Biota Technology, a leader in industrial genomics, identified a unique business opportunity to apply DNA sequencing and genomics, typically used in medical and scientific fields, to industrial use, specifically for subsurface exploration in oil and gas. The company recognized the potential benefits of their innovations for energy companies under pressure to improve capital efficiency and reduce operating costs. However, the complexity of genomes and biological material made Biota's vision challenging to implement and scale. The company needed to characterize fluid movement in oilfields by surveying subsurface microbes at different locations, depths, and times, and organizing them into DNA markers. Each Biota sample contained around 20,000 sequences describing around 100 DNA markers, resulting in hundreds of thousands of microbial data points that needed to be stored, categorized, and analyzed for informed business decisions.

CTI Solutions Group was facing a significant challenge in managing their reporting solution for customers. The company's clients were increasingly involved in monitoring various aspects of their businesses, including wholesale inventory, sales by style, and SKUs. CTI Solutions offered analytics via Excel and other tools in both HTML and downloadable formats. However, the company was struggling to keep up with programming and maintenance, despite having a team of 12 local full-time programmers and another 30 offshore. Six of these programmers were dedicated to maintaining task reporting for 93 countries throughout the world. The company realized that they needed a more automated, more uniform solution that could present information in a variety of ways, both online and downloadable. If they didn't move to a more agile reporting and data handling system, they would not be able to satisfy their clients' growing needs for timely information or hire the talent they needed to grow.

While the introduction of high-throughput techniques and lab automation helped to save a lot of time and manual effort to screen compounds, organizations lacked an easy to handle tool to perform accurate analyses that didn’t require a highly skilled analyst. Moreover, to cope with the tremendous amount of data, the scientists used to evaluate results on a per batch basis, skipping over information from the entire dataset thus missing opportunities to make better decisions. A large volume of complex data has to be assessed throughout the workflow to achieve the goal of delivering high-quality compounds. When the assay is developed and optimized it’s not only the activity or inactivity of a given target that has to be considered, batch size, reagent preparation, temperature, and signal stability need to be evaluated for a robust assay. Moreover, the quality of the screening campaign needs to be supervised to eradicate systematic errors, and hits have to be carefully selected to minimize false positives and false negatives in order to concentrate on the most promising candidates and make the most out of the available resources. Many data evaluation applications have difficulty dealing with the sheer volume of data, let alone handling the data’s multivariate and multiparametric nature.

Bigmate, a company that primarily deals with the Internet of Things (IoT) or more specifically, the Internet of Assets (IoA), faced a significant challenge. The company's telematics platform provides real-time vehicle tracking, data analysis, and tools that scale vertically or horizontally. However, new and emerging telematics applications, such as vehicle engine monitoring, were driving the need for customer accessible dashboards and reporting. With data generated as frequently as once a second, delivering visualizations that bring clarity was a crucial requirement. The main objective was to find a product that would enable them to solve their customers' problems effectively.

In the semiconductor industry, constant margin improvement is a common challenge, and no different for NXP Semiconductors. They have a complex sales model involving direct sales to customers and through distributor channels. Managing distributor incentives and ensuring no margin leakage across different regions was a significant challenge. The traditional, static BI environment was slow and highly dependent on IT, making it difficult to add new data columns or graphs to reports. Analysts spent more time pulling data from various sources rather than analyzing it, leading to delays in identifying and acting on outliers.

The management of regulatory changes is a significant challenge for financial companies. The process is often costly, time-consuming, error-prone, and unpredictable. The volume of regulatory information published by state and federal governments is overwhelming, and financial companies are forced to invest heavily in manpower to keep up. Compliance.ai offers solutions to these inefficiencies, helping financial services companies manage and respond to the growing volume and pace of regulatory change. Their platform includes purpose-built machine learning models and an API for programmatic access to regulatory information. However, the challenge was managing access to the API and its offerings.

Macy’s needed to adapt to the increasing mobile traffic and provide a seamless mobile experience. The company faced challenges with optimizing their mobile site, which was not frequently used due to slow speeds and lack of optimization. The impact of not resolving these issues would be dissatisfied customers, decreased brand identity, lower sales, and higher customer turnover.

A large tech company was using legacy analytics platforms to support over 500 internal clients with predictive modeling projects. These projects were aimed at improving customer acquisition and retention, identifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, increasing revenue, and understanding customer lifetime value. However, the legacy systems were primarily used for data extraction, processing, analysis, and reporting, and had several limitations. The global analytics team was heavily dependent on these systems, and the idea of migrating to a new platform, the TIBCO® Data Science platform, was met with reservations. The team decided to conduct a feasibility analysis by creating a customer lifetime value model for one of the business units, a project they had undertaken multiple times before.

