Springer, a leading scientific and medical publisher, faced challenges with its online content delivery platform, SpringerLink. The platform, which hosts over 8.4 million scientific documents, had become the core of the company's business, accounting for two-thirds of total revenue. However, Springer was relying on a third-party technology provider to power SpringerLink. As the importance of online content grew, Springer needed more control and flexibility over its content distribution. The company also faced a tight deadline to find a new solution, as its contract with the third-party provider was ending soon. Additionally, with the explosion of online content, readers were expecting better functionality from content providers, including faster search times.

Condé Nast, a renowned media and magazine brand, was facing challenges with its digital asset management system due to the introduction of over 7 million rich media assets representing more than 220 US and International Brands. The system was struggling in three critical areas: search, usability, and development. The average wait times for asset searches were upwards of 30 seconds per 100 results, making the search too cumbersome for regular use. As a result, editors started using expensive outside firms to source assets. Additionally, metadata and category additions required developer involvement, which delayed content updates by users. Lastly, there were long wait times for programmers to accommodate new features and workflows.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required the Emergency Operations Network (EON) to handle multiple document types and feeds, and make sense of the information as quickly as possible. They needed a solution that provided a backend repository and search for unstructured information-tweets, weather reports, news stories, emails, SharePoint documents, geospatial data, and more that get pulled together for decision-making; and integration with in-house custom built as well as commercially available applications to analyze and share the data rapidly. The FAA AEO-400 team tried to implement EON with traditional SQL technologies, but found it impossible due to the complex mix of data and unplanned informational needs that are standard characteristics of this environment.

The Bank, a major player in the derivatives market, was struggling with a legacy system that was slow, inefficient, and unable to deliver real-time alerts to manage market and counterparty credit positions in the desired timeframe. The existing system, based on a relational database, was comprised of multiple installations around the world, leading to duplicated, redundant, incomplete, and inconsistent data. This made risk management fallible and time-consuming, and the Bank recognized the importance of having a real-time global view of its positions.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was tasked with providing comprehensive coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. The challenge was to cover more than 10,000 athletes, cater to a sophisticated audience increasingly reliant on social media, provide continuous live coverage, and deliver content across multiple channels. The traditional method of Static Publishing, which had been relied on for over 15 years, was no longer sufficient. The BBC needed to transition to a Dynamic Publishing infrastructure, which involves creating a collection of related data elements and dynamically serving it as audiences demand. The flow of content was enormous, non-stop, real-time and went across every channel from web, mobile, tablets and broadcast.

NEWBOOKS Solutions and MVB wanted to create a new revenue stream and open up a new market by digitizing published new books, previews, and an ordering system with a new service, VLB-TIX. The developers at NEWBOOKS required an infrastructure that could integrate and manage a wide range of data sources and formats, offer the highest levels of customer service, support future growth with enterprise features, and provide agility. They needed to integrate data from its database and the VLB database, which together contained titles from 23,000 publishers and diverse data types such as bibliographic book metadata, and shared buyers' notes. They also had to incorporate a large number of publishing partners into the process with different workflows and various data formats.

The national postal service was facing a significant decline in traditional mail volume due to the rise of electronic delivery. They needed to evolve their business model to stay relevant in the digital age. They saw potential in APIs to monetize their valuable demographics data and offer new business services. However, their initial attempts to develop APIs were slow and lacked the necessary tracking and management features. They needed a solution that offered advanced design capabilities, easy integration with backend services, and scalability to support a growing number of consumers.

Oldcastle Precast, a leading manufacturer of precast concrete, polymer concrete, and plastic products in the United States, faced a significant challenge due to its rapid growth through acquisitions. While these acquisitions expanded the company's reach and audience, they also led to a lack of systems consolidation, negatively impacting customer satisfaction. The company had been using manual, custom-coded point-to-point integration to connect CRM tools such as Salesforce and MS Dynamics AX and project management tools like Clarizen, Box, Piece Tracker, and GoFormz. However, this approach was not scalable or cost-effective. As Oldcastle continued to expand, the lack of a centralized, scalable, and repeatable integration solution made it increasingly challenging to integrate the acquired on-premises systems and data into the central cloud infrastructure. The company needed a hybrid integration platform to meet the full spectrum of their needs.

