The major US communications company was facing significant losses due to equipment theft from online and retail spaces as well as fraudulent insider billing schemes. These criminal activities were constantly evolving, requiring the company to stay highly adaptable and proactive in its fraud and theft detection and prevention efforts. The company was losing billions of dollars to the black market when smartphones were stolen and multiyear service contracts were not secured. Malicious acts including submitting incomplete invoices, overbilling and overcharging for a lesser product were also costing the company money. The company needed to improve its ability to ingest large volumes of data from multiple sources and integrate that data for visualization to improve its fraud prevention and detection platform.

The military team, stationed in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, was tasked with collecting, analyzing, and disseminating large volumes of data used to develop human terrain intelligence in the battle against insurgents. The team comprised five companies with subunits occupying their own areas of operation. The large geographical area involved encompasses a wide and varied population amongst whom the insurgents can operate. Each subunit passes data up the intelligence chain for fusion with other data and further exploitation. Previous methods of channeled data did not facilitate the rapid fusion of intelligence needed to drive intelligence-led operations. The team needed a solution that would ingest large volumes of complex data for analysis, minimize duplicate efforts, and maximize corroboration.

The Austrian public insurance company, which provides health, pension and accident coverage to 260,000 railway workers and miners, was facing a dramatic increase in the percentage of the population suffering from type 2 diabetes. The lifetime costs per patient were averaging EUR150,000, prompting the company to shift its focus from traditional to preventive care. Effective screening, treatment and management of at-risk or already afflicted patients can slow or even halt the advance of type 2 diabetes. However, proactive treatment requires close cooperation between physician and patient, with success directly dependent on precise medication management and challenging lifestyle changes demanding a high degree of motivation. The insurer required a convenient way to monitor compliance on a daily basis, in near-real time, while offering ease of use to facilitate patient autonomy and participation.

The Brazilian retailer had a business-critical incentive compensation system that had 60 rules for calculating bonuses, and provided little flexibility in product promotion. The monthly processing time took 12 - 18 hours causing a rush to meet the payroll deadline. The compensation system was a 15-year-old COBOL program with very little documentation that depended on a single systems analyst to keep it running. There was a two-day window at the end of each month to collect and process all store transactions in order to determine incentive compensation. If a problem appeared, such as an unexpected or erroneous transaction volume or money value, the IT team would work around the clock to make adjustments and reprocess batches. Making timely updates to the compensation plan to meet constantly changing business needs was a challenge.

As movies have transitioned from 35 mm film to digital cinema, film producers and distributors are looking to find better ways of delivering films to cinemas for viewing. Traditional satellite and courier delivery models were proving to be slow and expensive. CinePostproduction GmbH saw an opportunity to disrupt the film services industry and leapfrog its competitors by creating a faster, less expensive way of transferring large media files to theaters.

As Cinedigm’s business continues to grow, the company is faced with the dilemma of how to retrieve more content from production companies and disseminate more content, and faster, to their distribution partners located across the country and even internationally. Presented with full-length HD films, often uncompressed or in ProRes or other high-res versions, Cinedigm needed a transfer solution that could accommodate very large file sizes while maintaining speed, efficiency and security. Along with receiving content from producers and delivering to distribution partners, Cinedigm also needed a faster transfer mechanism for their internal business needs. Files needed to be quickly delivered to storage facilities located in Dallas and Chicago as well as content sent from New York to their sister office in Los Angeles for sharing and collaboration. Shipping media content on hard drives back and forth across the country and internationally was too costly and time-consuming, while FTP presented challenges with speed, bandwidth consumption and reliability. Cinedigm sought a faster, more dependable solution to shorten the end-to-end delivery workflow.

The City of Marietta, Georgia, had a public-facing digital presence that it needed to defend against a continual assault of potentially malicious digital incursions. The volume of anomalous network activity, ranging from simple irregularities to serious security breaches, required constant, resource-intensive vigilance, which taxed the city’s small security team.

The Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) was under pressure to increase the value it offers. The business wanted greater support in attracting and retaining high calibre people, managing performance and ensuring talent was developed through appropriate learning opportunities. There was also a drive to reduce costs, improve efficiency and improve quality of service. As far as the provision of basic HR services was concerned, CFS had a number of challenges. Its general HR administration system was located in-house while the payroll system was outsourced. The two systems were linked by batch interfaces which impacted the timeliness and accuracy of information, a particular challenge when creating the monthly payroll. There was no self-service access to HR information and details were gathered on paper forms or through emails and then keyed into the in-house system or sent to the payroll provider for keying. Management information, insight and analysis were difficult to obtain and the cost of running the two systems was high.

Coop Estense, a retail company, needed to ensure compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) across all its endpoints. The company had to manage patches, control network access, and guard against potential intrusions. Initially, the company used a manual approach, deploying patches and firewall rules necessary for compliance. While this approach brought compliance into the company, maintaining it in the long term proved to be complex. The company needed a solution that could automate compliance across all endpoints without adding to the management burden of the IT personnel.

