Avanza, a leading business process outsourcing (BPO) provider in Spain, faced several challenges in its operations. The company, which offers a wide range of services from retail operations to human resources to call center support, had to maintain efficiency while dealing with the cyclical nature of the BPO sector and tight margins. With over 7,000 employees spread across six countries, Avanza struggled with collaboration and communication, largely due to its outdated email platform that led to siloed working and the burden of maintaining its own servers. Furthermore, Avanza wanted to incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence into its business solutions, but its existing IT infrastructure was not equipped to handle these advanced technologies. The company was at a crossroads in 2016, deciding whether to continue with its current platform or explore new options.

Balgrist Campus, an internationally renowned research institute for musculoskeletal issues, was facing challenges in expanding its research on lower-back pain. The Integrative Spinal Research (ISR) group at the campus was gathering data from patients across a broad range of symptom durations, using an on-premises cloud setup linked to a network of supercomputers to process and analyze the information. However, this setup had limitations. The growth of the ISR research team and the success of their projects presented problems, including the need for more workstations and increased computing power. The expense of purchasing additional infrastructure and the desire for a more cost-effective solution led the team to seek alternatives.

Band Aid 30, a global philanthropic initiative aimed at raising funds for Ebola relief, was faced with the challenge of organizing a live performance featuring dozens of top music artists. The project was to be executed in less than 14 days, with a small team of two web developers, Mukesh Randev and Jonathan Horne from Adtrak, a UK-based media agency. The task was to deploy a website that could handle heavy traffic from millions of followers of the participating artists. The website was to be hosted on Google Cloud Platform, a platform that was relatively new to the developers. The challenge was to ensure the website remained online and could handle the anticipated heavy traffic, while also being cost-effective.

Banlinea, a Colombian fintech company, was in search of robust technologies to leverage data for its digital transformation and online sale of financial products. The company aimed to change people's lives by helping them make better financial decisions. To achieve this, it needed to understand users' behaviors using digital tools. However, it was critical for Banlinea to have a robust infrastructure that provided the necessary security and certifications to assure its customers. The company also needed the ability to scale its products globally and required new data analysis tools to detect patterns from people's behaviors to develop products that meet their financial needs. Furthermore, Banlinea needed a technology that was not limited to a single type or brand, allowing for versatility, capacity, and scalability regardless of the increasing number of simultaneous customers. Business challenges included quick responsiveness in the development of its products, timely delivery of information, and a high level of security.

BasisAI, a company that helps enterprises accelerate AI adoption, faced several challenges in its mission to deploy responsible AI applications. The company needed to ensure that the AI systems it helped develop were free of biases, which could potentially lead to loss of consumer trust if certain groups of customers were favored over others due to AI system biases. The process of taking AI from code to production required a tight collaboration between data scientists and DevOps within an organization, which could be complex and time-consuming. Additionally, managing the infrastructure for machine learning operations (MLOps) was a significant burden, particularly in terms of resource allocation and dealing with traffic spikes. BasisAI also needed to ensure robust monitoring of AI models to prevent downtime and manage cloud consumption costs. Finally, ensuring data privacy and security was crucial, especially for customers in regulated industries.

BE International, a direct marketing company, faced significant challenges with its e-commerce application, BE4U. The application was initially built on a monolithic architecture, which began to show its limitations as the company's membership base and transaction volume increased. Three major events - flash sales, new product launches, and month-end transaction processing - would cause the application to shut down, leading to a chaotic situation where invoices had to be manually generated. This not only jeopardized the company's image and sales revenue but also led to numerous complaints from members. The company needed a solution that could handle high traffic without compromising performance, allow the in-house team to focus on development rather than infrastructure issues, and improve overall member and customer experiences.

Beryl, a leading micromobility company in the UK, was faced with the challenge of ensuring its bikes, e-bikes, e-cargo bikes, and e-scooters were available at the right places and times to meet customer demand. The company aimed to encourage people to switch to sustainable transport to reduce traffic congestion, carbon emissions, and improve mental and physical health. However, to achieve this, Beryl needed a reliable, glitch-free customer-facing app and fully functioning vehicles. The company also needed to manage and analyze the vast amount of data generated by docking stations, vehicles, users, logistics teams, and maintenance crews to continuously improve its service.

