Einhell, a leading wholesale supplier of tools and garden products, has been focused on expanding the company internationally since 2002. To provide clients around the globe with optimum service, Einhell needed its new international facilities to operate at the same level as its corporate headquarters. This resulted in the need for a robust and agile IT infrastructure that could meet the company’s growing global demands. As part of its expansion effort, Einhell laid the foundation for an IT system operated from a shared service center based in Landau. The company operates three data centers, two main data centers, and one backup facility. Until recently, their function was to supply services for Einhell in order to relieve pressure from the daily IT business and simultaneously promote homogeneous international IT standards. Today, nearly all of these services are virtualized and therefore require a high-performance infrastructure.

NIKKEI, a leading publisher of business information in Japan, was facing challenges with its storage infrastructure. The company had three separate Storage Area Networks (SANs) for its three core business divisions, each with its own IT staff, budget, and storage devices. This resulted in duplicated management tasks and hardware expenditures. The company realized that consolidating its SANs would streamline administration, enhance IT productivity, and minimize future investments in storage hardware. Additionally, the company was seeking ways to further protect its mission-critical data by implementing a disaster recovery site in Osaka, Japan. However, it wanted to avoid the cost and complexity of separately linking each SAN island to this facility. It believed a single, enterprise-wide connection would be much more economical and practical.

Neos Airlines, based in Milan, Italy, operates flights throughout southern Europe and the world. With 150 employees at its Milan headquarters, and an additional 50 people on 24-hour rotation at Malpensa International Airport, the airline must ensure that all of its staff can readily access mission critical applications. From access to enterprise applications such as e-mail, to applications that enable crews to track airplanes and maintenance teams to inventory and manage spare parts, Neos Airlines employees need to be as mobile as the planes they are operating. The financial impact associated with late plane departures or delays in maintenance can be significant, with downtime costing up to $15,000 per hour for each aircraft in the fleet. Because Neos Airlines’ network supports access to the spare parts database, e-mail, aircraft movements, and Internet access for field engineers, network uptime is essential to both daily operations and the bottom line.

Evangeline Parish School District, serving approximately 6000 students in 12 schools in rural Louisiana, was faced with the challenge of upgrading its network to support upcoming computer-based Common Core testing requirements. The district’s network infrastructure, including the cabling, was outdated, leading to frequent speed, connectivity, and latency problems with both the wired and wireless networks. This resulted in poor application performance and switches dropping users when network traffic peaked. The district also faced issues with aging Cisco wireless equipment, which relied on Power over Ethernet (PoE) injectors, deployed in the ceiling near each access point. The injectors generated heat, which in turn affected the access points and made them unreliable. When problems arose, an IT team member would have to drop everything and drive out to the school, which might be 40 miles away, resulting in lost teaching time.

The University of New Mexico (UNM) is the state’s flagship research institution, injecting millions of dollars into New Mexico’s economy, advancing health care, and augmenting teaching and learning across the state. The university community expects IT to be agile—able to quickly meet new demands and innovate services, whether on campus or in the cloud. However, UNM’s existing network had reached its capacity limits. The IT team had the option of upgrading the line cards and management modules to add capacity. But they decided to look at something new, as financial accountability is critical for them.

Rackspace, a leading managed-cloud company, was facing the challenge of upgrading its SAN infrastructure to better utilize physical facilities, keep pace with growing customer demand, and minimize data center and management complexity. The company's data centers had to handle high data volumes with high performance and zero downtime, as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. However, the existing architecture required servers and storage to be located in the same area of a data center, leading to unbalanced growth and islands of unused storage and SAN ports. Rackspace wanted to simplify the architecture so that switches, hosts, or storage platforms could be plugged in anywhere, regardless of their physical locations. At the same time, this new architecture had to be able to scale virtual workloads quickly.

HANYS, a nonprofit organization that represents healthcare providers and systems across New York, needed to ensure data protection and business continuity. The organization collects, consolidates, and reports on data at local, regional, and state levels, making data protection crucial for meeting service commitments to members and keeping HANYS’ operations flowing. The organization was also looking for ways to heighten security levels and considered leveraging a SOC 2 compliant data center to enhance its resiliency and security profile. Furthermore, HANYS needed to update its business continuity plan to include a fully redundant hot site for its critical applications and business processes.