Dundee City Council, serving a population of 145,000 citizens in Scotland, was challenged to do more with less, and identified IT as an area in which it could cut costs. The council needed to make cost savings without impacting the quality of service to citizens. The council soon identified its IT infrastructure as an area where changes were urgently needed to avoid service interruptions, and also where significant savings could be made. Convinced that the answer to its IT challenges lay in virtualization, Dundee City Council began formulating a plan to consolidate physical servers to virtual instances hosted by fewer machines.

Earth Signal Processing, a global leader in seismic data processing, was facing a challenge. Their clients in the oil and gas industry needed the results of their 2D and 3D seismic programs as quickly as possible to make informed decisions about land purchases and drilling locations. However, Earth Signal was constrained by the physical limits of its data center in terms of floor space and rack space. They needed to increase their data-crunching capabilities to meet the demands of their clients. The company was also under pressure to keep costs low, which meant they needed to find a solution that could maximize core and thread count within their existing infrastructure.

Fabler Studio, a video postproduction services company based in New York City, was looking for a way to differentiate its services in a highly competitive market. The company was interested in facial imaging technology that could capture emotional responses to its video content, providing immediate feedback and insights into consumer reactions. This technology would provide a unique selling point for the company, setting it apart from competitors and offering a more comprehensive service to its clients.

Fiducia & GAD IT AG, a leading IT services provider for banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, was facing disruption from FinTechs. These emerging companies represented both potential partners and competitors for established banks. To demonstrate their industry innovation and stay competitive, Fiducia & GAD IT AG decided to conduct two collaborative hackathons.

Friedhelm Loh Group, a leading engineering company, was looking for ways to optimize its operations to deliver products to customers faster and at a lower cost than its competitors. The company was facing rising IT complexity and costs due to its growing business and the need to integrate new acquisitions onto its central IT system. It also wanted to boost system availability, as even short periods of downtime would cause backlogs in its warehouses and delay manufacturing and customer deliveries, tarnishing the company’s excellent reputation. The company also wanted to deliver even the most complex orders on time and cost-effectively.

As the G-INCPM has grown over the years, it began to reach the limits of its current data center. The IT team needed to expand the capacity of IT resources to support a rising number of researchers and facilitate increasingly complex, data-intensive research. Finding a solution that could be deployed quickly was key; the IT team did not want to slow down the addition of new researchers or place technology limitations on research projects. At the same time, the IT team wanted to retain control over its infrastructure and help ensure the tightest security for research data. The team also wanted to keep any new data center in close physical proximity to its IT staff and existing facilities.

Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest aquarium, was looking to strengthen its relationship with visitors, sponsors, and donors via the email channel. However, there were gaps in communication and data was stuck in silos. The digital marketing team, which consisted of just one person, was tasked with not only retaining loyal fans, providing consistent value, and driving more revenue, but also proving the benefit of bringing on additional resources. The team needed to identify the Aquarium’s key personas and match these with the Aquarium’s primary goals. They also needed to redesign the newsletter templates to be mobile-friendly and study readers’ behaviors to create better-targeted conversations.

Getac Technology Corporation, a leading manufacturer of rugged computing solutions for extreme environments, was facing challenges with its aging IT systems. The company's Oracle solutions supported all of its processes, from the factory floor to final delivery to customers. However, if these Oracle solutions were to go offline unexpectedly, practically every business process would be forced to stop, causing severe delays. Being unable to meet delivery schedules would jeopardize customer relationships, posing a significant risk to the business. To safeguard its customer relationships, Getac wanted to ensure the smooth running of its global business. To achieve this goal, it looked to refresh the infrastructure for its mission-critical Oracle applications with a robust, reliable, and scalable solution.

Octagon Insurance Company Limited, a Gibraltar-based car insurance company in the UK, was having difficulty understanding why their website conversion rates were dropping, and why customers were abandoning policies before they were complete. They had limited information on their visitors’ behavior and struggled to draw cohesive conclusions on how to improve their website. They could not determine precisely why site conversion rates dropped or why customers behaved in a certain manner. They knew what was happening, but they didn’t know why. Without a clear understanding of their visitors’ interactions on the website, they felt blindfolded when identifying site errors that drove visitors to abandon a process or their website altogether.

Rabobank, a multinational banking and financial services company, was facing the challenge of understanding individual customer needs and responding with personalized services. The bank's local branches were taking tailored approaches to customer management, which made it difficult to gain a clear view of each customer's history, channel preferences, priorities, and behaviors. The in-branch personnel had to switch between multiple systems to build up a full picture of customer interactions across the bank. This was a time-consuming process that delayed response to customer demands and made it difficult to understand how to best serve each customer.

UniCredit S.p.A., a global bank based in Milan, prioritizes offering first-class customer service. However, the bank was facing challenges with its external website as customers often reported usability issues. This was affecting the bank's online service and sales. The bank was in need of a solution that could proactively diagnose and address site problems to improve the customer experience.

