Uttarakhand Power Corporation Ltd. (UPCL) manages the distribution of electricity in the state of Uttarakhand, India. The utility delivers power supply to more than 1.59 million consumers across 13 districts. UPCL’s distribution network covers a geographical area of more than 50,000 square kilometers, presenting a significant challenge when it comes to meeting Uttarakhand’s daily energy demand. The utility wanted to gain deeper insight into the performance of its network, so that it could better serve customers, cut costs and guarantee more reliable power supply. Lacking a proper asset management framework, UPCL found it difficult to accurately pinpoint faults or weaknesses in the network. The company also wanted to reduce instances of energy theft. By improving detection of spikes in electricity usage across its network, UPCL would be able to better identify anomalous consumption levels that could point to theft. These issues were compounded by poor availability of business information, as UPCL relied on third-party agencies to house power consumption data and manage billing. Without proper data and reliable access to customer records, UPCL had no way to track how many customer service requests it received and how many had been addressed. This exposed the company to fines and penalties from the Uttarakhand Electricity Regulatory Commission (UERC) for failing to meet established service levels in a timely fashion.

VEKA AG, a leading producer of PVC profile systems for windows and doors, was facing challenges with its existing IT infrastructure due to escalating data volumes. The company's production lines require constant access to data to ensure high-quality production and correct storage. However, the expansion of the company's portfolio led to a significant increase in data volumes, putting pressure on the existing IT infrastructure. Specifically, backup times for business-critical SAP systems were increasing, raising the risk of unscheduled downtime or slow recovery in the event of a hardware failure. Products produced when SAP systems are not available need to be stored somewhere until applications are back online, resulting in unnecessary warehousing costs and delays to deliveries. VEKA AG needed to minimize planned and unplanned downtime to boost output and sales.

Vestas, the world's largest wind energy company, relies on the precise placement of wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy costs. The optimal location for a wind turbine can significantly affect its performance and lifespan. However, the process of determining the best location for a turbine is complex and time-consuming, often taking up to three weeks. This delay is unacceptable in a competitive industry where quick responses and delivering business value are crucial. Furthermore, the cost of placing a turbine in a sub-optimal location can be significant, potentially leading to underperformance, increased warranty costs, and loss of customers.

Attracting and harnessing the energy of innovation — especially in cities — is imperative for economic growth and development. Building the connected ecosystems required to jump-start digital innovation can mean major up-front costs, which is why smaller cities have had a harder time making the business case. Vodafone Spain sought to rewrite that formula by creating a new line of business offering smarter cities services to smaller cities.

Wimbledon, organized by the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), is one of the world's highest-profile sporting events. To maintain its prestige, its digital experience must be second to none. The AELTC set a target of attracting 70 million visits, 20 million unique devices, and 8 million social followers during the two weeks of The Championships 2015. The challenge was to update the digital properties to adapt to a mobile-first world, while still offering the best possible desktop experience. The team also needed to build a special set of websites for the most important tennis fans of all: the players themselves.

nViso SA, a company that provides emotion recognition solutions, was in need of a high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company wanted to extend its services to a global customer base. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the demands of their growing customer base and the need for high performance and reliability.

Duy Tan University (DTU) in Da Nang, Vietnam, needed to incorporate additional cutting-edge technology in classrooms to help students become more marketable in the IT industry. The university prides itself on the fact that 100 percent of graduates who majored in software technology find employment immediately upon graduation. Therefore, it is extremely important for the university to have cutting-edge technology in classrooms so that students are marketable in the IT industry. Man Nguyen Duc, dean of the DTU International School, explains that students are better able to acquire jobs when they have training and knowledge about products from well-known technology companies.

Inventive, a company committed to equitable, collaborative innovation, was looking to launch its fair-trade crowdsourcing portal. For this, it needed a flexible, cost-effective development platform and high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company needed to ensure that the infrastructure was scalable to continue extending its portal solution as needed. The platform also needed to offer on-demand development capabilities to agilely support new projects.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. wanted to deliver a more customized travel experience to drive customer loyalty and improve customer satisfaction levels. However, with its existing booking systems, it could be challenging to meet customers’ requests. The system allowed a guest to select a room type and rate plan. However, each type of room could potentially be available in many locations, such as on different floors of a hotel, and guests could not easily provide guidance on their location preferences. In fact, when booking a stay on the web, guests’ only option for requesting a specific location, such as on a high floor or near the elevator, was to enter a comment in a text field. But if a hotel associate didn’t see the comment or didn’t speak the customer’s language, Starwood would not necessarily meet the request. Plus, the company had no way to track how frequently it satisfied these requests.

