ISS Consulting, an SAP solution consulting partner, was facing challenges in demonstrating SAP software to potential clients due to the cost and complexity of creating specific SAP demonstration instances on the on-premise data center. This resulted in the company not being able to reliably produce more than a few high-quality sales presentations per month. The data center servers used to run the SAP demonstration instances also ran general business applications, which affected the performance of the SAP solution. The local IT team tasked with creating the new demo environments were often busy with other tasks, further complicating the situation.

Banca Carige, a leading Italian bank, was facing intense competition and wanted to develop a customer-centric approach to service delivery. However, it first needed to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and desires. The bank was looking for a robust and trustworthy platform for its new analytics and mobile capabilities. As banking customers increasingly embrace web and mobile technologies, their expectations for 24/7 service are growing. For Banca Carige, this raises the stakes for ensuring round-the-clock availability for its digital channels.

HANSA-FLEX, a hydraulics specialist, differentiates itself through the speed of its logistics processes. However, as the business grew, it faced the challenge of ensuring that its SAP landscape would keep up the pace. The company's previous server landscape, which was based on larger, monolithic servers, needed regular upgrades, which could lead to downtime. This was a significant challenge as HANSA-FLEX uses SAP ERP applications to operate a global network of branches and a fleet of express vehicles that enable its technicians to respond rapidly to failures and maintenance requests. The company needed a more flexible, modular configuration, where it could expand capacity as needed with minimal impact on its 12 production systems.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an explosion of data from various sources. This data, if processed and understood correctly, can unlock new insights, exceed customer expectations, and provide a competitive edge. However, traditional databases struggle to handle high-velocity time-series data efficiently. Businesses that create, distribute, transport, re-sell or service physical products can benefit from sensor-sourced data that follows the movement of goods through the entire value chain, from manufacture to usage. For service industries, the opportunity is to blend environmental data with customer data to create innovative offerings. The challenge lies in gathering and processing these huge volumes of time-series data.

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU) needed to satisfy customer demand for access to financial services anytime, anywhere, through any device. The bank sought to launch these new services using only its existing IT assets. In today’s banking environment financial institutions compete on the ability to quickly launch products and services and deliver them through new channels. As BTMU developed a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform to realize this “cloud-banking” concept it found that long-term effective use of existing business systems and information was essential. The bank's biggest priority was to ensure zero impact on existing systems.

SinfoníaRx, a leader in Medication Therapy Management (MTM) services, was facing a challenge of managing and analyzing vast amounts of prescription data for millions of patients. The company needed to ensure fast, accurate analysis of this data to improve patient outcomes and save healthcare providers millions. The complexity of modern healthcare, with thousands of prescription drugs approved for use, made it difficult for doctors and pharmacists to determine the right combinations of medication for each patient. SinfoníaRx was established to address these needs by pioneering modern Medication Therapy Management (MTM) services. However, as demand for its healthcare data analytics services rocketed, SinfoníaRx needed a data-processing platform capable of huge scalability and uninterrupted performance.

Continuum Managed Services, LLC was preparing to launch its new Continuity247 backup and disaster recovery solution. For this, the company needed a scalable, highly reliable cloud hosting platform that could support compliance requirements for financial and healthcare users. The platform needed to offer performance, flexibility, a well-established brand, and international data center locations.

Cxense ASA, a company that delivers a portfolio of online personalization services, was relying on a traditional hosting infrastructure with colocated resources. However, as the company expanded, it required a hosting platform with presence worldwide, including Japan. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide a global presence, improve agility, and reduce infrastructure provisioning time.

DSB Consulting, a private technology and consulting firm based in Los Angeles, California, aimed to address a significant challenge in the media and entertainment sector: piracy. Traditional cloud-based media management systems often involve moving a large amount of content back and forth between editorial facilities and the cloud, which not only slows down the process but also increases the risk of piracy. DSB Consulting envisioned an innovative approach to video editing that would enable users from virtually anywhere in the world to easily access and work on video content with minimal risk. The idea was to virtualize the editing workstation and move it into the cloud, thereby taking the tools to the content instead of moving the content to the tools.

Startup business Deliver.ee was in need of a scalable, cost-effective cloud hosting platform for the applications supporting its online delivery service. The company was anticipating rapid business growth and wanted to team up with a cloud provider that offered data center presence worldwide. The challenge was to find a solution that could support their growth and expansion plans throughout Europe and the United States.

Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, needed to reliably exchange large, time-sensitive content globally, typically 10GB up to 1TB over the Internet, with partner stations and postproduction companies. The broadcaster must constantly interact with its vast network of partner stations and postproduction companies to exchange newsworthy programs. The number and size of high-resolution video files have grown immensely, varying between 10GB and 1TB for DW. DW must be capable of transferring up to 20TB of media content each month. As transfer volumes have grown, DW was compelled to find a solution that enabled it to receive and deliver content to and from anywhere as quickly as possible while content was fresh, independent of the file size and geographical distance.

EVERTEC processes more than 2.1 billion transactions annually, and manages an extensive electronic payment network. With its services underpinning essential operations at a range of financial institutions, merchants and government agencies, EVERTEC must ensure fast, secure and effective processing around the clock. In the past, EVERTEC used a distributed platform to support a number of its transaction processing systems. As the company’s payment network expanded over the years, the expense and effort of maintaining the underlying computing infrastructure increased substantially. As the server landscape grew in size and complexity, operating costs were threatening to spiral out of control. In addition, they were starting to reach full capacity, leaving no room for growth, and they suffered from low resource utilization, which impacted performance.

Engine Informática, a Brazil-based company specializing in the implementation of SAP ERP solutions, identified a gap in the market for small and medium-sized companies. The company realized that the fixed infrastructure investment needed to run SAP 24/7, such as data centers, hardware, and support, meant that the per-user cost could be perceived as too high for smaller companies. The challenge was to reduce or eliminate the capital expenditures and implementation costs as much as possible to help reduce the barriers to entry for these smaller companies.

Epic Piping, a startup company, saw the opportunity to build a multi-million-dollar business. However, the challenge was to create an enterprise-scale operation in a matter of 12 to 18 months. The company needed to focus on its core business – winning customers and establishing its manufacturing credentials – as well as removing administrative barriers. Selecting, implementing and configuring business management solutions, such as financial and logistics systems, threatened to drain valuable time and energy. Epic Piping looked for a business partner that could address business management issues and allow the team to devote itself to building the company. Additionally, Epic Piping was keen to avoid the capital outlay of implementing an ERP solution on fixed server hardware, and to avoid the ongoing costs of hiring an IT team to administer and maintain the system.

Equinix, a global interconnection platform provider, was facing challenges due to its high growth rate. The company identified that converting to a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) could potentially save millions of dollars, creating shareholder value. However, the company and reporting structures in place at Equinix would need to be completely transformed to achieve REIT status. Manual processes were not scalable or reliable, and the level of detail, consistency and auditability required for intercompany transactions would not be possible with existing systems. REIT status would require new processes and structures for global operations, and much more. At the same time, Equinix created a Strategic Worldwide Integrated Financial Transformation (SWIFT) program, designed to streamline and improve its financial operations.

Front-safe identified a gap in the market for a company that could bring the power of enterprise-class data protection to small and mid-sized businesses. Larger companies have access to enterprise-class solutions, yet the expertise and resource requirements of these platforms have traditionally put them beyond the reach of smaller organizations. Front-safe recognized that every company needs to back up its data, but it can be incredibly complicated and inefficient for a business to manage its own data protection solution.

The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) is a national facility based in Hamburg, Germany. The organization provides high-performance computing and storage resources to scientists examining the Earth’s climate system, addressing global climate change and its regional effects. With an estimated annual growth rate of 75 PB over the next five years, DKRZ needed to upgrade to a more powerful storage solution. Michael Böttinger, Group Head of Visualization and Public Relations at DKRZ, says: “Storing and retrieving data efficiently is absolutely essential for our HPC systems to always deliver the best performance for scientists. To continue providing world-class high-performance computing systems, we needed an equally world-class data archiving system.”

Grace Co., Ltd., a leading fashion accessory design group, was aiming to standardize its business processes and systems to drive its global growth. However, the company realized that deploying the physical server, storage, and networking infrastructure to support the new way of working would incur significant capital costs. The company was also facing challenges with multiple business systems which increased the time required to extract actionable insights from business data and introduced the risk of inaccurate data entering the reporting process.

INEOS O&P USA, a major producer of high-density polyethylene and polypropylene, wanted to simplify and improve the reliability of its SAP landscape to enhance key business processes. The company's SAP and other applications were running on a large number of dedicated servers, which over time, grew into a complex landscape that was relatively costly to operate. The company was looking for a flexible, agile infrastructure that could adapt quickly to new demands. The traditional architectures based on dedicated servers for each application tend to sprawl, and gradually become more and more difficult to manage, which was less than ideal for INEOS O&P USA.

