NK.pl, a popular social networking service in Poland, was facing a challenge in keeping pace with the changing preferences and behaviors of its 13 million users. The traditional transaction database used by NK.pl was not powerful enough to process the 250 terabytes of data generated by its users in a timely manner. When product managers attempted to run queries against the data, which was spread across 1,500 servers, they faced query response times of three to four weeks. Such slow response times were unacceptable to NK.pl because the data was outdated and meaningless by the time it was received. To optimize product features, marketing efforts, and the experience of its social network members, NK.pl needed a system that could perform both simple and rich queries quickly for intra-day analysis and response in an extremely cost-effective manner.

With its business growing, Peerless needed a more consistent, flexible platform to modernize its production environment and support future expansion. The company began exploring commercial off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and underlying databases. While companies in similar situations often go straight to proprietary vendors, Peerless decided to build its own ERP solution from the ground up. With a team of just a half-dozen developers, Hamilton’s department set out to develop a fully featured business platform that would automate every aspect of the company’s business processes – from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution – in order to enable a highly optimized just-in-time manufacturing process. To support this environment, Peerless required a flexible, scalable database environment that would be easy for developers to optimize around the evolving ERP platform.

The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), an executive agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was facing the challenge of keeping pace with rising regulatory challenges without increasing costs. The organization’s mission encompasses ensuring the safety, effectiveness, and regulatory compliance of plant protection products used by both industry and amateur gardeners; regulating a market worth around £450 million in the UK and a similar figure in overseas exports; and shaping UK policies on pesticide issues – all with a staff of only 200. Technology plays a vital role in making this possible. Most recently, Park’s group was called on to deliver a particularly high-profile project – enabling the electronic delivery of all services, followed by the introduction of a complete, end-to-end electronic workflow for the entire new product application and approval process.

Colgate-Palmolive's Online Acceleration Center of Excellence in London was focused on transforming its digital offering in markets throughout the EU. However, reporting on key digital advertising parameters was largely manual. Local media teams logged into various ad platforms, collected data, and inserted them into Excel templates to create bi-weekly reports. These reports were then sent to brand managers in respective markets and the local agency teams, with no automated flow of information. The process was slow and time-consuming, involving over 25 people in the EU region. Furthermore, the data was practically out of date by the time it arrived with the analysts and decision makers. The reports were distributed via email, clogging up inboxes and increasing the possibility of a data discrepancy.

The Philadelphia 76ers, a part of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment’s (HBSE) portfolio, had a data ecosystem consisting of over 130 data sources. Managing and expanding this data infrastructure was becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming. The process of connecting to a new data source could take weeks, severely limiting the bandwidth of the data team. The fixed timelines surrounding live events made flexibility and agility of data operations paramount. The existing data consolidation procedure was not scalable and was preventing the team from fully focusing on uncovering the insights the data could provide.

IKEA Austria was facing challenges in consolidating data from various sources, which was crucial for understanding the needs of its customers and preparing for future growth. The company was dealing with multiple data sources and using the services of several agencies, which led to data silos and unavailability of data. Data quality was also a significant issue, with different KPIs and naming conventions used for campaigns on different channels, making reporting on campaign performance extremely difficult. The company was also facing challenges in terms of data accessibility, with global teams at IKEA having to wait for days, even weeks, for the information they needed.

Globalvia, a global infrastructure concessions management company, faced the challenge of consolidating and structuring business data from 29 diverse and geographically dispersed concessions to maximize management efficiency. The company manages concessions in seven countries, including highways, railways, hospitals, and ports, each with different management criteria. There were no defined roles and responsibilities and no governing data policy. The company needed to consolidate data and define its processes to facilitate a corporate transformation. Globalvia developed the Prometheus project to chart a course for unifying and standardizing processes, systems, and corporate culture. This project led to the Delphi technology initiative to facilitate an organization-wide transformation. The project’s stakeholders set out to develop a single management model based on innovation, with higher quality data for improved internal processes and better decision-making. They wanted to establish a model that could detect trends and make it easier to determine the profitability of their concessions.

