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.

Apiiro, a cloud-native application security platform, was faced with the challenge of providing complete visibility of all application components to security and development teams. This was crucial in order to map the application attack surface and proactively remediate critical risks before releasing to the cloud. The complexity of security issues was increasing as software development accelerated and businesses used agile models to deploy more apps at a faster rate. Traditional application security tools were proving ineffective in improving a company's security posture due to the intricate combination of multiple factors that contribute to risks. Furthermore, Apiiro needed to ensure near-perfect uptimes to deliver resilience and grow its business on Google Marketplace.

Arab Bank, a leading financial institution in the Middle East, recognized the need to innovate and modernize its services to maintain its market position and attract new customers. Despite its strong presence in the market, the bank faced challenges in responding quickly to the growing consumer market and the small and midsize enterprise (SME) sector. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where Arab Bank operates, has a largely unbanked population, with a significant portion interested in new digital tech capabilities. The bank also had to deal with legacy systems and applications, which made it difficult to release new features and functionalities frequently. Furthermore, Arab Bank had to navigate regulatory constraints such as data residency rules in the countries where it operates.

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.

In Indonesia, the fishing industry has traditionally been fraught with challenges. Fishermen relied on traditional knowledge to predict weather patterns and locate prime fishing grounds, leaving much of their catch and sales to chance. The increasing impact of climate change further complicated these predictions. Additionally, fishermen in remote villages were dependent on middlemen to sell their catch, store, and transport the fish to larger markets. This process often resulted in lower income for the fishermen. Furthermore, the fishing industry was largely paper-based, slowing down the flow of information and making it difficult to trace seafood from the fishermen to the consumer. Exporting fish abroad was a complex process due to the paperwork and logistics involved, which many fishermen did not understand. Lastly, only 25% of fishermen in rural villages used smartphones due to limited power supplies and low digital literacy, posing a significant challenge to digitizing the industry.

ATB Financial, a crown corporation of the province of Alberta, operates in a highly competitive financial services space. To retain its competitive advantage, ATB launched a bold transformation initiative to reimagine the way banking products and services could be delivered. However, the company faced several challenges. Remote employees often experienced connectivity and performance issues with the corporate VPN, which limited their productivity. Legacy office tools did not foster innovation and often slowed business processes, delaying the company’s ability to deliver new services and respond to customer needs. The ATB banking operations team also struggled with workflows and lost files in public folders, a common issue with legacy office applications.

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.

Autofleet, a leading solution provider for fleet and mobility operators, was faced with the challenge of offering its customers a platform that was secure, reliable, and scalable. The company provides solutions for asset-heavy fleets and mobility operators to optimize their operations and launch new on-demand ride services. The comprehensive and modular nature of the company’s solutions meant that reliability, security, and performance were crucial to its operations. Failures and downtime could have a negative impact on their customers' core businesses. Furthermore, the company needed to be able to scale at will and with little notice. Whenever Autofleet signed a new client, the platform was immediately subjected to high volumes of extra traffic, which posed a significant challenge.

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.

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.

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.

Ayoconnect, a SaaS company based in Southeast Asia, aimed to provide an open finance platform for developers to deliver a range of financial products to their customers. However, the company faced challenges in launching the platform on a cloud environment due to regulations requiring Indonesians' financial and transactional data to stay within the country. The domestic cloud service provider they initially used could not fully meet Ayoconnect's requirements, leading to performance and stability issues. Furthermore, the company needed to transition from a business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business model, which required standardization and visibility to solve issues created by multiple infrastructure types and API formats across financial services.

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.

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.

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.

Banco de Crédito e Inversiones (Bci), one of Chile’s largest banks, faced the challenge of meeting the changing expectations of its employees and customers who were increasingly comfortable using internet-based tools and services. The traditional ways of banking did not resonate with the younger workforce, particularly the millennials, and the bank needed to evolve to meet their changing expectations. The bank also aimed to get closer to its increasingly digitally engaged customer base. To do this, Bci decided it needed a digital transformation that would bring interactions between employees and with customers closer to their more intuitive digital experiences with consumer apps. The bank also needed greater support for working off-site, including finding ways to replace in-person and telephone meetings with simple, reliable videoconferencing. Bci also hoped to move beyond email as the means for sharing and document collaboration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Body & Fit, a leading sports nutrition and dietary product business, was facing challenges with its existing ecommerce platform. The company, which processes almost two million orders a year and offers more than 3,000 items, was planning a strategy of rapid growth, aiming to double its presence from seven to twelve countries. However, scalability was a challenge on its existing ecommerce platform, and weak integration between components made it difficult to track customer journeys across touchpoints. The company needed a solution that could deliver excellent customer experience, potential for global expansion, continuous optimization, and personalized content. Furthermore, Body & Fit wanted to create a unified customer journey by combining data from multiple sources, including its ERP, ecommerce solution, event-stream processing, frontend interfaces, online marketing, customer service solution, and analytics.

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.

Bonnier Publications, a Copenhagen-based media company, was facing the challenge of transitioning from a print to a digital multi-format business model in an ever-changing media environment. The global magazine industry was shrinking every year, and Bonnier knew that this digital transformation was critical for its survival and growth. The company set a six-month deadline to achieve this goal, with the challenge being a complete overhaul of its customer data and the way it engaged with customers online to maximize ecommerce conversion rates. The initial target was to gain 25,000 new subscriptions. Bonnier's success largely depended on its reader base, with B2C business accounting for 75% of its revenue. Therefore, it was crucial for the company to understand its readers and their preferences.

Book Creator, a self-publishing tool, aimed to shift its focus towards serving the K-12 market and enhance student engagement by unlocking their creativity. The company wanted to provide a platform where students and teachers could collaboratively create and publish ebooks and learning materials. However, with a small team of 13, they faced the challenge of reaching millions of students and handling high-variability workloads. Additionally, they needed to comply with strict data access management requirements including GDPR in the European Union and FERPA/COPPA in the U.S. The company also wanted to rapidly develop new features while reducing the complexities of storing data and scaling access to it.

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.