RTI Hotel Supply, Inc. 自 1989 年以来一直为酒店业提供专业采购服务。该公司主要专注于加勒比海和拉丁美洲市场，并已建立起作为高品质产品单一来源供应商的良好声誉。第二个部门负责定制酒店家具，包括梳妆台、橱柜和座椅。该公司一直依赖 Sage 300 作为其会计和分销软件，但多年来一直忽视更新该软件。快速增长（包括开设多个国际办事处）最终促使该公司投资其技术基础设施并将其系统更新到最新水平。

CHIN Radio 是多元文化广播的先驱，该公司希望更新其会计系统。该公司希望获得一种能够与其广告收入应用程序交互的现代化、灵活的解决方案。该公司担心数据从旧系统迁移到新系统，并希望确保从一开始就能够访问历史和当前财务数据。该公司还希望消除昂贵的数据输入时间以及与手动输入相关的错误。

迈阿密海滩的豪华酒店大海滩酒店 (Grand Beach Hotel) 需要一套财务和报告解决方案。酒店最初考虑使用专门为酒店会计设计的专有软件，但发现它的成本几乎是 Sage 300 的两倍，而且没有提供任何额外的好处。酒店还考虑过 Microsoft Dynamics GP，但被认为对于酒店的需求来说过于复杂。酒店想要一个易于学习、易于使用的系统，并且可以以具有竞争力的价格提供核心会计功能、远程访问功能、灵活的报告和可扩展性。

费尔蒙莱佛士国际酒店集团 (FRHI) 是一家全球领先的酒店公司，旗下拥有 70 多家费尔蒙、莱佛士和瑞士酒店品牌的酒店。该公司的业务模式围绕为酒店业主设计、开发和管理酒店而展开。FRHI 寻求一种可靠、灵活且经济高效的解决方案，该解决方案可以在全球范围内部署，并作为每家酒店的财务支柱和公司办公室的中央数据库。该公司需要一个可以适应不同规模酒店的系统，从拥有 1,000 间客房的度假村到拥有 150 间客房的酒店。该系统还需要可靠且价格合理，没有单点故障，并且足够灵活，可以与其他应用程序集成。

Posera, Inc. 是一家领先的酒店和餐饮业销售点软件和硬件供应商，随着业务的快速发展，该公司正努力管理不同办公地点和部门的多个不同软件包。该公司需要一个集成的业务技术解决方案，为整个组织提供服务，为客户提供全方位的销售、服务、支持和会计相关互动视图。前台是主要关注点，但也需要一个强大的后台业务管理系统。在决定采用 Sage 300 和 Sage CRM 之前，Posera 考虑了三种集成的企业资源规划 (ERP) 和客户关系管理 (CRM) 解决方案。

Workspace Commercial Furniture 是澳大利亚优质家具领域的知名品牌，但其业务系统却举步维艰。该公司使用的是基于 UNIX 的陈旧会计系统，速度慢、容易出错，而且需要程序员花时间来创建报告。此外，其销售业务是手动运行的，效率低下，需要重复输入三遍数据。该公司正在寻找一种超灵活的新解决方案，尤其是在报告选项方面。它还希望拥有一个具有复杂财务分析和客户关系管理功能的端到端系统。

Navtrak 是一家全球定位系统 (GPS) 设备制造商，其 QuickBooks 财务软件面临挑战。该软件没有提供足够的审计线索、执行分析的能力或深度库存跟踪。它还允许人们在不应该删除交易时删除交易，导致公司几乎没有管理控制权。Navtrak 需要一种能够提供更好的财务管理、库存跟踪和业务运营总体控制的解决方案。

Nylene Canada 是一家尼龙制造商，从 Honeywell Nylon Canada 独立出来，需要快速找到一个系统来支持自己的财务管理。该公司需要一个经济实惠的 ERP 系统，该系统可以在短短三个月内安装完成，用于管理业务和制造运营的各个方面。该系统必须能够处理现金管理，这是 Honeywell 财务部门以前负责的一项功能。过渡必须对客户无缝，并且不会中断用户正在进行的工作流程。

Wiseco Piston, Inc. 是高性能售后活塞领域的全球领导者，该公司使用一种早于 PC 技术出现的专有商业软件。该软件未集成，无法提供最新报告，并且无法提供在线服务。该公司需要一种专为中型公司设计的系统，该系统可处理制造和分销业务，并且有知名品牌的支持。该公司还需要一种能够帮助其遵守萨班斯-奥克斯利法案的系统。

旧金山现代艺术博物馆 (SFMOMA) 一直苦苦挣扎于其业务各个部分使用独立的非集成系统。很难从这些系统中提取信息，也不可能整合博物馆各种运营的数据。由于预算高达 3000 万美元，每一分钱都必须记账。博物馆需要一个先进的财务解决方案，可以管理 3000 万美元运营的各种信息集成需求、报告和分发要求。

