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.

Racold Thermo, a leading manufacturer of water heaters in India, was facing fierce competition in the rapidly growing water-heating industry. The company wanted to optimize its sales and distribution activities to capture a larger market share and increase profitability. However, the lack of integration between its many branches was hindering its ability to gain deep insight into sales and control over manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution operations. The company needed a solution that would provide a clear view of market demand and customer buying habits to shape its sales strategy effectively. The limitations of its existing business planning applications necessitated new tools and technologies.

Unilever Europe, a well-known consumer products giant, had expanded in a siloed fashion, by country and division. This resulted in a loose federation of business groups and geographies operating across 24 countries, all using multiple ERP systems. With so many different finance and accounting processes under three separate leadership teams, the result was a complex, inefficient organization that impeded growth. In 2005, Unilever Europe's leadership team made a strategic decision to integrate the company’s multiple business units into a single, unified Pan-European organization, but needed to implement the systems and framework to enable this goal. The diversity of cultures, policies and language across Europe further complicated the challenge, as did the varying levels of technology across the company’s business units, which ranged from advanced to outmoded paper-based systems.

Severstal, one of the world’s leading vertically integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, has built one of the largest SAP ERP environments in Russia over the past seven years. The SAP landscape is constantly evolving to meet new business requirements, such as introducing SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer for supply chain management, and SAP Mobile Platform for anytime, anywhere access to SAP applications. However, introducing these new functionalities, increasing the user-base and gaining deeper insight into operations all come at a price. The volume of data in the SAP environment was increasing rapidly, and performance was beginning to suffer. Severstal was faced with the challenge of designing a storage landscape that would scale to meet its future needs, while avoiding the expense of replacing all its existing storage systems.

Fraport AG operates Frankfurt International Airport and is involved in 12 other airports around the world. To succeed in this highly competitive industry, the company needs to keep its costs as low as possible while maintaining excellent service levels. The SAP® systems are a key component of operations at Frankfurt International Airport; but data volumes were growing rapidly, making these systems increasingly expensive to support. Due to these large data volumes – and the resultant need for additional high-speed disk storage and processing power – the cost of maintaining the SAP environment was rising rapidly. Fraport began to look for ways to improve the situation, and IBM suggested migrating from Oracle to the DB2 database platform.

TF1 Publicité, the advertising sales division of TF1, France’s largest free-to-air broadcaster, was facing challenges with its invoicing processes. The company had to handle client billing in multiple systems, which led to delays, inflexibility, and inefficiency. This prevented the agency from meeting client expectations for automated electronic invoicing. Without a single, standardized process for invoicing clients, TF1 Publicité could not optimize billing processes or meet client expectations around automation and the introduction of electronic billing. To maintain its position in the French market, the company needed to rationalize and simplify the invoice-to-cash cycle, automate its processes, and enable greater flexibility and granularity in invoicing.

The Chefs’ Warehouse, a specialty food distributor, was facing challenges in integrating new foodservice businesses rapidly and meeting the company’s high service, payment, and on-time delivery standards. The company had several ERP and best-of-breed solutions in place, but they were not sufficient to support the company's growth strategy. The company needed a solution that would provide visibility to inventory management, financial integration, process automation, and improvements for operating business units.

Shop Direct, a multi-brand online retailer, has been transitioning from a catalogue-driven business into a world-class digital retailer. With 86 percent of the company’s sales made online, it is critical for Shop Direct to ensure that the right product is available in the right place and at the right price. However, with its business growing, the group found it increasingly difficult to manage rapidly expanding numbers of products and related information. The previous approach to product management and stock planning was largely manual, with most buyers working from their own spreadsheets. This resulted in a lack of a consistent way of managing and forecasting inventory, and a limited view of products and pricing across the group.

IGT partners with lotteries and their retailers to maximize lottery sales in a responsible way. Their goal was to be able to better compare retailer performance and understand the factors driving sales. Lotteries are big business, bringing in USD75 billion in the U.S. alone, with the proceeds benefiting a variety of good causes. IGT—a company that works with lotteries and retailers worldwide to responsibly grow lottery sales—saw an opportunity to drive sales even higher. Matthew Whalen, Senior VP and CTO, Lottery at IGT, says: “We realized that we were in a unique position: huge amounts of lottery sales data from our client base are at our fingertips.

Milgard Manufacturing, Inc., a leading producer of windows and patio doors, operates on a demand-driven manufacturing model to avoid overstocking issues. This approach requires the company to predict sales extremely accurately to ensure it has the resources needed to fill incoming customer orders quickly. Sales of windows are influenced by various factors, including housing market fluctuations and regional preferences. Therefore, Milgard needs to ensure that its annual budgets and forecasts accurately reflect the impact of these factors. The company's inflexible approach to planning threatened to hamper business agility, prompting it to seek a better solution.

Oncor Electric Delivery Company LLC, the largest regulated electric distribution and transmission company in Texas, aimed to modernize its operations to proactively manage outages and meet more sophisticated energy needs. The company wanted to develop an interactive power grid that records energy usage data from homes and businesses every 15 minutes and transforms that data into actionable decision-making intelligence for energy providers and consumers alike. The goal was to be able to accurately respond to outages and restore services without requiring any contact from the customer. In many cases, outages occur during the middle of a workday, when nobody’s home. Oncor would experience a significant spike in customer calls and service orders after working hours, which meant customers would unnecessarily end up in a long queue waiting for service.

Outokumpu, a leading manufacturer of steel products, realized that by moving from reactive to proactive maintenance for its production line machines, it could improve availability, efficiency, quality and safety at its Avesta steel mill. The mill is known for the special grades of stainless steel it produces for the offshore oil and gas industry. Delivering a product that can withstand corrosive saltwater and extreme weather conditions requires very precise control of production processes. At the same time, production needs to be efficient and uninterrupted to meet the expectations of demanding clients, whose multi-million dollar offshore construction projects depend on Outokumpu’s ability to deliver the right materials at the right time. The company's top priority is always to keep all its employees safe while they work in the mill.

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.