HEROLD's initial challenge was to quickly monetize enormous amounts of addresses, household and corporate data that it acquired from purchasing a directory business. The company was seeking a better way to connect its customer-the businesses that advertise with it -with user of its digital properties, therefore HEROLD needed to create new digital products that could summarize and structure HEROLD's data assets so it could be productized and resold. Additional challenges included: Integrating and Managing Complex and High Volumes of Data. Integrating, accessing and searching the massive amounts of acquired personalized and address data could not be accomplished with HEROLD's existing relational database technology. Much of HEROLD's company data resided in as many as 15 separate systems and included records on more than 360,000 businesses, comprising of unstructured pieces such as product information, user reviews and recommendations, ratings, photos and text descriptions, which came from product feeds and manual entries. Aggressive Timeline to Demonstrate Return on Investment. HEROLD needed to integrate the newly acquired structured and unstructured data into its systems to quickly create and introduce new products that would help them stay ahead of the competition while demonstrating return on investment to management.

The AIRBUS flight test program is a key component of aircraft development. Every part in every possible configuration must be tested in as many scenarios as possible. This creates multiple types of data, all in different silos — plane configuration criteria, flight data criteria, flight event behaviors, crew reports, and other unstructured content criteria. Historically, each test flight required manual research into previous tests to create a set of specific requests, and the effort to leverage data to optimize those new flight tests was considerable. While a lot of data was generated during testing, AIRBUS’ process to search within the data in order to simply retrieve a specific condition and its result was a slow, manual one. And, flight test environments are constantly changing, with a series of maneuvers done at specific locations, which meant that traditional data approaches couldn’t keep up with this complex data challenge.

INSEAD, a leading global graduate business school, was struggling with a complex tech ecosystem comprising over 100 siloed applications. This complexity made it difficult for the institution to meet the expectations of students and faculty, leading to a depreciated experience, especially during enrollment and scheduling. The situation also resulted in an overload of manual work for staff and increased IT operations costs. INSEAD needed a new integration approach to break down information silos, connect multiple mission-critical systems, and deliver an industry-leading education experience for students and faculty worldwide.

The City and County of Denver (CCD) aimed to bring a digital experience to Colorado residents and businesses, allowing them to conduct government-related services online. This involved connecting legacy IT systems and critical data to new cloud-based services across over 50 agencies, implementing new technologies to enhance the delivery of law enforcement services, and streamlining key government services such as licensing and permitting. Before MuleSoft, the CCD team used Oracle’s ESB solution, which slowed down innovation and required frequent, time-consuming updates, custom integrations with multiple single points of failure, and very little documentation or reusability.

The New South Wales (NSW) Government wanted to build out its data practice and initiatives. They needed to enable its analysts to draw upon data science and automatic machine learning platforms to help find answers, pinpoint solutions and use data to create better services for all. The government was looking for a solution that could improve the accuracy of its predictive models and empower its team of data scientists to build models faster.

Organizations responsible for fraud prevention are facing a host of challenges at the transaction, account, and network-level to detect fraudulent behavior and suspicious activities. Fraudulent transactions are rare, but costly if they aren’t detected. In the credit card business, for example, third-party fraud accounts for roughly 4 out of every 10,000 transactions. Modeling rare events is difficult, like finding a needle in a haystack. For best results, gather as much data as possible, and use the most advanced techniques available.

KHD, a global leader in cement plant technology, equipment, and services, was facing challenges with its legacy IT infrastructure. The company's data growth rates were increasing, and the costs associated with managing this data were also on the rise. The complexity within the data center was growing, with the need to deploy numerous different deduplication, compression, and optimization appliances to keep up with data growth and the performance requirements of enterprise applications. The increasing capital costs for added storage, compute, various appliances, and software licensing were a concern. Additionally, operational expenses were mounting as administrators were spending countless hours on menial maintenance tasks instead of focusing on innovation to drive the business forward. In certain countries, where staff turnover rates are typically high, the lack of trained IT resources was impacting growth. KHD needed a new solution, based on a fundamentally new data architecture.

High Cotton’s disjointed IT environment was becoming increasingly risky, and costly to maintain and scale. The company relied on a mix of legacy equipment including HP servers, third-party storage systems, and they didn’t have any in-house data protection. Administering the fragmented environment was a manually intensive and error-prone undertaking involving a number of distinct management systems. Deploying new workloads—allocating compute and storage resources, instituting backup policies, performing restores—could take hours and weeks using the company’s legacy solutions. Even worse, disasters or equipment failures had the potential to impair critical IT services and disrupt business; restoring applications, including VMware Horizon View VDI apps, could take hours or days using the incumbent data protection solutions and methods.