BigChange, a company launched in 2013, has been instrumental in monitoring and managing over eight million jobs and tracking driving miles equivalent to over 100,000 trips to the moon. However, they identified a significant challenge in the industry. Many traditional companies requiring fleet and workforce management were wasting time, money, and fuel managing their mobile workforces due to reliance on outdated technology, manual reporting, or paper-based systems. BigChange aimed to build a system that would eliminate many of these antiquated processes, thereby improving efficiency and productivity.

Birlasoft, a global enterprise IT solutions leader based in India, was faced with the challenge of migrating its own SAP systems from on-premise to the new cloud-based RISE platform. This was a necessary step for Birlasoft to gain firsthand knowledge of the solutions it offers and provide best-in-class RISE transformation to its clients. The migration required selecting a public cloud hosting infrastructure that offered unlimited scale and agility to fully utilize the power of RISE. Birlasoft considered various providers before deciding on SAP on Google Cloud, a custom solution of Google Cloud to build, deploy, and manage SAP systems. The decision was influenced by Google Cloud's world-class compute capabilities, secure infrastructure, and intelligent cloud tools for machine learning and artificial intelligence transformation.

BK Medical, a manufacturer of ultrasound devices with operations in Denmark and the United States, faced a significant challenge when it decided to separate from its parent company. The company had been running SAP applications in-house with on-premises servers. The divestiture necessitated the separation of its data and systems, which presented an ideal opportunity to transition to cloud-based IT. However, the company needed to maintain its own data center while minimizing capital expenditure and reducing its on-premises footprint. The challenge was magnified due to the complexities of manufacturing and distributing medical devices globally, which included compliance, data and process management challenges, distribution, resource planning, and customer experience complexities.

Aerospike, an open-source, flash-optimized, in-memory NoSQL database, was looking to push the boundaries of Google's speed on Google Compute Engine. The challenge was to meet high throughput, consistently low latency, and real-time processing, which are characteristic of future cloud applications. The team at Aerospike was inspired by Ivan Santa Maria Filho, Performance Engineering Lead at Google, who demonstrated 1 Million Writes Per Second with Cassandra on Google Compute Engine. The goal was to benchmark Aerospike's product performance on Google Compute Engine and see if it could scale with consistently low latency, require smaller clusters, and be simpler to operate.

Almundo, a leading travel technology company and omnichannel agency, was facing a challenge in transforming its ecosystem into a more collaborative model. With operations expanding throughout Latin America, the company had over 800 professionals and more than 330 travel experts working in various areas of the business. The goal was to create a more coordinated work environment that would have a positive impact on productivity. However, the company was relying on legacy tools that were not conducive to collaborative work, distributed access, and productivity of work teams. The challenge was to find a solution that would meet these specific requirements and help the company maintain its leadership position in Latin America.

ARIGATOBANK Inc., a Tokyo-based financial services business, operates a platform called kifutown that connects donors with those in need of financial aid. The platform has grown significantly, handling over 2,000 donation projects as of March 2022. However, the company faced challenges in managing sudden traffic surges, particularly due to the influence of high-profile shareholder Yusaku Maezawa. A single social media post from Maezawa could lead to a significant increase in traffic, posing a challenge to the platform's infrastructure. The company needed a solution that could handle these traffic surges without impacting availability and latency. Additionally, ARIGATOBANK wanted to maintain development speeds and quality while undertaking progressive development, which required clear delineation of responsibilities and efficient operation of the application server.

The advent of education technology has revolutionized classrooms worldwide, providing a plethora of tools to enhance learning. However, this surge in educational tools also presents numerous challenges, such as identifying the most effective learning devices and equipping them with reliable management and monitoring tools. Blocksi, a company launched in 2011, initially provided internet filtering services through a Chrome-native app. The company soon realized that a significant number of families and schools were downloading its app, prompting it to tailor its tools for the education sector. The challenge was to expand its reach in education and power its business while ensuring the safe and compliant use of devices in schools.

ETH Zurich's Biomedical Informatics (BMI) Group is working on creating the world's largest-ever DNA search index by processing 4 petabytes of sequencing data. The goal is to make the world's genetic code more accessible for medical and scientific research. However, the team faced significant challenges in terms of data accessibility and processing. Despite having access to a vast amount of information in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) repository, existing methods did not allow for the most effective use of these datasets. The team's ambitions were curtailed by their other major obstacle: efficient accessibility. Before the switch to Google Cloud, the BMI Group had to limit its operations to smaller sequencing datasets of several terabytes in size, just to keep download and processing times manageable.

bofrost*, a European market leader in direct distribution of frozen food, was looking to evolve its business model to keep up with the growing global market for frozen foods, projected to reach $282.50 billion by 2023. The company's IT infrastructure relied heavily on legacy systems, with two on-premises data centers in Germany and Italy. Information about products was provided to customers via a twice-yearly print catalog, and salespeople used a basic device to access details about orders to be delivered. However, they couldn't access multichannel order histories and other additional information. The company wanted to transform its IT infrastructure to enable new ways of meeting its customers' needs, including a new point of sale (POS) platform to streamline delivery schedules and provide personalized suggestions to facilitate upselling opportunities.

