In late 2013, AstraZeneca began shifting its strategic IT focus towards cloud-based platforms and applications to support enterprise agility. The company needed a globally-available integration platform that could be used by distributed teams with minimal corporate support. The challenge was to integrate new cloud-based investments with existing on-premises platforms, while enabling relatively unspecialised IT practitioners to develop and maintain integrations. AstraZeneca's existing integration technologies were not meeting the new requirements, leading to the need for a new integration platform.

Xactly, a leader in cloud-based incentive management solutions, faced challenges as it expanded its use of cloud-based business applications. The company adopted a 'cloud first' approach, deploying Salesforce for CRM, Workday for finance and HR, Domo for business intelligence, and NetSuite OpenAir for professional services management. However, this led to data silos, impacting Xactly's ability to provide a seamless customer experience. The lack of integration between Salesforce, Workday, and NetSuite OpenAir meant that customer data was not unified, leading to repetitive manual data entry and inefficient use of resources.

Glance Networks, an Internet-based desktop sharing and Web conferencing service provider, faced challenges in synchronizing sales data from diverse channels. The company experienced exponential growth, necessitating a seamless flow of information from online and inside sales into Salesforce.com. The existing data analytics solution created silos of valuable data that couldn't be utilized effectively. Manual connection of systems was costly and time-consuming, diverting skilled R&D staff from core activities. An enterprise-class solution was expensive and posed installation challenges. The team needed a practical way to deploy Salesforce.com without overhauling the existing infrastructure.

The Advisory Board Company needed to migrate a large volume of data from its on-premise CRM application to salesforce.com. The IT team faced challenges in synchronizing data among divergent applications, with information spread across more than two million records. The existing integration software was costly and unable to meet data orchestration needs, particularly with cloud-based solutions like salesforce.com. The company required a more efficient way to move its massive enterprise database to the cloud.

Kaplan Test Prep faced significant challenges due to the accumulation of disparate applications storing data in different formats, which created a technology strain. This situation prevented the company from having a single version of truth or a flexible architecture, making it difficult to gather and harmonize data across all domains. The company had accumulated a large amount of data over the last decade, and early attempts to integrate this data using data virtualization technology and off-the-shelf products were time-consuming and inefficient. Kaplan needed a solution that could streamline data integration and provide insights more quickly to support their business innovation and digital transformation goals.

TBWA Worldwide, a global advertising agency network, faced the challenge of migrating 11,000 employee email accounts from Google Suite to Microsoft Office 365. The company needed an automated account management process to streamline agency and employee account management across its 300 ad agencies worldwide. The identity management team was tasked with managing employee email and providing real-time software access. Initially, hand-coding integrations worked, but as the number of integrations grew, it became time-consuming. The team needed a solution to manage APIs and complete the migration within 30 days, as hand-coding to Office 365 APIs was not sustainable.

A large part of George Weston Foods’ (GWF) success comes from delivering fresh products to supermarkets each day to delight its customers with the food they love. To continually provide consistent and high-quality products like freshly baked bread, GWF requires more streamlined Sales Operations processes. Multiple teams at GWF worked behind the scenes to analyze hundreds of thousands of data points and understand what they mean to the business. Though these teams used multiple cloud applications to ease their data analysis process, they still struggled to get consistent sets of data and reporting. Even though different teams used the same sets of data and existing tools to perform analysis, the results produced varied outcomes. GWF used a middleware platform for data orchestration, which while great for EDI and B2B, its strength was not extracting large batches of data, such as those that contained 1GB of customer orders (SKUs). “We had great systems, but we couldn’t effectively get the data into a centralized application. We needed to get a trusted and validated data representation where users, like sales and marketing, can go in and get the data they needed,” said Stephen Mackay, Solutions Architect at GWF.

Pure Storage aimed to enhance its internal operations by creating a robust architecture that connects all systems and applications, fostering a data-driven culture. The company faced challenges with manual, hand-coded integrations that slowed down data delivery and productivity. As the company grew, managing disparate applications became increasingly difficult, affecting decision-making across finance, sales, and marketing. The need for a scalable architecture was evident to support the company's growth and long-term vision.

KORE Wireless faced significant challenges in consolidating systems and platforms following its acquisition of Wyless Inc. The primary issues were dealing with disconnected and duplicate customer data across multiple sources. The IT and architecture teams were tasked with migrating customer data from six different systems, including KORE and Wyless device management platforms, into a single platform, Salesforce.com. The goal was to achieve a complete view of customers to better serve them across products, platforms, and connectivity services. This was particularly important for providing continuous connectivity for services like Fleet Management, which required seamless integration of multiple carrier networks.

A seamless customer experience is crucial for Inenco to stand out from its competitors. The company needs to effectively develop data-driven energy solutions and provide its customers with real-time and holistic energy data within the client portal. Over the years, Inenco's IT team has built and managed various in-house systems to collect energy data from each utility site. However, these systems and databases were not easily mapped to retrieve data pertinent to business users and customers. Data sources residing in those systems also came in different formats, resulting in tremendous time and effort for IT to transform data into a single, standardized format, and to eliminate data duplication. It was near impossible for business users across the organization to have a consolidated view of information to effectively manage day-to-day internal operations, to develop energy strategies and recommendations, or to provide customers with real-time energy data in their client portal.