Gerber Life Insurance has been growing steadily over the years, and with this growth, its technology requirements have also increased. The company's IT environment, which was once primarily on a mainframe, now includes a distributed infrastructure running dozens of critical applications. These applications power interactions and digital transactions with customers and agents. As the company's business applications became mission-critical, Gerber Life recognized the need for a better disaster recovery plan. The company decided to outsource recovery to a third-party service provider to keep pace with the business.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) was looking to enhance its fleet management system to improve fleet data collection and reporting and to maximize asset lifecycles. The KYTC team identified specific goals for the new fleet management system such as improving fleet efficiency, enhancing staff and systems reporting to identify the true fleet condition, improving fuel reporting to include usage and fuel economy, supporting utilization requirements and reassignments, and facilitating replacement scheduling. To accommodate KYTC’s fleet size (11,000+ vehicles and pieces of equipment) and the broad scope of enhancements, the project required specific development activities. In addition, meeting the system specifications required integration with third-party applications. KYTC also needed to manage staff training for 12 highway districts throughout the commonwealth.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) manages one of the largest state-owned road networks in the U.S., including more than 50,000 lane miles of roads and 13,063 state highway bridges. The agency wanted to implement a visualization tool within its deployment of AgileAssets® Pavement Analyst™, an advanced pavement management system (PMS) known internally at Caltrans as PaveM. The tool would facilitate the pavement project review process by displaying the relationships between the recommended projects and the currently programmed, under-construction, and as-built projects. Caltrans faced several challenges in developing and implementing the H-Chart project visualization tool. It needed to manage external development of H-Chart with the UCPRC, ensure the tool met specific requirements, and integrate the tool successfully with its PMS to access data for visualization and evaluation.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) was filing insurance claims seeking millions of dollars in infrastructure damage restitution annually. The process for recording and documenting damage claims was very detailed and time-consuming. To calculate the cost of these claims, MnDOT staff members were using data from different IT systems. Detailed damage repair information was not part of the agency’s day-to-day work reporting programs. MnDOT had previously developed a standalone computer application to be used statewide by damage restitution specialists. However, the claim submission process required re-entering the same data up to four times on different forms before the claim could be filed. In addition, without a single source of accurate data, MnDOT was using classification averages to calculate the costs of labor for damaged-property repairs, resulting in reimbursement of only 45% to 60% of the actual labor costs.

DelDOT maintains about 14,000 lane miles of highways, 54 toll lanes, more than 1,700 bridges, and a wide range of other infrastructure assets. The department also oversees the Division of Motor Vehicles and the Delaware Transit Corporation, which operates DART First State, the state’s public transportation provider. To implement the new PMS, DelDOT needed to overcome several challenges. The main challenge was reconfiguring DelDOT’s engineering decision-making framework to take advantage of automated data-collection processes. Another challenge was to address existing limitations in converting raw distress data into deterioration indices. DelDOT also had to develop performance models, treatments, and decision trees to support its new optimization analysis efforts. In addition, the department needed to integrate the new PMS with existing data collection tools and legacy systems. A final challenge was training staff on how to effectively use the new PMS.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) manages one of the largest and most heavily traveled road networks in the United States, with 80,444 centerline miles of roadway and 54,180 bridges located in its 25 highway districts. The state sees 197.4 billion annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on state-owned highways. Maintaining statewide transportation assets and providing a high-quality road system are vital for the state’s economy and public safety. To contain the costs of managing its road network, TxDOT applies innovative asset lifecycle management strategies to preserve and restore the condition of roadway assets. Texas legislation requires that TxDOT annually provide the state’s Legislative Budget Board and the Governor with a detailed plan for the use of transportation funds. The plan must include pavement condition targets and a district-by-district analysis of how proposed maintenance spending will impact pavement scores.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) was managing over 80,000 centerline miles of roads that support more than 500,000,000 daily vehicle miles traveled. The TxDOT pavement program is very large, and it’s growing rapidly to accommodate a fast-growing state population. Beyond the sheer size of its pavement program, TxDOT also faced the challenge of completing the migration from an environment comprised of four standalone applications to a new, comprehensive PMS in a very short time frame. Additional challenges included the need to develop a new Geographic Information System (GIS) module and to train the staff of numerous statewide districts on how to most effectively use the new PMS.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) manages a vast network of roadways across 254 counties. In 2011, TxDOT began using AgileAssets® Maintenance Manager™ as its maintenance management system of record. Five years later, the agency moved to advance its asset management practices even further by deploying a state-of-the-art PMS, AgileAssets® Pavement Analyst™. However, these two solutions were implemented as separate systems, leading to a lack of data sharing between pavement management and maintenance management functions. The pavement management staff often lacked up-to-date information about pavement work history and work type. Efficiency lagged due to a lack of coordination between recommended work plans and actual maintenance projects.