Marketing Innovators’ aging IT systems–HP servers and SAN arrays supporting a variety of business applications–were becoming increasingly costly and inefficient to operate, impairing service agility and business innovation. Deploying new workloads–allocating compute and storage resources, configuring data protection policies–took days using the company’s legacy storage solutions and data backup and replication tools. Shane Ladd, Sr. System Administrator for Marketing Innovators, initiated a data center modernization program to improve the scalability, performance and economics of the company’s IT infrastructure. After an extensive evaluation process involving a number of vendors including Nutanix®, Nimble Storage, Scale Computing and Maxta®, Ladd selected SimpliVity OmniStack Solution with Cisco UCS for its next-generation data center architecture.

St. John’s Riverside Hospital had been running their existing infrastructure environment for seven years, and the time had come for them to expand and update their technology. A multitude of issues came to a head, the most urgent being that their 40TB storage systems were quickly running out of physical space loads, restricting their ability to scale and grow. Their legacy servers were also oversubscribed to the point that failover was completely prohibited, leaving St. John’s Riverside Hospital in a compromised and unacceptable state if the system should ever crash. With so many mission-critical applications running in their virtualized environment, data protection and speedy data backup are essential to the well being of St. John’s Riverside and their patients. Using legacy backup software for their D2D backup as well as for an offsite location five miles away, St. John’s was seeing RPOs of eight to ten hours with a three-month retention and, depending on the data, RTOs could take five to ten minutes for files, with full servers taking up to 30 minutes. These backup times were unfavorable for St. John’s, who prides itself on continually improving efficiency and speed.

GoodLife Fitness, the largest health club chain in Canada, was facing challenges with its outsourced IT implementation. The system was costly, inefficient, and lacked agility. The company was heavily dependent on its managed service provider, which charged high monthly fees and required a three-week lead time for any changes. As the company was relocating to a new corporate headquarters, the management decided to bring IT operations in-house to increase agility and reduce operational expenses.

Surrey Place Centre, a specialized clinical services provider for individuals living with developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorder and those with visual impairments, was operating with a fractured IT environment. The combination of HP and Dell servers and Dell storage arrays was costly and complicated to administer and maintain. The organization relied on an outdated tape-based backup solution for offsite disaster recovery. Catastrophes had the potential to disrupt critical business applications for days or even weeks while systems were recovered.

Manufacture Belge de Chocolats (MBC), a Belgian chocolate manufacturer, was part of the corporate Godiva family until 2019 when Godiva sold its Brussels operations. This led to MBC becoming a standalone company, still manufacturing chocolates for Godiva but also creating its own brand - Rosalie's. The company aims to be an agile manufacturer that can meet production demands for all types of customers, including smaller batch orders. However, following the divestiture, MBC had to replicate the technical and administrative services that had been centralized under Godiva in the US. This included security, product specification management, and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. To meet its new manufacturing goals, MBC needed to digitalize its factory and automate its processes.

University College of the North (UCN) is committed to the development of its region, northern Manitoba, where approximately 70% of its student population is indigenous. The region is widely dispersed and remote, with nine of UCN's 12 regional training centers located in First Nations communities. The challenge was to expand access to IT training and career options for indigenous women in these communities, without requiring them to leave their social supports and face culture shock by moving over 600 km away to Winnipeg. The Information Technology Readiness North (InTeRN) project was created to meet this challenge, but it needed to be structured in a way that would be successful in an indigenous community, incorporating a holistic perspective and mentorship.

Riml, a family-run tourism business in Tyrol, Austria, needed to modernize its IT infrastructure to meet the increasing demands of its guests. The company's existing IT infrastructure was outdated and insufficient to handle the growing needs of the business, which includes hotels, guest houses, mountain cabins, restaurants, and sports shops. The company required a high-performance IT platform that could ensure maximum availability for all of its services and also accommodate future requirements. The new IT infrastructure needed to be agile, compact, highly available, and capable of providing state-of-the-art enterprise technologies for SMEs.