Box faced significant challenges in integrating its numerous cloud-based applications, such as Salesforce, Zuora, NetSuite, and Tableau, to make informed business decisions across departments. The company relied on multiple applications covering sales, marketing, consulting, financials, and people, each serving a distinct purpose. Users had to manually upload and download data from one application to another, which consumed substantial time and effort, diverting focus from high-value pursuits. The goal was to find a platform that reduced manual processes and supported the fluid flow of data across the company's disparate cloud-based and on-premises applications into a data lake. The platform also needed to be user-friendly and provide data aggregation, warehousing, and analytics capabilities. In 2014, Box subscribed to a platform provider that appeared to fulfill the company's needs but ultimately failed its high expectations due to the high skill sets required to use it. The search for an iPaaS continued, with a focus on agility and efficiency in developing integrations.

As customers became more tech savvy and interacted with multiple channels, the retailer needed a better way to engage with customers at the right time and in the right channel. With these rapid digital changes, marketers could not react fast enough to meet their customers’ needs. Although the marketing team invested in multiple marketing and analytics platforms to fuel their digital marketing strategy, the organization still lacked full visibility of its customers’ preferences and intents. Customer data resided in silos as the marketing team monitored customer insights in multiple marketing cloud applications, on-premises applications, and databases. Without complete insights, the marketing team could not make informed business decisions, such as which channels provided higher conversions for their digital content and offers. As a result, the marketing team could not measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of its digital marketing investments. The marketing team also relied heavily on expensive technical resources for daily operations. To retrieve customer data outside of their existing reporting platforms – from social media channels to data aggregators – they had to rely on their IT team to develop code for many Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The process of adding or modifying data took substantial time and effort that rendered the data irrelevant for the marketing team and hindered making business decisions in a timely fashion. Marketing by customer segmentation in the new digital landscape proved to be extremely difficult for the marketing team. Without customer data integration at their fingertips, the marketing team could not deliver real-time, personalized offers to their customers.

Boston University faced significant challenges with its data architecture, which hindered seamless interactions for students, faculty, and staff. The university relied heavily on its IT department to connect systems and automate processes, such as research operations, class scheduling, and financial processes. However, the existing data integration approach was cumbersome, involving a mix of homegrown ETL tools and a legacy data integration tool. These methods required continuous manual support and maintenance, leading to inefficiencies. The IT department had to manually write and rewrite code to fulfill integration requests, which was time-consuming and prone to errors. Additionally, the admissions processes relied on older technologies that were labor-intensive for staff to maintain. The faculty also needed a more seamless connection between training systems and research compliance tracking. Overall, the university's data integration approach was not scalable and required a more efficient solution to improve decision-making and access to information.

SnackNation, a rapidly growing company in the food and beverage industry, faced significant integration challenges as it expanded. The small engineering team was overwhelmed with integration requests from various departments, including operations, marketing, finance, and customer support. These requests involved integrating over 20 systems, such as Salesforce, NetSuite, Shopify, and custom-built applications, primarily through coding. This manual and code-heavy approach was unsustainable and hindered productivity. The order fulfillment process exemplified these challenges, as engineers had to manually retrieve and export SKU data to Google Sheets, which was time-consuming and prone to errors. This process delayed snack deliveries to customers and prevented engineers and brand specialists from focusing on higher-value tasks. As SnackNation continued to grow, it became clear that a more efficient integration approach was necessary to support its operations and maintain customer satisfaction.

Over the past decade, the enterprise software company has grown into a mature software company and looked to modernize the company’s IT systems and infrastructure. The company turned to new applications to enable different departments within the organization to stay agile and achieve business results. As a result, the company prioritized its “cloud first” approach by implementing cloud solutions in their IT architecture. The IT team at the company deployed multiple cloud applications, including Salesforce for their marketing and sales’ customer relationship management system, Workday for their finance and human resources teams, Domo for their business intelligence team, and NetSuite OpenAir for their professional services team, among other cloud applications. As the number of applications increased, teams faced silos of information, disabling them from moving quickly and providing the best possible customer experience. These applications proved to be useful for teams to manage their workflows within their departments. Over time, the organization realized that the same applications they implemented to stay nimble actually hindered them from identifying issues and making data-driven decisions. Teams saw gaps in their customer information, resulting in disconnected business insights. One of the biggest issues the company faced is that prospective customer and existing customer data in Salesforce was not connected to contract and billing information within Workday or the professional services projects in NetSuite OpenAir. The missing customer information disabled individual departments from identifying customers that required customer support. Users conducted repetitive and manual data entry to merge customer data and attempted to create a single view of the customer – wasting valuable employee time and resources.