TiVo, a pioneer in home entertainment, faced a challenge as its growth continued to accelerate and new partners came on board. The company's infrastructure included over 40 web services that provided services for both TiVo and its partners. Prior to implementing Mule, TiVo integrated these web services in a point-to-point fashion using custom Java code. As the number of services increased, the infrastructure grew in complexity, becoming more and more brittle. Every new service required an exorbitant amount of development effort and was difficult to maintain. Even simple configuration changes presented a problem - because of all the dependencies introduced by the point-to-point architecture, any change to the system would trigger changes that cascaded throughout the application. Because of the complexity, developers would need to meticulously test the entire system, making sure that the change didn’t have unintended consequences.

UCSF Medical Center, one of the nation's leading academic medical centers, was previously using a homegrown paging system for communication among its 8,000 staff members. The system was robust, but it had its drawbacks. Communication was one-way and text-based, requiring doctors to call back for additional information, slowing the flow of information and response to patients. It was difficult to coordinate across care teams as messages were not saved for future reference. Finally, team members had to carry a pager around with them in addition to their mobile devices, which was cumbersome and expensive.

Ube Industries had adopted a commercial enterprise application integration (EAI) tool over a decade ago. However, as the volume and type of endpoints requiring integration increased dramatically over time, Ube’s legacy EAI tool could not scale to meet growing business needs. By 2013, the number of endpoints had risen to over 100 and system failures happened often. Identifying the root cause became increasingly difficult and a single bug could impact large portions of the architecture. When system downtime did occur, transactions within the affected systems ground to a halt. Recovering from these system failures required manual intervention, which increased dependency on individual skills and lengthened resolution time. With support of that EAI tool ending in January 2013, the mission critical nature of the SAP logistics and accounting systems, and business impacts associated with failed or delayed payments and distributions, Ube decided to move to a new architecture.

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) had been using a third-party outsourced application for its Team in Training (TNT) fundraising program. However, as the number of fundraisers increased, the application began to experience frequent outages and performance issues, leading to failed or duplicate donations. The weak integration between the outsourced application and LLS’s internal systems resulted in duplicative functionality and higher maintenance costs. Additionally, the 7% transaction fee and the delayed transfer of funds significantly increased LLS’s fundraising costs. LLS needed to regain control of the infrastructure end-to-end, developing a set of rich user applications and integrating them with the existing back-end systems. The new system needed to be highly reliable, with no messages lost, robust exception strategies, and an active/passive failover architecture to achieve full redundancy.

The University of the Witwatersrand, one of South Africa's premier research universities, was faced with a required migration of their central student system, the most important system in the university. The university had implemented an Oracle-based Student System as part of a large Oracle ERP deployment. However, in 2007, the university received a notice from Oracle that their existing student system would be reaching end of life in 2013. After an evaluation of alternatives, the university decided upon Oracle’s PeopleSoft CampusSolutions as their new student system. To facilitate the move from the old Oracle system to Campus Solutions, CNS needed to split the Student and HR systems, which ran in one large Oracle instance. This required additional integration between the two Oracle products, Campus Solutions and other ancillary systems. Integration would be key to making the transition seamless.

GIE-UGIM, a major health insurance consortium for French civil servants, was facing the challenge of continuously improving the services it provides to its over 800,000 members. Improved service increases retention rates and thus improves the financial position of the consortium as a whole. In 2010, GIE-UGIM implemented Silligent CRM as the central customer relationship management system for the group. However, the challenge was integrating the multitude of applications core to GIE-UGIM's business with the new CRM system. They decided an Enterprise Service Bus was the ideal architecture for their needs. They wanted to loosely couple applications with the new CRM system and allow their developers to focus on developing applications that provided value to their members, not protocol and data issues.

In 2010, Pacific Compensation Insurance Company (PacificComp) decided to change its business model from direct sales to utilizing insurance brokers. This significant shift required a major systems overhaul and posed substantial integration challenges. The company needed to integrate their policy management, billing management, and other systems to support its new business initiatives. The overall goal of PacificComp's business initiatives was to decrease costs and increase ease of use for both underwriters and their broker partners. This became the mandate for the architecture PacificComp's technical team was tasked to build. As much as possible PacificComp chose to invest in software as a service (SaaS) applications as these allowed the company to increase and decrease its usage as the market dictated. However, they also had several existing systems so it was necessary to integrate both current and new systems, whether cloud or on-premise.