Botmaker, an AI platform that creates and administers voice and text enabled bots, aimed to provide exceptional customer service across various channels. The challenge was to automate conversations between brands and people using AI, requiring an infrastructure capable of processing millions of messages, understanding them, and providing accurate responses in real time, 24/7/365. This was crucial to maintain the brand's goodwill with its customers, making data processing speed and scalability a significant technical challenge. Additionally, Botmaker had to meet strict safety requirements imposed by various customers, including large banks and international insurance companies.

AirAsia, a leading airline in the Asia Pacific region, aimed to become a 'data-first' business and a digital airline. The company needed technologies and services that could capture, process, analyze, and report on data, while delivering value for money and meeting its speed and availability requirements. The airline also wanted to minimize infrastructure management and system administration demands on its technology team. AirAsia realized that only a cloud service could meet its needs and began evaluating the market. The company also faced challenges with its legacy on-premises directory as it expanded to new markets and regions. Managing multiple servers across a number of on-premises data centers and the public cloud proved costly and time-consuming.

ACH Colombia, a financial services company, was established in 1997 with the aim of providing solutions to the financial industry and promoting financial inclusion among users. Over the years, the company has delivered several services, but it identified a new need among Colombians: the ability to send, receive, and request money easily and immediately, without having to leave their homes. This need became even more pressing in the context of social distancing and preventive confinement measures against the spread of COVID-19. Furthermore, ACH Colombia faced the challenge of delivering a 24/7 service across all regions of the country, and needed to ensure that the service was accessible to unbanked users. The company also wanted to promote the use of e-money to reduce costs, decrease the use of cash, and increase the security of transactions.

Augmented Human Lab, a research center at Auckland Bioengineering Institute, was faced with the challenge of inspiring curiosity for science in children, particularly those who lacked confidence in science subjects. The lab's founder, Suranga Nanayakkara, wanted to create a fun computer interface that could become an extension of a child's curiosity and imagination. This led to the birth of the Kiwrious project, which aimed to make science playful and exciting by using plug-in sensors that capture environmental phenomena. However, to spread the Kiwrious mission, especially in disadvantaged schools, Suranga needed powerful cloud solutions to free up his small team from mundane tasks such as server maintenance, enable unlimited scaling power, and protect the identity of pupils with world-class cloud security.

Autonom8, a US and India-based enterprise workflow management software business, aimed to help clients reduce costs and improve customer interactions through automation. The company provides a low-code SaaS platform that includes components like A8Studio, a chat platform, and an analytics module. However, the changing customer demands of enterprises, the rising cost of building software with experienced developers, and the need for customer journeys to evolve due to changing consumer habits and regulations posed challenges. Autonom8 initially deployed on a multinational cloud service, but the decision to opt for a microservices architecture that enables individual services to scale independently while running in a containerized environment demanded high-quality container orchestration. Furthermore, many of Autonom8's clients were financial institutions in India, legally required to retain data within the country's borders.

Avocados Don Goyo, a leading exporter of fresh Hass avocado, was facing significant operational challenges due to its reliance on on-premises infrastructure. The company's servers were located in rural areas, making them vulnerable to inclement weather and recurring power outages. This resulted in stressful situations for employees who feared potential damage to equipment and subsequent data loss. The company's access to its SAP systems was heavily dependent on weather conditions, which hindered its ability to manage operations effectively and explore new business opportunities. As a company aiming for scalability and international expansion, Avocados Don Goyo realized that relying solely on on-premises infrastructure was no longer viable. They needed to transition to a more agile cloud technology that could provide full availability of its SAP systems, regardless of weather conditions.

