply put, if its systems can’t keep pace with its requirements, the company’s productivity comes to a costly halt.

DAI Rubicon, a company that provides publishers with an end-to-end solution including print, distribution, and circulation management, was facing a challenge. They were in a high volume, low margin business and needed to find a better way for customers to manage their logistics for online purchases. They decided to add a point of sale supply chain delivery solution that would make the ordering process more transparent, scalable, and easier to manage without adding to the cost. They chose Base2Services, Australia’s leading open source cloud computing specialist, to build the supply chain delivery solution. They wanted a solution that was more scalable, more transparent, and easy to use, built on the Amazon EC2 cloud that would lower their ongoing operational costs.

Emerson Network Power, a global leader in supplying business-critical power solutions, was in the process of centralizing their IT helpdesk in Manila. The goal was to seamlessly integrate the Australian operations with Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Emerson used the Infor Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution ‘MK’ as the central hub for information, distribution, and reporting. MK was built on Ingres Database and was integral to the daily operations of Emerson. The cost of downtime per business day was estimated at $1 million AUD. It was essential that a 24x7 disaster recovery resource was available to respond to any situation in a timely manner. Additional local support would be required to properly manage IT networks, systems, and databases for Australia. Due to the consolidating nature of the project, interoperability issues would become visible, and Emerson’s handling process would need continual development and improvement. To take all this work in-house would require hiring a minimum of three full-time employees which was considered an unworkable timeframe. Emerson needed a partner that could provide both the skill sets and knowledge base to service the Ingres database underlying the MK application, and provide a 24x7 support service with the highest level of support and continuity.

The Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) in Germany was tasked with monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-ban Treaty (CTbT). The CTbT, signed in 1996, prohibits all forms of nuclear testing in any environment, whether it’s underground, underwater, or in the atmosphere. The international monitoring system monitors compliance with the treaty, and comprises a global network of monitoring stations. One of BGR’s primary tasks includes monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the CTbT. In addition to monitoring the CTbT, the second key task of the BGR research group is the monitoring of earthquakes. Even today, it is still almost impossible to forecast when and where an earthquake might occur. Germany has seismically active regions that are repeatedly subject to earthquakes. Due to the high population and industrial density, continuous monitoring of seismic activity is essential. Only by careful monitoring is it possible to identify long term trends and make forecasts on future earthquakes and the accompanying seismic hazard. Both current and historical data on earthquakes form the basis for many scientific investigations.

Lynx Services, a market leader in auto glass claims management, required a high availability, transaction-processing oriented database solution that would enable it to process claims for its clients 24x7. The solution needed to be reliable, easy to use, and able to scale as the company grew. The company manages more than 3 million claims each year, processing three types of claims for insurance clients – auto glass claims, first notice of loss claims, and auto physical damage claims. The company needed a database that could handle this volume of transactions and provide high availability and quick transactional processing.

Magna, a leading global automotive supplier, had built a successful application called MAGIC that manages their complete production line as they manufacture and supply parts to car companies such as BMW, Bentley, and Land Rover. The application runs on Actian Ingres and Actian OpenROAD. However, Magna had limited internal resources to manage and monitor MAGIC, and they were looking to outsource this to a third party. The previous management of the application was done by Computacenter.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is dedicated to solving cases of child abduction and child sexual exploitation. Timely information is vital to the organization’s work, as its workers collaborate internally and with partner agencies around the globe to find and recover children at risk. When NCMEC began the implementation of its first database, it wanted to make sure its technology worked as hard – and as tirelessly – as its personnel. To help agencies and organizations around the world work together, the solution had to be able to support Web-based applications and websites in multiple languages and character sets serving diverse user communities. With time a critical factor in every case, the system also had to deliver maximum availability under any conditions.

NETinfo, a rapidly growing independent software vendor, was faced with the challenge of providing a cost-effective, fully customizable e-banking multi-channel solution to financial institutions. The solution needed to meet high-performance requirements including scalability, always-on availability, robust security, and full customizability. Additionally, the solution had to support multiple jurisdictions, single sign-on across multiple banks, and multi-signature workflows. The company initially used Oracle for the NETteller e-banking platform, but the high upfront licensing fees and costly ongoing support significantly increased the total cost of ownership. MySQL was also considered but was quickly rejected due to its lack of critical features such as online backup, point-in-time restore, and security features.