NoctisIT, a small managed service provider (MSP) based in Austin, was looking to scale and win clients over larger MSPs. The company's CEO, Jason Whitehurst, identified the need for a virtual CIO role, which would involve managing the client’s entire IT environment. However, this required overhauling and replacing existing processes with best practice tools. The challenge was to find a tool that would allow NoctisIT to manage the client appropriately and understand what devices are in their environment. Another challenge was to effectively and proactively manage his clients’ networks, which would allow NoctisIT to position itself as a business investment rather than a traditional resell strategy.

ITque, a full-service outsourced IT company, was facing the challenge of managing its growing client base without increasing the number of technicians. The company aimed to achieve 65% revenue growth in 2016 by creating streamlined processes and repeatable outcomes. However, the biggest challenge was triaging support issues, funnelling them to the appropriate level of troubleshooting in the fastest amount of time, then solving the issues quickly. Traditional customer complaints about network slowness were particularly challenging to address.

Network Doctor, a managed services provider (MSP), was facing challenges with its existing network monitoring tool. The tool was not providing information about new equipment being added to the network, making it difficult for the company to stay updated on the client's environment. The tool also lacked discovery and initial auditing capabilities, making onboarding a time-consuming process as the team had to physically locate the equipment and manually input all the inventory into their PSA tool, ConnectWise. The company was looking for a solution that could offer more functionality and help them maintain a high level of uptime for their clients.

LAN3, a UK-based systems integrator specializing in networking and cybersecurity, decided to transition from a hardware supplier to a services company. The company already had a service center and skilled staff to offer a fully managed service. However, they lacked the technology systems to ensure their team of 25 could efficiently and profitably deliver on 24/7 service level agreements. They needed a remote monitoring and management system that could provide excellent visibility and assessment of a network, and proactively monitor a range of performance indicators. A cloud-hosted solution was a must, as an operational expense model and guaranteed uptime were high priorities.

XING, a social network for business professionals, was facing a challenge with its existing privilege elevation process. The process was too time-consuming and did not allow for a consistent set of access rights. The company was seeking to improve command elevation from an administrative point of view, as well as establish better auditing features. Furthermore, XING needed to keep in mind a number of regulatory and compliance requirements related to German privacy and related laws. This includes protection of private data, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), as well as other requirements for public companies.

ACME Truck Line’s seven-man tech support team is responsible for 500 employees located throughout the country. Approximately 80% of these employees are located within the company network or are connected to it via VPN, but the remaining 20% are outside the company network. This is a significant segment of the organization. Because the VPN client software issues make up a majority of the issues needing attention, finding an effective remote support solution was critical for the team. While Symantec’s pcAnywhereTM1 could be used to support employees inside of the company firewall, employees outside of the company network had to be supported by phone. This required ACME support reps to relay complex instructions to end-users. Because of the support team’s size and the scope of its responsibilities, on-site visits were often necessary to troubleshoot complex problems and put a strain on its already limited workforce.

The financial institution was facing challenges in validating virtualization security, controlling access, and securely authenticating users. An internal security audit revealed that its VMware ESX systems, Red Hat Linux VM guests, and Solaris systems were configured with file-based methods of user authentication and access control. The staff responsible for user accounts lacked the expertise to manage and synchronize accounts for every type of operating system. The firm was using Active Directory 2003 R2 for its Windows servers. The administrators attempted to implement Active Directory authentication on their ESX hosts by using VMware’s configuration scripts. Although Active Directory’s Kerberos authentication provided single sign on, it provided only part of the desired solution.

Activant’s Eagle product includes a support option in the monthly service fee. Customers have immediate access to a Tier-1 phone support desk that operates in Manila, Philippines. These agents handle minor support issues and customer questions. If the call is not resolved in 10-20 minutes, the call is escalated to the Eagle group – a Tier-2 and up support center – based in Livermore, California. The Tier-2 group either receives phone transfers or calls customers back (depending on SLA). The Tier-2 group is divided into four specialty teams: credit cards, accounting, telecommunications and systems. Calls to this support group are usually complex, says Michelle Sanford, senior product support manager. The average call lasts 22 minutes with the average incident lasting around 57 minutes. Fifty-seven minutes away from a small retail business can be detrimental to customer service at the store level, so Activant knew they needed a way to connect to customers where they could view the screen and speed first call resolution. Activant previously used two remote meeting products, but needed a tool that would actually allow them to support customers.

