Actian

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.