Vasaloppet, a nonprofit organization that manages and operates an annual 90-km cross-country ski race in Sweden, wanted to expand its business and increase its positive impact on the region. The organization aimed to boost the popularity of its summer cycling and running races and its off-season recreation opportunities. They wanted to provide athletes and spectators with a range of interactive features to enhance their experience and engagement with the events.

Westpac New Zealand Ltd. was facing a challenge with its complex IT environment that had grown over the decades. The bank initiated a strategic initiative to simplify it. Part of this simplification initiative included examining existing business processes to find ways to improve them to better serve customers. The company’s existing method for process documentation, using Microsoft Visio software and open source tools, was cumbersome and often resulted in duplicated effort. A staff member would create project documentation and then move on to another project. This led to a lack of continuity and loss of valuable information. To improve its processes, the bank needed to establish a process library.

L’Oréal, a global leader in beauty products, faced a major internal challenge around managing product information due to its vast portfolio and the varying standards and approaches across its divisions and geographic zones. The company lacked a single source of truth for product information, which hindered internal reporting and planning, made it harder to prepare statutory reports, and had a direct impact on L’Oréal’s effectiveness. L’Oréal needed to improve data quality and align product information across all parties, from suppliers through to manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Doing so would assist the Group to get the right product to the right place at the right time, driving revenues and profitability.

I-CAR, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to training the collision repair inter-industry, was facing challenges in keeping up with the rapidly evolving lightweight vehicle materials and advanced technologies. The organization needed a robust system to deliver its training materials that could reach collision repair professionals in their workplaces. The system also needed to be easily updated at one time regardless of where the information was stored and used. The organization was also looking to enhance its training programs to become increasingly relevant, engaging, accessible and timely.

Merck KGaA, a global pharmaceutical and chemical company based in Germany, needed to foster innovation to remain competitive. The company needed to capitalize on the collective intelligence of its workforce by uniting the widely distributed and functionally distinct competencies of its employees. The company sought a practical way to energize its personnel to use social business technologies to share observations, knowledge, and expertise.

Orlando Health, a private, not-for-profit healthcare network based in Florida, was facing challenges in managing competencies for its thousands of healthcare employees in a fast-changing clinical environment. The introduction of new specialized technologies in the healthcare industry, particularly in nursing, demanded additional training and qualifications for healthcare personnel, increasing the risk of skills shortages in important areas. The organization was looking for ways to improve its ability to attract, retain and develop talent. As a first step toward gaining deeper insight into talent across the organization, Orlando Health deployed a learning management system (LMS) from Cornerstone OnDemand. However, the organization needed a fresh competency library.

Orlando Health, a comprehensive private, not-for-profit healthcare network based in Florida, recognized the need to transition to value-based billing and population health management. However, this transition required the automation of patient engagement and the unlocking of patient data across all clinical systems. The two options available to them were either manually aggregating the records for its large patient population across the various electronic health record (EHR) systems used by its physicians, which would be impractical, or relying on outdated claims data, which would be insufficient due to the rapid changes in a patient's health over time.

PureFluent, a translation services company, was facing challenges in managing its translation and document review processes. The company often received files in uneditable formats from customers, which required staff members to transfer text to word processing or spreadsheet documents. During the translation process, maintaining version control was a challenge because PureFluent sent work to hundreds of translators in multiple geographic locations. It was also time-consuming for staff to manage the large volume of emails and FTP transactions required to submit translations for customer review and ensure the integration of requested changes. Furthermore, staff were spending significant time hunting through their emails for specific attachments.

Sika AG, a specialty chemicals company, was facing challenges due to its accelerated growth through acquisitions. The company needed to simplify knowledge sharing among new and existing employees across different lines of business. The majority of new employees in 2013 joined the company through acquisitions, creating challenges in quickly onboarding, integrating, and training people. Sika needed a solution to continue further developing a competent, educated staff committed to delivering on the company’s brand promise. The leadership team envisioned a workplace of the future, serving thousands of employees based on one secure, flexible, integrated solution.

The University of Zurich, one of the leading research universities in Europe, needed a way to facilitate efficient and effective collaboration among its staff and students. The university community was in constant communication, with more than 500,000 internal emails sent daily. While email was an efficient tool for transferring certain types of information, the university believed that other options such as file sharing, wikis, forums, and online communities would be faster and more effective in some cases.

The international retailing group's Security Operations team was using IBM Security access management software for nearly 14 years. The software was instrumental in governing and enforcing user access for nearly 300,000 users across 250 applications. However, the team saw an opportunity to reduce costs and gain new security capabilities by moving from a software-based access management solution to an integrated access appliance. The company was also looking to better support access to new mobile and cloud applications.

CEVA Logistics, one of the world's leading logistics services providers, was facing a challenge with its electronic data interchange (EDI) services. The company relies on EDI messages for communication with its extensive network of clients, suppliers, and logistics partners. During major retail events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the volume of EDI messages can skyrocket, leading to processing delays and potential revenue loss. The company's legacy in-house platforms made it difficult to scale the EDI infrastructure quickly to meet these peaks in demand. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide high-performance, dependable, and scalable EDI services without incurring excessive costs.

