Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V., a leading services provider for the dredging, maritime infrastructure and maritime services sectors, faced the challenge of carrying out essential maintenance in a time- and cost-effective way. The company operates more than 300 vessels in five continents, and the sand and salt water environments in which it operates could significantly shorten the lifespans of its multi-million dollar equipment. To meet its commercial objectives, the company aimed to complete essential maintenance tasks quickly and efficiently. However, managing such a large fleet spread across multiple locations was a complex process. The company aimed to improve asset reliability by transitioning from a reactive to a preventative maintenance model.

Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the know-how and resources required for thorough IT system monitoring. Wittmann EDV-Systeme wanted to launch a solution to plug the gap – enabling it to improve its own competitiveness and that of its customers. IT landscapes are becoming ever more complex and outsourcing is gaining popularity, IT systems must nonetheless remain easy-to-use and extremely reliable at all times. Automated, round-the-clock system monitoring therefore represents an immensely valuable proposition for companies: downtime for business-critical applications can be avoided, and IT systems remain available at all times.

The European defense unit was facing challenges in quickly assimilating various types of data and exploiting information gathered by multiple rotating field teams. The teams were required to gather and combine various types of intelligence data for analysis and information exploitation to identify gaps and report them to headquarters. As teams rotated in and out, the unit needed to replicate the data stored on each team’s Intelligence Support Server (ISS) and distribute it to all necessary teams, ensuring that no data was lost during rotations and allowing those teams to share intelligence.

The major US insurance company was facing challenges in pinpointing fraud quickly on submitted claims and strengthening prevention methods. With each investigator handling 35 investigations, the business needed to accurately and quickly ingest data from multiple sources, including policy, claims and medical billing data; Insurance Services Office (ISO) data; and public records data from the Thomas Reuters CLEAR database to build links and find relationships among fraudsters and the people and businesses they are related to. In addition to determining whether a claim was legitimate, the company believed that gaining insight into customers before granting them insurance would help prevent fraud. It sought a system to help bolster fraud prevention and detection capabilities.

COPROB, one of Italy’s largest sugar beet processors, wanted to boost efficiency, tighten finances and build out its new biomass energy business. With 5,700 partner farms to manage, the company faced the challenge of managing growth effectively. The company's existing systems were largely untouched by technology, with many processes being manual or relying on a combination of spreadsheets, local technology solutions, and department-specific expertise. The company needed to produce data of sufficient quality to enable the predictive analytics capabilities required to support the new biomass business, and to ensure continued success in the core business. Managing the 5,700 partner farms was critical, since knowing the quantity of beet each farmer had planted and crop expectations has a direct impact on sugar beet and biomass availability.

Christian Cinema, a company that hosts the largest selection of faith-affirming and family-approved films on the Internet, was looking to move most of their 4,000 DVD titles to their online platform in the cloud for digital streaming. They needed a fast, secure, and reliable transfer solution to transport filmmakers’ titles directly to the cloud. Traditional technologies such as FTP were not viable due to network interruptions and latency over the WAN, which resulted in failed transfers. Shipping hard drives was also not a viable option due to the time it took for the shipments to journey from filmmakers located around the world to Christian Cinema’s headquarters. Plus, the files still needed to be uploaded to the cloud anyway, which would take additional time and effort.

Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.

Coca Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) was running its business on a multitude of different technologies. Manual searches and information delays were creating operational bottlenecks and business inefficiencies. CCBCC would manually enter the equipment services work order into their legacy system when work orders arrived via phone or fax from their customers. This process was time consuming and open to error, and so CCBCC began to question the potential cost of these errors. CCBCC needed to quickly accept and return information electronically without error and focus on software replacement as a means to improve cross-application and system integration. They needed a flexible and robust system to integrate internally with SAP as well as other existing systems.

Telefonica | Vivo, a leading Brazilian communications company, was facing a challenge with its marketing campaigns. The company, which offers voice, text, and web services to nearly 60 million customers, generates about 2 billion call records per day. However, the manual list-generating processes performed by over 30 marketing vendors were creating ineffective campaigns that didn't offer customers the services specific to their needs. This resulted in contact fatigue that devalued the brand. The company needed a closed-loop process that would use customer behavior to generate targeted marketing campaigns that really worked.

Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) was facing the challenge of maintaining excellent customer service and fast-paced growth due to the strain on processes and systems caused by rapid business expansion. The bank wanted to make banking more accessible by expanding its reach, responsiveness, and service offering. However, an aging core-banking infrastructure supported only some of its aims. In addition to targeting new domestic markets, CBE wanted to unlock the commercial potential of electronic banking services, both in branch and online. However, basic services such as bank transfers relied on heavily manual processes, which were time-consuming and inconvenient for customers.

Faurecia, a leading automotive components manufacturer, operates on a just-in-time basis, supplying global vehicle makers with emissions control technologies, seating, and interior and exterior systems. The company's customers demand faultless order fulfillment, and any failure to meet service levels can result in severe financial penalties and reputational damage. To run its worldwide operations, Faurecia relies on a comprehensive set of SAP applications, supported by IBM® DB2® databases and running on IBM Power Systems™ servers. These were previously deployed as a single instance supporting more than 200 production sites in 33 countries. However, as the company's business grew, it needed to minimize potential downtime for its critical SAP ERP applications. The company needed a new systems architecture that would support its expansion, reduce risk, and minimize the impact of planned maintenance on its supply chain, manufacturing, and customer service levels.

Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC, a leading brewery in Sri Lanka, was facing challenges with its end-of-life legacy ERP solutions and manual workarounds. These issues were dulling operational insight and efficiency, threatening to hold the company back from meeting its ambitious expansion goals. As operations expanded, existing business systems, some of which were nearing end-of-life, were unable to deliver the deep insight that Lion Brewery demanded, and threatened to hold the company back from meeting its goal of reaching wider regional markets. The company's existing mix of Baan, Oracle, DataStream, legacy and in-house systems were not able to provide the deep operational insight needed to support its ambitious growth objectives. Customization and additional line-of-business solutions had added to a complex and expensive IT landscape, which delivered much less than it promised.

eircom Group Ltd., a communication services provider based in Dublin, was facing a significant challenge due to fierce industry competition and the increasing risk of customers easily switching service providers. The company was experiencing an annual loss of EUR1.5 billion due to customer churn. The company needed a solution to identify the factors contributing to unfavorable customer experiences and to identify customers most likely to switch communications service providers.

The White Plains School District, serving over 7,000 students and employing more than 1,100 staff members, was facing a challenge with its outdated copper network. The district's local area network (LAN) was crucial in supporting a variety of technologies used in schools, from tablets and PCs to projectors and HVAC systems. However, the district was struggling with the need for a robust, reliable network infrastructure that could provide the bandwidth for these technologies plus a growing number of devices and applications. The district wanted to enhance its wifi network to improve mobile connectivity. But before doing so, the MIS group needed to refresh or replace the LAN. Upgrading the existing copper-based network was going to be too costly, and the district needed a new approach that could deliver scalability, reliability, and security while avoiding the high costs of a copper upgrade.

Shiseido Co., Ltd., a leading cosmetics firm, wanted to enhance the customer experience by providing its Beauty Consultants (BCs) with a new way to engage with customers, influence product development and socially connect with each other. The company has been supporting BCs’ work with technology for nearly 30 years and began exploring mobility early on. To advance mobile innovation and offer better tools for customer engagement, product feedback and teamwork, Shiseido wanted to equip BCs with Apple iPad “Beauty Tablets,” which required developing new mobile apps for the tablet format. Creating apps for varied devices and operating environments can be difficult if developers have to become experts in the language and parameters of each mobile device.

Ferrovial, a leading infrastructure operator based in Madrid, Spain, was keen to expand its construction business internationally. However, the company's existing systems were inflexible, non-scalable, and highly customized, making it difficult to adapt to the diverse requirements of operating in multiple countries. The company lacked online integration, centralization, a shared and corporate-wide view of business information, and the capability to adjust to challenging requirements coming from multiple locations. Employees performed manual calculations that were slow and error-prone, and did not offer an accurate view of the business. This decentralized way of working and the use of obsolete technology prevented Ferrovial from growing faster and joining forces with suppliers and subsidiaries when embarking on international construction projects.

Mercy Health, a premier healthcare provider with 450 health facilities located in Ohio and Kentucky, decided to transition to a Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model. The organization first needed to meet all National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) certification requirements within a 15-month time frame. At the same time, Mercy Health was working to integrate its Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and future bundled care initiatives across its entire network, which includes 147 PCP offices in Ohio and Kentucky. To support these initiatives, Mercy Health engaged Watson Health, a leader in big data-driven healthcare transformation, to use its cloud-based platform to manage populations, engage patients, and meet PCMH and ACO goals.

The jewelry retailer operates hundreds of stores across the United States and was facing a challenge in attracting and retaining skilled and motivated people to drive sales and business growth. The company wanted to refine its approach to sales associate recruitment and sought a more accurate way to assess new applicants and determine whether they had the qualities needed to develop successfully in their roles and contribute to the company’s continued growth. The challenge was to find a way to ensure that an applicant has the right skills for the job, and that they fit in with a company’s culture and ways of working.

Waterfront Toronto is a steward for the revitalization of Toronto’s lakefront area. It aims to be a model intelligent community, developing a community where people live, learn, work, and play in a seamless, technology-enabled environment. After deploying an ultra-high-speed fiber-optic network and IBM Intelligent Operations Center software for city management, Waterfront Toronto turned to creating a social network. It sought the best way to link present and future residents, retailers, students, partners, and staff using online interactions and apps that would enhance the quality of life while showcasing the community as a model of innovation in sustainable development, urban design, and advanced technology.

Superior Group, a company providing workforce productivity solutions, found that its employees worldwide felt disconnected from headquarters, regional offices and each other due to outdated internal communication and collaboration tools. The company's intranet had become a top-down affair with little staff involvement, and employees lacked effective tools for anywhere/anytime communications. Those working remotely had limited access to co-workers and company apps. The main method of collaboration was inefficient email, challenging IT staff to manage a growing store of attachments. These factors inhibited the company from achieving its productivity goals.