Addison Lee, Europe’s largest premium car service, was facing the challenge of keeping up with changing customer behavior and the competitive pressure from new technology-focused entrants in the marketplace. The company needed to launch new mobile apps and features for enhanced customer experience and expand its partner ecosystem to increase user adoption. However, it was hindered by a brittle point-to-point architecture that took months to extend and change. The company needed to move away from bespoke code and towards a more efficient and flexible system that could deliver bookings application on a mobile device or web page.

Dixons Carphone, a leading specialist electrical and telecommunications retailer in Europe, faced the challenge of differentiating its in-store customer experience to compete against e-commerce vendors. The company aimed to drive consistent sales execution and gain deeper insight into sales and colleague performance. It also sought to optimize the customer buying journey and remove friction due to manual processes. The challenge was compounded by the expansion of Dixons Carphone's product offerings, which increased the breadth of sales expertise required of in-store sales teams.

Citrix, a pioneer in virtual workspace solutions, was looking to create agility and competitive advantage by pragmatically moving their primarily on-premises infrastructure to the cloud in phases. The first opportunity came from the marketing department. The Citrix marketing team needed a better way to synchronize data between Marketo and Salesforce. Client account data wasn't always up to date, hampering the pace of sales and the ability of the marketing team to use real-time data to refine their marketing efforts. Vinod Sangaraju, Integration Development Manager for Citrix, knew that an on-premises only solution would not scale with their long term vision to move to the cloud.

Deakin University, located in Melbourne, Australia, is facing significant challenges due to the arrival of the digital economy, changing funding models, and increased competition among educational institutions. The university needed to offer a unique service to its students to enhance their learning experience and stay competitive. However, students were struggling to learn efficiently due to disconnected applications. The university uses almost 200 applications across its operations, including learning management, student management, human resources, finance, and customer relationship management systems. The challenge was to integrate these systems to provide a seamless learning experience for students.

Splunk, a rapidly growing enterprise software company, was facing challenges in maintaining its pace of growth post-IPO. The company was using cloud technologies such as Salesforce for sales, NetSuite for finance, and other custom applications, including one for fulfillment. However, they were using a data extraction, transformation and loading tool (ETL) to manage the data flows between their systems and for an order fulfillment process across their sales, finance and fulfillment teams. This ETL tool was a black box, which made it challenging for Splunk's developers and IT team to quickly drive and support innovation. Moreover, the ETL tool proved to be incompatible with the company's fast-moving processes and goal to be a 100% cloud platform, as the tool required an on-premises agent. The system also ran in 15-minute cycles rather than in real time, limiting the speed of order processing.

In 2009, the Affordable Care Act was passed, and Colorado chose to create their own health insurance marketplace instead of using the systems provided by the Federal government. They also expanded Medicaid coverage. To ensure their citizens had access to these expanded health care benefits as soon as they came into effect on October 1, 2013, the State of Colorado had 6 months to build the new integrated system required to process applications online. The expectations of today's citizens have evolved significantly over the last 10-15 years. They now live in a 24/7 world, where they expect all of the services they consume to be readily available, easy to find and easy to use. The State of Colorado needed to deploy a system that met their citizens' ever growing expectations, while still meeting their tight implementation timeframe.

In 2012, Vertu became independent and separated from parent company Nokia. As a result, Vertu needed to build a brand new architecture, migrate and implement new applications and set up their own IT department. They needed to ensure they could continue manufacturing mobile phones, support existing customer devices using Nokia's software, and continue providing a superior service to their customers. To find a solution, they embarked on a 45-day discovery exercise to examine their current applications estate and determine a path to build out a new IT infrastructure that would support the vision of full visibility of their devices from cradle to grave and a have complete view of all customer interactions with the brand. They enlisted the help of WHISHWORKS Consulting to help them develop an innovative and cost-effective solution.

Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania (SCAO) was facing frequent system outages and data loss due to issues with their Microsoft BizTalk integration platform. This was causing significant disruption to their business operations, including the exchange of vital business documentation such as purchase orders, purchase order confirmations, and shipping notifications. The system required a hard restart every three days, leading to high support costs and interruptions to customer-facing business operations. The issues affecting SCAO’s core business processes and overall customer satisfaction necessitated an immediate replacement of the current system. Management at SCAO wanted to ensure the replacement was quick to deploy and seamless to end users.