AVROTROS, a Dutch radio and television broadcaster, was facing challenges in engaging its audience through online media and mobile apps due to the limitations of its existing infrastructure. The broadcaster's infrastructure was not optimized for the scale that popular mobile apps work at, leading to outages and users being locked out of the app. This was a significant issue as AVROTROS aimed to foster a deeper connection with its audience by using every channel available. Additionally, AVROTROS had outsourced its back-end and was totally dependent on its suppliers, leading to stability issues and outages. The broadcaster needed a next-generation infrastructure to engage and retain its audience with next-generation apps and gain greater control and visibility into its infrastructure management.

Bareksa, an Indonesian fintech startup, was founded in 2013 with the mission to provide investment opportunities to the rapidly growing middle class in Indonesia. However, as the popularity of the platform grew, Bareksa found itself struggling to scale services during spikes in customer demand. This was a significant issue for a startup that relied on speed and 100% reliability to succeed. Additionally, its engineering team was spending a significant amount of time on DevOps tasks, such as provisioning servers and managing databases, leaving little time for creating innovative fintech solutions to grow the business. Bareksa was operating in a monolithic on-premise environment, with physical servers and a self-managed database, which was proving to be inefficient and time-consuming.

Bedatadriven, a company that leverages data and analysis to achieve their clients' goals, was facing challenges with their core project, ActivityInfo. ActivityInfo is a database platform for humanitarian relief operations and development assistance, used by over 75 organizations across Africa and Asia. The platform was initially developed for UNICEF’s emergency program in eastern Congo and is now used to track relief and development activities across more than 10,000 project sites. The challenge was to ensure that the system was highly available, given the challenging environments that ActivityInfo users work in and the nature of the crises. They also needed minimal system administration, allowing Bedatadriven to focus on product development. The platform also needed to scale up and down according to the load, with minimal human intervention. They also required clear monitoring tools to help pinpoint performance problems.

Engineering simulations are a critical part of designing and assessing infrastructure such as bridges, buildings, and aircraft. However, the industry-standard technology, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), is computationally intensive and often unfeasible for large-scale 3D simulations. These simulations require large amounts of RAM, often exceeding the capacity of a desktop workstation, and can take hours or even days of computation time. This is particularly problematic when time is at a premium and engineers need to perform hundreds or thousands of simulations for a piece of critical infrastructure. Additionally, attempts to integrate simulations within university courses have been unsuccessful due to the complexity of the tools.

Alcide, a cloud-native security leader, was facing challenges in securing complex and distributed cloud stacks for organizations. The modern cloud deployment was intricate with numerous moving parts and shifting parameters, making it difficult to operate and secure. The traditional security protocols were not sufficient for the evolving technology standards and the convenience of the cloud. Alcide aimed to provide a complete security solution specifically designed for cloud-based infrastructure, but the process of provisioning new clusters was manual and time-consuming, taking up to 2-3 days. This was a significant drain on their resources and time, which were already limited.

Allthecooks, a social media platform for cooking enthusiasts, faced the challenge of managing a rapidly growing user base. The platform, which allows users to find, rate, comment on, and post their own recipes, had to process hundreds of thousands of simultaneous API requests whenever popular chefs updated their content. The company, which started with just three part-time engineers and no external funding, needed a scalable and reliable infrastructure to support its growth. The challenge was not just about speed, but also about scalability. As the user base grew, the need for a more robust backend processing architecture became evident. Cost was also a significant concern as the company was using its savings to build the platform.

Alma, a fintech startup based in France, was founded in 2017 with the aim of providing an easy-to-use payment service that guarantees instant payment to retailers while allowing customers to pay in installments. The 'buy now, pay later' model, while beneficial for retailers in terms of increased conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and improved customer satisfaction, also posed significant risks. Retailers had to bear the burden of chasing debts and the possibility of late or cancelled payments. In France, such schemes were only viable for larger enterprises with extensive working capital and large credit lines. Smaller businesses were unable to afford the financial risks or secure the same level of support from their banks. Alma sought to address this challenge by developing an installment payment platform that would be accessible to a wide range of retailers and customers.

Alto, a ride-hailing company founded in 2018, operates with a unique business model where all drivers are W-2 employees and the company owns all the cars. This approach is designed to provide a safe, clean, consistent, and high-quality experience for every passenger. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining efficiency and competitiveness due to its smaller size compared to more established ride-hailing companies. One of the key issues was imprecise pickup points, which often led to delays and customer complaints. Drivers were often directed to incorrect locations, requiring extra driving time or contact with the customer to determine the proper pickup point. Additionally, the company had to manually input custom areas, locations from which riders frequently request a pickup that are not necessarily on the map yet. This process was time-consuming and inefficient.