Digital solution provider Intesa S.p.A. wanted to broaden its service portfolio and provide companies with end-to-end solutions for paperless operations. The business sought a robust cloud platform to expand its reach and launch a series of new software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

KYOCERA Document Solutions Inc., a global company with 32 sales offices worldwide, was looking to promote further expansion and strengthen its business in the United States, Europe, and Asia. To achieve this, the company needed to expand the use of its FOCUS CRM system. However, the company faced the challenge of requiring a global hosting platform that offered the flexibility and security necessary to support governance worldwide. The company's data center in Japan needed to be integrated with IBM cloud data centers in the United States and Germany to offer CRM capabilities globally.

Key Information Systems, Inc., an IBM Premier Business Partner, needed a flexible, enterprise-class infrastructure to meet diverse client requirements for highly reliable and efficient hybrid cloud services. The company wanted to focus on building the right cloud to meet its clients’ needs, starting with conversations about clients’ specific objectives for business continuity, availability, and performance. The company aimed to provide hybrid cloud offerings for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), and Backup and Recovery-as-a-Service (BRaaS). These services were all designed to scale quickly and dynamically as business needs grow, without clients having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. However, the company faced challenges in delivering high availability, rapid scalability, and customizable security for its hybrid-cloud services.

Enterprises are increasingly looking to focus on business outcomes rather than infrastructure. However, they often face challenges when it comes to outsourcing their infrastructure, particularly when it comes to moving mission-critical applications running on the IBM AIX and IBM i operating systems. Finding an external hosting partner with the necessary skills and enterprise-class support can be difficult, and migrating these core business systems to another, less reliable platform is not a viable option. In this context, Logicalis US saw an opportunity to create an enterprise-class cloud based on IBM Power Systems servers to address these outsourcing challenges, as well as providing a high-quality option for businesses requiring offsite backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

Luna Lights, a startup based in Chicago, developed an automated lighting system that uses pressure sensors and cloud-based analytics to help reduce and prevent falls among older adults. However, the company faced challenges in keeping costs down while complying with healthcare regulations. Their previous cloud services provider was expensive and did not provide the necessary security controls to meet healthcare regulations.

Operating thousands of physical servers grew increasingly complicated for this company. At the same time, manual processes for procuring server space slowed app development, test and production.

The leading national retail chain, with over 3,000 stores and 27,000 endpoints, was looking to streamline and automate its daily tasks required to control its servers, including provisioning, configuration management, and inventory of hardware and software. The company was using a legacy IBM solution that required manual registration of clients before they could be controlled. The retailer was interested in IBM’s latest offering for managing servers and hoped that the new solution would help streamline and automate the daily tasks required to control its servers.

The Mariinsky Theatre, a historic opera and ballet theatre located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, wanted to extend its reach globally by live-streaming performances over the Internet for viewers around the world. The organization tried Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosting solutions, but it experienced frustrating performance issues, including frequent buffering. The theatre considered investing in onsite hosting infrastructure, but it needed the flexibility and cost-effectiveness that cloud technology provided. The theatre sought a more reliable cloud solution with the power and scalability to stream performances flawlessly and to easily accommodate a fluctuating number of site visitors.

Medicat, a leading provider of healthcare information technology (HIT) to colleges and universities, was facing a rapidly growing client community and needed to move fast as it reached the limits of its current IT infrastructure in order to maintain its market leadership. With storage requirements doubling year-on-year, Medicat looked for a solution that would offer easily managed scalability to support ongoing expansion. The company needed a solution that would not only meet its current needs but also be able to scale with its growth.

Melissa Kikizas, a pasta and semolina producer, was looking to reduce inventory levels across its warehouses in Greece to unlock significant financial benefits. However, the company was concerned about the risk of under-stocking. The company operated multiple warehouses across Greece to serve its domestic and international markets. The company realized that reducing inventory levels in its warehouses had the potential to unlock significant financial benefits. However, it needed to identify the optimal quantity of stock at each of its warehouses, and orchestrate its manufacturing and distribution processes to ensure that it delivered the right quantities of products at the right time. Previously, the company relied on a series of non-integrated systems to manage its businesses, which led to inefficiencies.

Mi Agencia, a company that creates monitoring and measurement platforms, websites, mobile applications, media strategies, ad word campaigns and brand management solutions, envisioned an innovative, collaborative platform harnessing the power of cloud technology to address a vast range of municipal needs. Their mission was to build a bridge between government and the people. They wanted to support initiatives from urban repair to election monitoring with a platform for easily uploading images, measuring progress and reporting results. To extend its solution across Mexico, Mi Agencia needed flexible, highly reliable cloud hosting infrastructure. Additionally, the business wanted to team with a cloud provider offering a trusted brand that would appeal to potential adopters of the platform.