QIWI plc, a payment services company in Russia, was facing a challenge with its security operations. Despite never experiencing a serious security breach, the company's confidence was dwindling due to its reliance on a disparate set of security solutions. It lacked a clear hierarchy among security notifications and had limited visibility into cross-platform threats. The company needed a solution that could consolidate security events, identify and analyze threats, and prioritize mitigation efforts.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative, one of the largest electric generation and transmission cooperatives in the United States, was struggling with data management. The company's data was held in dozens of systems, spreadsheets, and people’s heads, making it difficult to make informed decisions. The company recognized that its reliance on complex manual processes represented a serious risk to the business. In strategy meetings, staff were often unable to agree on the figures that they were meant to be analyzing. Too much time was spent trying to determine which system, spreadsheet or expert truly had the right information about a given issue – and this lack of visibility hampered the organization’s ability to make smart decisions.

Continental Tires, a major global tire manufacturer, was facing inefficiencies in its production landscape, which manufactures 10,000 different products. The company was using manual, spreadsheet-based allocation of products to production plants, which was extremely complex and time-consuming. The process was entirely dependent on the know-how and experience of the people driving it and used no form of computer-aided optimization. Since data could not be transferred between documents automatically, it was also easy to make mistakes. The company planned production budgets annually and at a fairly high level to lighten the burden this process placed on its planners. But since the company launches 1,000 new products every year, even this method was becoming unviable.

Roskilde Festival, the largest North European culture and music festival, faced the challenge of keeping 130,000 guests safely entertained, fed, watered and informed in a sustainable way. The festival generates huge volumes of real-time data, which if analyzed, could provide critical insights for planning and running the festival. The Copenhagen Business School (CBS) saw the festival as a potential real-world laboratory for improving sustainability issues. They wanted to understand the movement of people around the festival site, the sales of food and beverages over time, and the popularity of different musical events. However, the data types and data volumes were essentially unknown at the outset, requiring a highly flexible solution.

The Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) was facing challenges due to the increasing complexity of operations. The process of collecting, consolidating and analyzing financial data from different legal entities within different systems had become time-consuming. The central finance team at ENOC was losing days each month manually inputting and checking financial data from 31 subsidiaries. The real challenge for the central finance team was ensuring data consistency and accuracy. Manual input inevitably results in a high risk of error, and painstakingly validating data from over thirty entities each month was becoming unsustainable.

IT-Informatik, a provider of SAP solution hosting and cloud services for medium-sized companies, aimed to boost retention and win new business by creating highly competitive and flexible offerings. However, its complex hosting environment made it difficult to set up client environments cost-effectively. With existing systems at or near capacity, IT-Informatik looked for ways to expand the scope, performance and capabilities of its hosting and cloud services. The company realized that if it could accelerate the deployment of new SAP application environments, it could onboard new customers more rapidly and respond faster to clients’ changing business needs.

Kronopol, a subsidiary of the Swiss Krono Holding AG and a world leader in the wood-based products industry, was facing a challenge with its growing databases that supported the company’s SAP applications. The IT team was spending increasing amounts of time maintaining and administering these databases. The growing data volumes were also affecting business-critical functions such as daily backups. Kronopol needed a solution that would support the data explosion resulting from business growth, while keeping IT spending lean. The company was looking for a solution that would not only address its immediate data management needs and cut storage costs, but also offer a strategic solution to help manage long-term data growth.

Mankind Pharma, one of the fastest-growing pharmaceutical companies in India, was facing challenges due to poor visibility and integration across its extensive operations. The lack of a unified way of controlling and monitoring business activity made it difficult for decision-makers to gain the trusted insight they needed to optimize operations and plan strategy accordingly. This was holding the company back from making the most of growth opportunities in India's booming pharmaceuticals market. For instance, onboarding new carrying and forwarding agents took several weeks, by which time valuable opportunities to expand might be missed.

Pentair, a global water, fluid, thermal management, and equipment protection company, was evolving from a holding company to a diversified industrial manufacturing company. This evolution necessitated a change in the way it managed its operations, and to gain greater insight over the data and processes used in each area of its businesses. In 2009, Pentair’s HR function began working towards this global standardization objective. The HR team saw an opportunity to replace a number of localized systems and spreadsheet-based processes with a single, integrated solution based on Oracle PeopleSoft Human Capital Management software. In 2012, while the HR standardization initiative was underway, Pentair also completed a merger with Tyco Flow Control, and the company doubled in size overnight. It grew from a $4 billion to a nearly $8 billion sales company, and from 15,000 to 30,000 employees.

Heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting represent the largest energy costs for businesses; worldwide buildings consume 42 percent of all electricity. Understanding the detailed usage patterns of these services within buildings and having the ability to manage these services more efficiently will deliver cost savings to the bottom line very quickly. Eighty percent of buildings are already constructed; affordable building management systems need to be built around flexible and configurable hardware that can be retrofitted. The cost of such integrated solutions has historically been high and not integrated into small or medium sized building developments, as it was difficult to justify the additional expense. This left many commercial buildings with no efficient way to manage their operational costs related to heating, cooling and lighting.