Lufthansa Cargo’s IT systems had evolved into a complex and heterogeneous structure centered around the host-based MOSAIK application, which dated back to the seventies. This system enabled access to product information, bookings, reservations, and shipment tracking, as well as the exchange of waybill data via electronic data interchange (EDI). However, developing add-ons and adaptations to this system was time-consuming and costly, which was necessary for the optimal support of Lufthansa Cargo’s time-definite services. These services responded to customers’ needs for the rapid shipment of specific types of goods within a precisely defined time frame. The company needed to reduce operating costs by simplifying the complexity of interfaces and maintenance, and to accelerate the time to market of its new products and services. Enterprise and business application integration were identified as key facilitators, connectors, and control systems to achieve these objectives.

BroadReach faced a significant challenge in improving healthcare outcomes due to the fragmented nature of data across various clinics, hospitals, and NGOs. The delay in data reporting, especially for late-stage HIV and TB patients, was critical as it could take weeks to get a report, leading to severe health consequences. The primary challenge was to integrate and understand data from multiple sources quickly and effectively to make informed decisions that could save lives.

Royal Caribbean strives to anticipate guest needs and optimize their experience throughout pre-cruise, cruise, and post-cruise interactions. To accomplish this faster, better, and at lower cost, the IT team realized it needed a higher level integration and a services-oriented architecture that would let them transform legacy applications into reusable and re-combinable software services. The company needed a cohesive enterprise (ship and shore) integration services foundation and governance to manage the service lifecycle and sharing across the organization.

In the United States, roughly one in 20 patients admitted to a hospital develops an infection, with surgical site infections being the most common. These infections account for more than 30 percent of occurrences, leading to illness, prolonged hospitalization, and even death. The total cost of hospital-acquired infections is estimated at $10 billion per year. Surgeons at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics wanted to know when patients were susceptible to surgical infections to make critical treatment decisions in the operating room. Dr. John Cromwell believed that predictive analytics could prevent a high percentage of surgical site infections and decrease healthcare costs. However, the division’s desktop analytics environment could not handle large distributed data volumes, posing a major roadblock.

The airline industry has evolved significantly, shifting from traditional sales agents and ticket offices to online and mobile platforms. Air France and KLM, after merging, faced the challenge of integrating multiple reservation systems, legacy systems, and commercial off-the-shelf systems. They needed an integration platform to connect these diverse systems, ensuring seamless service to passengers 24/7. The integration had to be fast, cost-effective, and future-proof to support new functionalities and personalized services.

ING Bank Turkey aimed to enhance customer service and market share by making banking accessible through mobile devices, the Internet, or branches. The bank faced challenges such as lack of transparency in service levels, inefficient processes, and user-unfriendly systems for both customers and employees. They needed to streamline processes, decentralize operations, and increase service and sales while differentiating their distribution with new third-party channels.

Over the years, Societe Generale’s Risk, HR, Accounting, Procurement, and other business units (BUs) had each built their own information systems to meet business needs. These systems had evolved into separate silos of technologies with no plan for reuse. The results included high development and maintenance costs and data discrepancies that ultimately impacted the ability to make informed decisions. To overcome these issues and industrialize integration between business units, Societe Generale’s IT management decided to implement a platform to manage and govern data exchanges: the Système d’Echange Groupe (SEG), or Group Exchange System.

Banco Sabadell aimed to transition to a new digital banking model to meet the demands of more discerning digital customers. The bank faced challenges with complex legacy systems that were not integrated, leading to increased costs and longer time-to-market for new cross-system requirements. The primary goal was to simplify operations, administration, and customer relationships to deliver top-quality financial services and enhance customer satisfaction.

Yellow Pages, a well-known Canadian digital media and marketing solutions company, faced the challenge of transforming its business from traditional print directories to the digital world. With consumers increasingly looking for information online, on smartphones, and on social platforms, the company needed to adapt to these new search methods. The primary challenge was to ensure that the information provided was complete, accurate, up-to-date, and rich. The company had multiple sources of merchant information, which, if published online without proper management, would lead to incomplete or duplicate listings. This would result in a loss of users, as consumers do not accept inaccurate information. The company's vision was to have efficient, systematic, and controlled curation of directory content by implementing the right governance, people, processes, and tools. The Content Accuracy & Relevance (CAR) initiative aimed to acquire, maintain, and deliver the richest, most accurate, up-to-date, and relevant content to consumers, while providing advertisers with exceptional ROI for lead generation and customer acquisition.

As Yakult Market Analyst Egbert Jan Vierkant explains, in the first several years in Europe, Yakult sales grew steadily, but suddenly, after competitors began to enter the market, something surprising happened. “We had an extraordinary sales increase, especially in the Netherlands.” The company wanted to know why, but tools like Excel were not suitable. “We were suffering from time-consuming analysis, mistakes, and spreadsheets. We had multiple data sources that we could not bring together. We were spending time on gathering and collecting information instead of on thinking about the business.”

The rapid pace of change in the telecom industry presents a major challenge to the wireless providers. Consumers are constantly demanding changes like new rate plans, value-added services, better connectivity, and popular mobile applications. Throughout the industry, companies fight to keep up with the expectations of customers. As applications on mobile devices become richer and begin to generate more data, T-Mobile strives to be at the forefront of change. Consumers expect to see updated data in their apps the moment they open the phones, which necessitates automatic updating of data and faster transmission speeds. The sheer volume of traffic that smart phones and mobile apps generate is going up exponentially. By adopting the right technologies, T-Mobile wants to provide exemplary service and connectivity to its customers.