Route had multiple sources of data in applications such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Jira, and in a production database, and was not able to connect these sources of data to create a holistic customer view. Route leadership wanted to know how merchants were doing on their platform and how they could better serve them. Without the ability to connect vital data, it was nearly impossible to gather these insights to drive strategic business decisions. Traditional integration would require countless hours manually coding integrations, updating, and maintaining them.

In 2018, dnata catering Australia acquired Qantas Airways’ catering businesses, Q Catering and Snap Fresh. The challenge was to migrate all applications and systems used by Q Catering from the Qantas environment to the dnata catering environment, ensuring a seamless migration without interruption to business operations or customer delivery. This involved integrating multiple applications and systems that managed passenger information, meal scheduling, and real-time changes. The lean IT team at dnata catering Australia was tasked with transitioning from Qantas catering apps on AWS to dnata catering’s Microsoft Azure cloud, integrating dnata catering’s applications with Qantas’s passenger and scheduling systems, and ensuring platform stability and scalability for 17 dnata catering centers in Australia. The team had only three months to fully test, validate, integrate, and implement the migration.

Hampshire Trust Bank aimed to enhance operational agility and become more data-driven through a digital transformation initiative. The bank's CIO, Russ Fitzgerald, identified cloud technologies as the best support for these goals, leading to a focus on migrating data and processes to the cloud. A significant part of this initiative was an API enablement project to streamline internal processes and improve interactions with brokers and customers. However, the Head of IT Infrastructure, David Patterson, faced an integration challenge. Custom coding for system integration would slow down the release of new APIs, necessitating a search for a cloud integration solution.

Thayer Distribution faced significant challenges with its data integration processes, which were manual, code-heavy, and time-consuming. These inefficiencies were eating into the company's profits and hindering its growth potential. The company had previously attempted to solve these issues by purchasing an integration solution, but it failed to deliver the desired results. As a result, Thayer was at an impasse, needing a more effective solution to streamline its data management processes and support its growth ambitions.

Opya, a healthcare provider specializing in autism treatment, faced significant challenges with manual data and application integrations. The engineering team, led by VP of Engineering Matt McKenna, was tasked with maintaining and enhancing a proprietary mobile application used by clinicians and parents. This app required seamless and secure data flow between critical back-end systems, including Amazon Redshift, Salesforce.com, and a PostgreSQL application database. The manual integration process was time-consuming, requiring extensive coding and ongoing maintenance, which diverted resources from strategic projects aimed at improving client care. McKenna estimated that hand-coding the integration pipelines would take two developers approximately three months, with additional monthly maintenance. The risk of unexpected integration failures was also a concern, as it could impact the quality of care provided to families.

In 2015, Pitney Bowes embarked on a digital transformation journey to provide frequent data access to stakeholders, aiming to uncover new opportunities and drive business growth. Previously, data used by employees across departments would become stale once downloaded onto local machines, making timely business decisions challenging. The Big Data team needed to store and back up data from disparate sources on a data lake and host curated data in a cloud data warehouse for direct user access. Initially, they built a home-grown integration tool to move data from on-premises and cloud sources into the data lake on Amazon S3. However, this tool could not support integrations for many new cloud-native applications, leading to time-consuming custom coding and workarounds. The team had to re-evaluate their strategy for moving data from cloud applications into their data lake long-term, as they were not scaled to support the business strategy at the required pace.

In 2018, Schoeller Allibert initiated 'Project MOVE', focusing on digitizing their operations by introducing a new ERP system from IFS across all manufacturing sites. The challenge was to integrate this new system with existing legacy systems to support intercompany processing during a phased rollout across more than 20 countries. The IT team needed a modern integration platform to connect their diverse data and application architecture, which included both cloud and on-premises systems. They sought a stable, flexible, all-in-one solution that would integrate their information infrastructure transparently and uniformly, without requiring extensive resources and time to build and maintain custom APIs. The ideal platform would support the company's IT strategy of moving from paper-based to system-driven operations, ensuring efficient and disruption-free day-to-day IT and business operations.

Manual, inefficient processes prevented business speed and agility. Browns Shoes needed to embrace the growing amount of valuable data it collects and manages via new business intelligence and data warehousing initiatives. The retailer started with Tableau and Python script to move all the data needed in a SQL database, but in order to scale the project and make it business-ready, the IT team needed an efficient way to move large amounts of diverse data from the various systems it had into its data warehouse. To do this, Browns Shoes sought an ETL tool that would match its requirements.

In 2018, V12 Vehicle Finance embarked on a significant transformation to support its ambitious growth plans over the next five years. A critical component of this transformation was the implementation of a new IT infrastructure to ensure that both front- and back-end systems were modern, agile, and future-proof. The company needed to automate repetitive, manual tasks to free up its skilled IT team to focus on higher-value projects. Additionally, V12 Vehicle Finance needed to move away from older legacy systems that were hindering progress. Previous attempts to make these changes, both in-house and with a software provider, had yielded lackluster results. Therefore, V12 Vehicle Finance required a modern iPaaS solution that was cloud-based, feature-rich, enterprise-grade, and easy for employees to understand and use.