Panviva, a leading provider of Business Process Guidance software, was facing challenges with its legacy product, SupportPoint. The evolution of SupportPoint was hampered by legacy product architecture constraints that disrupted new development. The on-premises technology wasn't evolving as fast as it could, with SupportPoint caught in a loop of incremental development and bug fixes that customers found costly to deploy. Panviva needed to create an innovative product roadmap that leveraged future-proof technologies to enable rapid development and integrations in a SaaS delivery model. The primary challenge with its legacy software was the complexity around re-developing the software for genuine cloud compatibility and deployment, while also designing for scalability and multifaceted integration.

The company, a top 4 food retailer in the UK, was operating in a fiercely competitive retail market and needed innovative ways to drive in-store revenue while also expanding into new product categories and channels on the web. After acquiring an online baby retailer in 2011, the company had a high performing online channel along with new customers in the higher margin baby product category. To capitalize on this new channel and customer base, the company expanded the baby brand to a new series of retail superstores while looking to integrate these customers into the brand experience at their existing grocery stores. However, customer and product data were stored in multiple databases, an IBM Unica marketing automation platform, and an Avaya call center platform. The middleware manager and his team made the strategic decision to consolidate a single view of the customer in Salesforce to run multi-channel marketing programs across brands.

After enjoying years of accelerated customer and product expansion, in 2008, the company identified not only a profound shift in customer engagement as a result of emerging technologies and changing culture, but also an alarming halt in growth and innovation within the company. Slow-moving IT and a disconnected architecture bottlenecked new ideas, preventing new features and products from coming to market at reasonable speed, if at all. Without innovating and responding to customer demands at the speed of technology change, the company could not maintain its market stronghold over the long-term. This software provider decided to focus on continuous innovation, rapid testing of new concepts, and delivering delightful experiences to customers. But delivering on this vision required a major shift in IT. They needed to turn their IT capabilities into an innovation platform, and that required service enabling and connecting all of their applications and data sources, then API-enabling those services for rapid access by internal consumers, partners, and even third party developers. It also required a restructuring of the development organization into small teams that would execute rapid releases in agile sprints.

The government agency was facing the challenge of serving an expanding customer base with reduced funding and high demand for cost savings and faster turnaround. The technical environment was outdated and would not allow the agency to achieve these customer driven requirements. Poor process modeling and misaligned business and data flows meant that it took an astronomical amount of time to execute system integration flows using legacy integration solutions. The agency aimed to retire some of their outdated applications to improve and update the technical environment, but many point-to-point integrations had been built in and they had to find a way to loosen existing couplings.

Banque de Luxembourg, one of the largest financial institutions in Luxembourg, was facing challenges due to new regulatory requirements and heightened customer expectations. The bank's IT landscape was built upon point-to-point connections, based on individual project and line of business definitions. This approach was becoming very complex and time-consuming to integrate and capitalize on existing architecture. The bank acknowledged that a number of upcoming projects such as their web banking system and Visa 3DS System would not see good return on investment from this tight coupling between front end and core banking systems. The bank set out to understand how they could improve efficiency in their organization and reduce time to market.

ASICS, a global athletic footwear and apparel company, was struggling to deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience due to its inability to connect disparate systems such as order management and product management for the company's seven growing brands worldwide. The company generated only a small percentage of revenue through eCommerce and needed a new approach to engage customers directly via digital channels. As part of a new digital strategy to drive eCommerce, ASICS had to unify multiple systems across all brands, geographies, and channels. This required building a universal eCommerce platform to manage the global ASICS portfolio of brands, developing APIs to integrate with various Order Management Systems (OMS), product management systems, payment providers, email service providers, and legacy systems to access all the backend data, and migrating to the new eCommerce platform.

Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the world, was on a digital transformation journey to deliver a unified customer experience (CX) at the accelerated speed that their customers expect. The bank aimed to unify customers' experience around any interactions with the bank - whether it is over phone, web, or mobile. However, the challenge was to seamlessly integrate services from all partners and applications into the Wells Fargo experience and consistently render them on any channel.