This US-based company provides a diverse portfolio of health and well-being services. It relies on a claims processing application to support its operations. This application was handling the organization’s existing claims volume, but changes within the healthcare marketplace, particularly around government healthcare initiatives, were expected to drive up that volume. A technology manager within the organization anticipated the growing demands on the company’s claims processing systems and took action. He created a modernization strategy for the organization’s two IBM zEnterprise® EC12 servers running IBM CICS-based application workloads to improve application performance and help accommodate the growing claims volume.

The organization wanted to make fundamental changes to its IT strategy. It sought to replace silos with enterprisewide applications and create greater alignment between business requirements and the IT department. As part of this transformation, the company needed to change the way it handled business rules. Its core ERP system relied on numerous COBOL-based applications for processing. Making changes to these applications could be tricky; they were poorly documented and the company had a shrinking pool of resources available to manage them. The organization began looking for a more flexible, responsive business rules solution that would enable it to get new and updated business rules to production quickly.

The voice and data services provider aimed to improve its services while enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and empowering its employees with the latest technology. The company began providing self-service options in 2000 to better serve its customers. However, with the advent of smartphones, the company faced the challenge of staying on top of changing technologies and evolving customer needs. The company needed to update its application correspondingly with the frequent updates of the Apple iOS and Android operating systems. Additionally, the company had to accommodate growing numbers of customer self-service transactions and increasing amounts of data. The company also sought to empower its employees by enabling them to work on the device of their choice.

APIS IT d.o.o., a company that designs, develops, implements, and maintains information systems for the Republic of Croatia and the city of Zagreb, was facing a challenge with its increasingly complex technology environment. The company maintains a large and diverse array of systems, including mainframe and other types of servers. With the constant changes and additions to their systems, they needed a comprehensive monitoring solution that could integrate monitoring data from multiple systems to provide one view into its IT operations. This was crucial for them to continue delivering on their service level agreements (SLAs) and providing high-quality service to their customers.

The IT applications department at this company had an aggressive roadmap for improvement, including plans to reduce manual processes. The organization’s change request process for financial reference data was manual and labor-intensive, requiring staff to update and exchange spreadsheets by email. There was no process for gaining the necessary approvals for requested changes, which sometimes resulted in employees making revisions without key stakeholders’ approval. The company needed a BPM offering to automate this key process.

The US-based healthcare company was facing a challenge of accommodating a growing volume of healthcare claims. The company's existing claims processing application was handling the current volume, but changes within the healthcare marketplace, particularly around government healthcare initiatives, were expected to drive up that volume. The technology manager within the organization anticipated the growing demands on the company’s claims processing systems and took action. He created a modernization strategy for the organization’s two IBM zEnterprise® EC12 servers running IBM CICS-based application workloads to improve application performance and help accommodate the growing claims volume.

Control Risks Group, a global risk consultancy, generates a significant portion of its revenue from its subscription services. The company's subscription team is responsible for managing these services, which involves encouraging prospective clients to sign up for a free trial subscription, monitoring the progress of the trial, then moving them to a full service and reminding them to renew or upgrade their subscription when it is due to expire. However, with subscription-related data held in several disconnected systems and governed by a completely manual set of processes, it was difficult for the subscriptions team to keep track of when to contact their clients and prospects. The team wanted to find a better solution.

Container Centralen, a provider of reusable plant and flower shipping containers in Europe, maintains over 3.5 million containers in its inventory, which circulates through 60 depots spread across Europe. For years, the company has faced a significant challenge: counterfeiting. Up to 20 percent of the container pool is counterfeit, creating a twofold challenge to CC. First, because the reusable containers belong to CC, it is responsible for their cleaning, maintenance, repair and replacement. Second, since customers are using more containers than they are paying for, CC is losing lease revenue while being responsible for containers it does not own.

The credit agency wanted to improve its decision management processes to increase the value of the products and services it offers its customers. The agency wanted to offer its customers, such as credit card companies and banks, more effective and targeted up-sell and cross-sell suggestions for consumers based on their recent financial history. The agency also wanted the ability to stay on top of consumers’ financial ratings after they received credit to help minimize risk for the lender. A key challenge in developing the agency’s systems was giving their customers the ability to rapidly make changes to their credit risk decisioning policy. This would improve their hit rates, improve the products that they’re selling and increase their revenue for the products that they’re offering.

Equens, a leading European payment processor, was approached by a key banking client who needed new payment capabilities for its online banking processes. The bank requested that Equens use the IBM CICS Transaction Gateway, which provides application programmers with proven APIs for integrating CICS with numerous application platforms. Equens knew that if it could not provide the desired solution, the bank would turn to one of Equens’ competitors. Therefore, the challenge was to test and implement the IBM CICS Transaction Gateway V9 solution to meet the bank's requirements.