Merlin Entertainments, the second largest theme park and attractions company in the world, had no single, consistent process for online ticket sales. The cost of sales was variable, online cross-marketing and promotions were difficult, and there was no global sales visibility. The company was maintaining several separate solutions internally, and its outsourced service providers were also charging a significant fee per ticket sold. Equally, Merlin Entertainments was unable to run effective cross-marketing or cross-brand promotional activities online, and could not easily see online sales performance across all brands and sites.

Moosejaw, an outdoor retailer, was looking for a flexible, non-complex solution to grow their email revenue program and integrate with other systems to create a cart abandonment program. They needed a solution that would allow them to be creative and engage with their communications, test various aspects of their emails, without being overly complex or time intensive. They also wanted to integrate a human element to their marketing campaigns, both with the tone and style of their emails as well as through social media channels.

Celero, a leading provider of IT solutions for Canadian credit unions and financial institutions, faced a significant challenge in ensuring high performance and availability for their mission-critical systems without incurring excessive costs. The company's clients, operating in a fast-paced sector, had high expectations for Celero's services, which included hosting key banking systems and Oracle databases running on IBM Power Systems servers. Much of Celero's existing infrastructure was nearing its end-of-life, necessitating an upgrade to the latest-generation technology to guarantee the smooth running of key business systems and associated databases well into the future. The company needed to improve performance and increase scalability to continue delivering top-quality service to clients as their business grew.

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG), a renowned international biomedical research institute, was faced with the challenge of sharing large amounts of genome sequencing data quickly and cost-effectively with worldwide research institutions. The volume of data available for analysis was growing rapidly due to advancements in genetic sequencing technologies. CRG partnered with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) to improve the services of the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) to offer easier access for a global research audience. However, the EGA archive contained over two petabytes of data in a range of different formats, which posed a significant challenge. Research institutions required huge amounts of data very quickly, which may be distributed across multiple small files, a small number of very large files, or a mixture of the two. Traditional file transfer protocols were unable to deliver the required performance.

Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP), a global provider of business outsourcing and human capital management solutions, was faced with the challenge of equipping its workforce with the latest technology in a cost-efficient manner. The company considered leasing equipment as a viable option, but the management of thousands of contracts quickly and simply was a daunting task. The ever-shortening development cycles of IT equipment also posed a risk of turning capital expenditure into sunk costs. Additionally, ADP was seeking to improve its existing lease management approach by enhancing insight into costs, expiration dates, and maintenance. The company was also preparing for new, more complex Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) standards that would require all leases to be added to the balance sheet.

Alleyoop Inc. was presented with a significant challenge by a government organization in Japan. The organization required the creation of a website designed to facilitate sports camps and, in anticipation of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, to support visiting sports teams and tourists. The website needed to be multilingual and agile, capable of accommodating a fluctuating number of visitors from locations worldwide. The challenge was not only to create a website that met these requirements but also to find a hosting solution that was cost-effective and capable of handling the expected traffic without compromising on performance.

Balluff, a world-leading manufacturer of sensor solutions, was facing challenges due to growing data volumes. The company's sales and business development reports were taking longer to produce, and processing tasks scheduled to run overnight were almost running into business hours. This was negatively affecting information availability and application performance. The company needed to accelerate access to information to support its sales and business development functions. Balluff wanted to optimize its entire IT environment, including software, servers, and storage, to increase the performance of its transactional SAP ERP environment and boost productivity of its business users across all departments. The company also aimed to improve decision-making with faster, more accurate business analytics capabilities for its data warehouse.

AppAdvice, a Los Angeles-based company providing a comprehensive range of iPhone and iPad application reviews, news, and app discovery services, faced a significant challenge in managing its variably structured data. The company needed to store this data in its application catalog in a way that was not only easy and inexpensive to start with but also capable of handling potentially massive future growth. Given the nature of the data, a relational SQL database was not a viable option for the platform. As an early-stage company, AppAdvice was looking for a NoSQL database that was easy and inexpensive to get started with, but built for growth.

Arch Health Partners, a multi-specialty group with over 90 providers at 13 locations in San Diego County, was facing a challenge with its hypertensive patient population. The group's hypertension statistics were below their expectations, and they were struggling to improve the health of these patients. The first step in driving better outcomes was identifying at-risk patients from within a large and growing patient population, which proved to be a more difficult challenge than originally expected. As the organization continued to grow, managing clinical data and improving quality scores became increasingly difficult due to manual processes. The organization realized that to increase the quality and frequency of patient engagement, they would need to automate some of their processes.