Antek HealthWare, a healthcare software provider, was facing challenges in providing fast and effective support for its medical office software products. The company was using a client server-based solution, but as the company expanded its client base, it became clear that this type of software was not up to the task of supporting Antek’s nearly 2,000 clients. The clients had to install the software before any support sessions could be initiated, adding to the time and expense of end-user software implementation. In addition, the software required manual configuration of firewalls in order to allow for high-speed connections. In most instances, Antek’s support representatives had to connect to remote clients through dial-up, making the connection extremely slow. This resulted in longer call times and increased frustration among support representatives.

Australian Finance Group (AFG) is the largest third-party wholesaler of mortgages in Australia, processing an average of over 6,000 residential mortgages worth a total of over $2 billion per month. With customers and employees throughout Australia, AFG support reps could not travel on-site every time support was needed. They were responsible for everything from software support for their customers to network and server administration for their primary and satellite offices. AFG’s support reps often had to walk end-users through complex tasks over the phone, which was time-consuming and difficult.

CETREL S.A., a Luxembourg-based company specializing in electronic transfers and payment technology, was facing challenges with managing their complex IT environment. They had been using sudo to manage their Unix/Linux assets and trace access from their support teams to applicative or generic users. However, as they continued to add Unix and Linux servers to their operations, they found that sudo was not providing adequate security over their logs as required by PCI DSS mandates. The process of reviewing sudo logs was time-consuming as it required accessing every server individually. Additionally, sudo logs could be altered by the super user, and the time required by system engineers to configure sudo was deemed unacceptable.

In 2010, a North American college approached B Virtual looking to offer their certification exams online in a proctored environment. The college had students taking online courses but writing paper-based exams. When the semester ended, the student needed to travel to a physical location to write a paper-based exam. The college sought a way for the student to take an online test while ensuring the integrity of the exam session. B Virtual knew they needed a trusted and forward-thinking technology partner offering a scalable, fast-growing solution for their live online proctoring program. They required a versatile technology to remotely log into a student’s computer while they were taking their exam. Having this monitoring ability prevented the student from compromising the integrity of the exam and provided a higher level of reliability to the colleges who were administering the exams.

Springhill Medical Center (SMC) was facing issues with its existing network infrastructure. The switches were failing due to heat and age, and high equipment and maintenance costs were preventing timely upgrades. The network was also difficult to manage and was a source of frustration for the staff. SMC needed to upgrade to a 10 GbE infrastructure to support its wireless capabilities, Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS), Allscripts Sunrise platform, and be ready to support emerging healthcare technologies. The new network also needed to be easy to operate and maintain, even for less experienced staff members. SMC also wanted to improve the return on its networking investment by achieving a longer lifecycle, reducing maintenance and support costs, and gaining greater flexibility.

Ajubeo, a high-performance cloud infrastructure services provider, was tasked with enabling customers to go to market quickly and cost-effectively using reliable, robust cloud services and cloud infrastructure. As an infrastructure and services company, Ajubeo delivers multiple gigabytes of data to its customers on a daily basis, providing compute resources, storage, and network connectivity. The company aimed to virtualize all aspects of the enterprise network architecture. Ajubeo executives set a company goal to create a customer-centric culture. To provide customers with the best infrastructure and cloud services possible, Ajubeo assembled a best-in-class network with solutions from technology leaders. Ajubeo stacked its network with solutions that deliver maximum performance and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) optimization, and positioned Brocade® switches and routers throughout its networking environment—at the access, core, distribution, and edge layers. With these industry-leading, cost-effective solutions, Ajubeo can offer better pricing while outperforming its competition.

The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) was facing a challenge of building a campus network infrastructure that could meet the growing performance and reliability requirements of next-generation applications while minimizing operational costs. The college was expanding its network of campuses and needed a network that was both flexible and scalable. SCAD’s flagship location in Savannah, Georgia, currently consists of more than 60 facilities spread throughout the city, with more than 100 miles of fiber linking these buildings. These sites needed to link with the new digital media center in Atlanta. The college was starting to saturate its 300 Megabit Ethernet link between cities due to its large-scale use of rich media, film and video editing applications, and its extensive use of replication in a Brocade SAN environment. Aware of the rising use of mobile devices on campus, SCAD sought to expand its network both at the edge and the core by rolling out 802.11n wireless in tandem with 802.1x security and Power Over Ethernet Plus (POE+).