Sabre Holdings, a world leader in the travel marketplace, was looking for an open system solution to provide real-time inventory for travelocity.com and several other websites. The challenge was processing Origination and Destination, also known as Airline Inventory, which requires massive transactional throughput. Relational technology was not a good fit for this task. Sabre was looking to migrate from an expensive and proprietary IBM Mainframe System, TPF, to an open system solution using an object-oriented design approach to run its SabreSonic Inventory System.

Telecom Bretagne, a prestigious graduate engineering school in France, was tasked with developing a French validator and demonstrator system for the UsiXML project, which is based on the European Maritime Surveillance project. The challenge was to develop a database technology that could provide both the objects of the simulation and the operational information captured during the experimental or effective mission. The system needed to integrate various autonomous surveillance applications, tactile surfaces, and sensor systems, including maritime search and rescue, traffic monitoring, fishing inspections, and maritime border surveillance.

ACME Truck Line, a leading transportation company in the United States, was grappling with a labor-intensive and error-prone paper-based invoicing process. The company had to manually enter all invoicing data twice, once in its own accounting system and again in its customer’s invoice system. This double-entry practice not only increased the risk of errors and delays but also complicated the customer onboarding process. The challenge was further compounded by the fact that ACME's customers all had different invoice processing systems. The company was therefore faced with the daunting task of implementing an electronic invoicing solution that could seamlessly connect with all its customers' diverse systems.

Bloomberg Industry Group was faced with the challenge of integrating its Advantage Fixed Assets tax and accounting software into existing customer application and data infrastructures. The constant changes to tax laws and regulations often required the finance team to monitor and manage corporate data and assets in new and unexpected ways. This was problematic as the financial software and the corporate data and assets were not well and flexibly integrated. The changes often required finance professionals to gather data they had not had to track and monitor before, which may not even reside in their primary ERP systems. Tax changes could even be retroactive, requiring finance professionals to interact in new ways with systems and data repositories configured to support compliance with rules that no longer apply.

EidosMedia, a developer of digital publishing solutions, was faced with the challenge of creating a new digital editorial platform. The developers recognized that modern news consists of complex and relatively unstructured data, requiring a solution beyond a conventional relational database. The platform needed to manage and deliver content to a variety of emerging endpoints. The complexity and inconsistent structures of the content, which could range from text, graphics, audio, video, and more, posed serious challenges. The platform also needed to cater to an ever-widening range of devices, from televisions to smartphones, tablets, and more.

Expandium, a provider of network monitoring and management systems, was faced with the challenge of finding a robust analytics solution. Their mobile telco customers required near-real-time insights into the events impacting their large and complex networks, specifically those that could potentially affect their Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The need was for a solution that could be integrated into the intelligent systems Expandium was building, to provide deep visibility into network events, down to individual calls. The solution had to be capable of handling the massive volumes of data generated by these networks and deliver insights quickly enough for proactive issue resolution.

A mid-size enterprise software vendor, based in California, was struggling to optimize its sales and marketing operations in response to market disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite major investments in solutions from Salesforce, Marketo, and other vendors, the company was unable to gain a comprehensive 360-degree view of its customers. The individual apps feeding into Salesforce CRM were providing only fragments of the total customer picture, and the Salesforce CRM solution itself was unable to present these fragmented pictures as quickly as the company’s fast-moving go-to-market initiatives demanded. The full, 360-degree customer view, accessible in real time, continued to elude the company. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic had disrupted the dynamics of commerce like nothing in recent history. Uncertain economic conditions threatened to affect both the company and its customers, and the company needed to be able to respond more quickly and appropriately to customer needs and opportunities.

Netwrix, a company that provides information security and governance solutions, was facing growth and scalability challenges. The company needed to integrate its Salesforce and Oracle NetSuite solutions to support its transition from a small to a mid-sized company. The volume of inbound data was increasing, and there was a demand to process this data accurately and consistently across multiple systems. The old method of manually cutting, pasting, and reconciling data between systems was no longer efficient or effective. Furthermore, data integrity and security considerations required Netwrix to facilitate this integration in a way that protected and ensured the auditability of processes.

The Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU) at the University of Oxford was struggling with an aging legacy database infrastructure that could not handle the increasing volume of data nor run analytics against thousands of fields in multiple tables in a timely manner. The researchers at CTSU were dealing with vast amounts of information related to the causes and treatments of chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke. They were seeking greater insights into links between causes and diseases as well as prevention and treatment options. However, extracting insights from the ever-increasing volume of data was becoming more and more difficult. Their ad hoc analytical queries could take multiple days to return a response. The researchers needed a faster, more cost-effective way to identify, manipulate, and extract the exact data they needed from the large pool of data they had accumulated, and gain insights from that data far faster than the legacy infrastructure could accommodate.

TAIFUN Software, a Hannover-based company that has been developing commercial software for over 30 years, faced a significant challenge. The company needed a high-performance database with a small footprint for its ERP system, specifically designed for firms operating in the German and Austrian building trades. The database needed to be user-friendly and require minimal management, as most of the companies TAIFUN was targeting did not have access to an IT team or a skilled database manager. Many databases that were capable of providing a touch-free experience typically sacrificed performance for ease of use. Conversely, those that could provide the high performance TAIFUN wanted often came at the cost of ease of use, requiring ongoing management for optimal performance.

The Office of the Revenue Commissioners in the Republic of Ireland (Revenue) faced a significant challenge in improving the performance of their mission-critical database systems without compromising application availability or service delivery. The agency needed a highly reliable and available database platform to support uninterrupted operation of its mission-critical computer systems. The Revenue had to ensure that it could efficiently manage tax revenues, enforce import and export controls, administer various European Union schemes, and provide collection services for several other Irish government departments. The challenge was to maintain a system that could handle the influx of information and transactions as a large percentage of Revenue’s customer base moved to mandatory e-filing and e-paying.

Tsubakimoto Chain Co., a global machinery manufacturer based in Japan, was faced with the challenge of creating a registration and identification database capable of tracking and sorting up to 10,000 items per hour on their high-speed conveyor belt sorting systems. The company needed a solution that could meet their millisecond-level response times for database reads and writes. The challenge was not only to find a database that could handle the high volume of items but also to ensure that it could maintain its speed and efficiency over time. The company also needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate with their existing systems and processes.

The University of the West of England (UWE) was faced with the challenge of upgrading its student record system and underlying Ingres from Ingres 10 to Actian X, and migrating the entire system to the CentOS 8 implementation of Linux. This was a daunting task as the student record system was the only mission-critical application still running on the university’s aging Solaris UNIX systems. The challenge was further compounded by the global pandemic, which made it impossible for the teams to meet in person to plan or execute this critical project. The goal was to upgrade the database from Ingres 10.2 to Actian X 11.1 and to migrate the entire student record system from Solaris UNIX to the Linux platform, without interrupting access to the system.

ACME Truck Line, a leader in the truck transport of equipment, materials, and supplies throughout the United States, was facing challenges with its invoice processing standards. The company was asked by a major oil and gas industry customer to shift from paper to electronic invoicing. However, the traditionally paper-based truck transport industry had varying invoice processing standards from customer to customer. Before deploying the Actian solution, ACME had to enter all of its invoicing data twice: once in its own accounting system and once in its customer’s e-invoice system. This 'double-entry' practice doubled the risk of errors, delays and rework in the invoicing process. It also had an adverse impact on the company’s customer onboarding process, making it unnecessarily cumbersome and complex and hindering support of high-volume customers.

Bucap, a leading Italian company providing outsourced document archiving and management services, needed a highly flexible and scalable system to allow quick and easy customization of the applications to respond to business requirements. The company handles huge quantities of data which must be managed and stored in systems compliant with the requirements of high availability, accessibility and security. Bucap also needed the system to be scalable, reliable, highly available and easy to maintain, in order to be able to support all the business processes of storage, indexing, retrieving, and displaying of the documents at the service level agreement committed with the customers.