S&B India's existing setup had served them well until now. As their workload grew, they were looking to refresh their IT infrastructure to be scalable for at least the next five years. Hence, they knew hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was the answer. Given the scale, complexities, and criticality of the engineering and design services that S&B India offers to crucial capital goods, basic materials, and energy sectors, data integrity and high availability are paramount for the organization. Until recently S&B India ran on a conventional setup of HPE servers with SAN storage and several applications including CAD/CAM and Oracle database running on VMware® clusters. As the organizational workload continued to rapidly grow, S&B India was overwhelmed with IT performance issues. Given the resource requirement creeping up on S&B India's IT infrastructure and network, its far-site, on-premises disaster recovery setup wasn't keeping up with the scale. Space constraints to continuously add infrastructure and lack of centralized server control added to the woes.

Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, a Formula 1 team, is in a constant race against time, not just on the track but also off it. Each Formula 1 circuit is different, with its own challenges and characteristics and the car is customized for each race location. Between races, the clock is ticking to create new designs and adapt the car for the next circuit. An F1 car can go through some 30,000 changes throughout the season and from week-to-week, this can involve 1,000 design elements. The result is a constant evolution of change in the design process, all of which needs to be simulated, manufactured, and tested. With a typical year consisting of more than 20 races, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing needs a robust technology infrastructure in place to make the team agile, efficient, and business-like, both on and off the track.

Kingsway Hospitals, a new healthcare facility in Nagpur, Central India, needed to build its IT infrastructure from the ground up. The hospital required a robust and efficient Hospital Information Management System (HIMS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) that could handle terabytes of patient data and medical imaging files. The systems needed to function independently and offer high-speed performance. The hospital also required a solution that could ensure zero downtime, enhanced data backup and disaster recovery, and maintain the highest levels of data security and privacy. The solution also needed to be flexible and scalable to accommodate the hospital's growth.

High Technology Industries (HTI) needed a modern and homogeneous IT infrastructure in order to standardise the systems of the group companies in the different countries. The infrastructure was both to meet the business needs of the next few years and to conform to the enhanced data privacy requirements. The various businesses had already come to the realisation that their rapid growth and geographical distances had created huge differences between the individual IT infrastructures in place at the miscellaneous IT locations of the group. This was presenting an obstacle to internal collaboration, since projects are delivered by the group across sites and a full range of winter sports technologies is covered.

The Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Medical Science and Research (SVPIMSR) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is a large-scale healthcare facility with 18 floors, 1500 beds, 32 operation theaters, and 139 ICUs. To ensure its smooth functioning, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) needed a reliable and secure IT infrastructure to manage its patient records, hospital ERP, users, and other applications. This infrastructure had to provide secure desktops for thousands of doctors, nurses, and administrative staff. The system had to be resilient enough to offer better uptime, have data protection capabilities to quickly recover from data loss, deliver consistent performance that would not degrade over time, and be disaster recovery-ready for future implementation.

Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, a UK-based Formula One racing team, was facing inefficiencies in its car design process due to the need for aerodynamics engineers to use two separate workstations, each running a different operating system (OS), for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This resulted in a slow and cumbersome design process, with engineers having to manually port data from one workstation to another. Additionally, the input and outputs to CFD 3D modeling are very graphic intensive, requiring high-spec GPUs on the workstations.

A. K. Capital Services Ltd. operates in a highly competitive market environment where systems must be up and running at all times. With high volumes of transactions at nanosecond speed, there is no room for latency and downtime. Any disruption could damage A. K. Capital Services’ reputation and market standing, and cause huge financial loss to clients. With increased connectivity and digitalisation, high availability and system accessibility became the foundation for business growth and credibility. However, with expanding operations and volumes, it became increasingly difficult for A. K. Group to manage disparate systems while ensuring uptime, efficient system utilisation and keeping cost under control. The application environment was highly complex as some applications were deployed on legacy systems and could not be integrated, causing serious performance issues. The company wanted a simple solution to manage the complex environment by consolidating all applications on a single platform and improve manageability to deliver a uniform and consistent experience to users at all times. As a player in financial services, ensuring data availability and data protection was a serious challenge. At the same time, the regulatory environment became more stringent and compliance guidelines were mandatory. Given the financial implications of transactions, A. K. Group could not afford downtime, and business continuity and disaster recovery were critical considerations for A. K. Group.

The market research industry has been slow to adopt new technologies and methodologies, and is now facing a time of rapid change. There is a need to nurture and prepare the next generation of market researchers for this swiftly changing space. Setting up a program that incorporates real-world businesses, an educational institution and a nonprofit organization can be a challenging task. Many nonprofit organizations don’t have the budget to conduct any major market research. However, solid market research can help these organizations direct their limited resources more effectively.