Retail giant Marks and Spencer wanted to empower its business analysts to learn more about the business and use that knowledge for better decision-making. They aimed to improve the productivity of the organization, particularly focusing on IT. This included optimizing the number of people working on projects and improving the speed at which solutions could be delivered. M&S started looking for a solution that would supply self-service data access and empower employees to confidently use data to answer key business questions without IT support.

Oil and gas is saturated with tools and software, presenting an opportunity for data science to connect across domains and provide unique workflows. Ruths.ai aimed to be a data science partner and trusted advisor by delivering quality solutions and good advice. They sought technologies that enabled easy deployment at enterprise scale and allowed end-users to gain trust and exercise intuition. Without the right technologies, Ruths.ai would be limited in their ability to deliver and connect with clients.

Swisscom faced significant challenges due to intense competition from local Telco operators and over-the-top providers that use local network resources. Additionally, the company was undergoing a rapid transformation to digital business, which necessitated an organizational restructuring and IT platform consolidation. The primary challenge was not only integrating technologies and IT platforms but also integrating people from different divisions to create solutions for the entire company. Without successful integration, Swisscom risked slower product creation, increased costs, and reduced revenues.

At Western Union, customers are central to everything. The company aims to make financial transactions as fast and secure as possible, with no margin for error. Customers are increasingly embracing new technologies, especially in regions like Indonesia, India, and Africa, where adoption is faster than in some developed countries. This shift brings new requirements, such as the need to complete transactions on mobile devices. Western Union faced challenges in integrating its payments ecosystem with hundreds of banks, half a million locations, and various post offices, ATM networks, mobile devices, and online and retail locations.

Though nonprofits want data, they don’t always have the ability to get it. “When we start a project to help a nonprofit, we sometimes see a data collection issue, and not collecting data can have implications on funding. Funders are the biggest group demanding data from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), nonprofits, and even government,” says Heeke. At the same time, funders aren’t always keen on the idea of their donations going towards analytics tools. “There’s a huge opportunity to use enterprise-level tools for social impact and finding ways to make this technology accessible to the non-profit community is critical.” “It’s really about the quality of data and the ability to make the data visible and useful to a wide audience. People forget that good ideas come from people on the ground, and not necessarily from the analyst in an office,” says Heeke.

Like many companies in the energy industry, the challenge for Cargill was the volume of its diverse data and the difficulty of processing it quickly to enable fast response to market events. Without a strategic partnership, Cargill would have had to develop these solutions internally, which would not be ideal. The company needed a way to manage and analyze large volumes of data efficiently to make timely and informed decisions.

eClinicalWorks aimed to transition from merely capturing healthcare data to converting it into actionable insights. The solution needed to provide simple answers to complex problems, present analyses that were comprehensible and visually appealing to end users, and facilitate the extraction of data from silos. The company initially considered developing its own software but decided to integrate TIBCO Spotfire into its existing EHR application after recognizing its potential to generate new revenue from existing customers and its strong reputation in the healthcare industry.

For its new always-on, all-digital Hello bank! project, BNL aimed to improve customer acquisition by offering innovative, customer-focused banking services. The project required implementing new technology and staying updated with technological innovations. BNL faced several challenges, including transitioning from traditional, manual workflows to digital business processes, reducing costs, and moving from centralized back-office management to distributed management. They needed a robust infrastructure for application integration due to the heterogeneous applications built over the years, which lacked standardization.

In 2014, AccorHotels began its €225 million digital transformation. The company was struggling with a best-of-breed IT environment made up of many developments, all of which were integrated with strong dependencies. The difficulties in bringing together Oracle and Salesforce applications illustrated the limitations of point-to-point integrations. To support the development of new services and deal with the growth in transaction volumes, IT needed to address four issues: simplification of both technical architecture and service ergonomics, openness of services for easy partner integration, scalability to cope with increasing load levels, and modularity to enable a truly service-oriented architecture.

Dutch Railways (NS) faced the challenge of proving their capability to deliver reliable and better services to secure the next railway concession from the Dutch government. The company had to integrate various IT systems across nine different types of trains, each with its own IT environment, making maintenance expensive and complex. They needed a unified, scalable, and reliable platform to handle the onboard and onshore systems, ensuring synchronization and no message loss. The goal was to leverage real-time data from over 800 trains to improve customer experience and operational efficiency.

Our customer experience (CX) orchestration platform gives clients four capabilities: listening to the voice of the customer, learning what customers are saying, sharing that information internally, and engaging with the customer to close the loop. Competing on price and products will eventually run its course, making customer experience a significant strategic differentiator. The ability to relate and connect with customers is crucial. We saw a market opportunity for a single, fully integrated, end-to-end architecture providing these capabilities.