Andex Industries 是一家消费品包装制造商，该公司希望用能够适应其制造模式的灵活、集成的 ERP 解决方案取代其旧的 AS/400 平台。该公司一直在使用自定义程序、旧版应用程序和行业专用软件的混合体，但效率不高。该公司聘请了一位独立顾问来帮助他们寻找新的解决方案。他们评估了五个软件包，并安排了 Sage 500 ERP 和 Made2Manage 的演示。他们需要一个包含他们所需的所有功能的解决方案，包括计划和调度、信用卡处理、业务监控和警报、核心会计以及工资和人力资源管理。

Pediatrix Medical Group, a leading provider of maternal-fetal, newborn, and pediatric sub-specialty physician services, was facing significant challenges in its claims processing due to lack of data integration. The company works with multiple clearinghouses for insurance claims and receiving claims status reports, each of which employs unique and complex formats in generating reports. The lack of data integration between internal applications and clearinghouses caused breaks in information flow, slowing down the claims review and reporting process, and creating a disconnect between reporting and other process steps in the Pediatrix patient life cycle. As the volume of the claims increased, these challenges grew more severe, causing bottlenecks and delays in insurance claims processing.

Unruly Media, a leading global technology platform for social video distribution and analytics, was faced with the challenge of providing its clients with real-time visibility into the social footprint of their videos. This included factors such as reach, shareability, and other elements critical to gaining a competitive business advantage. The company needed a robust solution that could handle the delivery, tracking, and auditing of billions of video views across thousands of social video campaigns for hundreds of brands.

TimoCom, Europe’s leading provider of freight and vehicle exchange services, was faced with the challenge of managing 450,000 freight offers per day and 30,000 warehouse/logistics options with efficiency and security. The business was complicated by the varied operational and regulatory requirements and languages of different countries. Company leaders recognized early on that sustained business growth would require improved performance and deeper insights into its international operations. In the transport and freight forwarding industry, orders tend to be large and represent a large investment on the part of the customer. Criminal organizations sometimes monitor and prey upon transport networks, attempting to steal valuable freight in transit.

Axiell, a UK-based company that designs, develops, implements, and supports systems for libraries, archives, museums, and other community resources, was looking to expand its services to all 33 boroughs of London, a growth rate of almost 200 percent. The company's existing system, a 64-bit Solaris system, limited scalability and was not able to support the increased workload that would come with this expansion. Axiell needed a system that could handle the increased workload without causing slowdowns or failures. Additionally, many of Axiell's customers are run by local government agencies, which are under pressure to control costs. As a result, Axiell was looking for a less expensive but technically superior platform that could help it increase service without increasing costs.

Banca IFIS, an independent Italian bank specializing in financing enterprises, faced a challenge when new Italian banking regulations imposed a demand for a higher level of security and data protection. The bank had to evolve its core business application to meet these new challenges. The main issue was the limited time frame available to implement the new version of their application to meet the timeline given to the bank. In less than one year, they had to deliver a cost-effective and scalable solution, a fully unicode enabled database and application to support Banca IFIS expansion, high availability, and a secured infrastructure fulfilling disaster recovery targets imposed by new banking regulations.

C&K Market, a supermarket chain servicing Oregon and Northern California, was facing the need to transition from its legacy VMS platform to a new platform. The company wanted to adopt an open source database solution to take advantage of improved efficiencies, scalability, and low total cost of ownership. The company had been running Ingres on a VMS platform, which was being phased out. The efficient reporting and analysis of pricing and inventory – and effective control of costs – was all enabled through the Ingres Database, an enterprise open source database.

DAI Rubicon, a company that provides publishers with an end-to-end solution including print, distribution, and circulation management, was facing a challenge. They were in a high volume, low margin business and needed to find a better way for customers to manage their logistics for online purchases. They decided to add a point of sale supply chain delivery solution that would make the ordering process more transparent, scalable, and easier to manage without adding to the cost. They chose Base2Services, Australia’s leading open source cloud computing specialist, to build the supply chain delivery solution. They wanted a solution that was more scalable, more transparent, and easy to use, built on the Amazon EC2 cloud that would lower their ongoing operational costs.

The Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) in Germany was tasked with monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-ban Treaty (CTbT). The CTbT, signed in 1996, prohibits all forms of nuclear testing in any environment, whether it’s underground, underwater, or in the atmosphere. The international monitoring system monitors compliance with the treaty, and comprises a global network of monitoring stations. One of BGR’s primary tasks includes monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the CTbT. In addition to monitoring the CTbT, the second key task of the BGR research group is the monitoring of earthquakes. Even today, it is still almost impossible to forecast when and where an earthquake might occur. Germany has seismically active regions that are repeatedly subject to earthquakes. Due to the high population and industrial density, continuous monitoring of seismic activity is essential. Only by careful monitoring is it possible to identify long term trends and make forecasts on future earthquakes and the accompanying seismic hazard. Both current and historical data on earthquakes form the basis for many scientific investigations.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is dedicated to solving cases of child abduction and child sexual exploitation. Timely information is vital to the organization’s work, as its workers collaborate internally and with partner agencies around the globe to find and recover children at risk. When NCMEC began the implementation of its first database, it wanted to make sure its technology worked as hard – and as tirelessly – as its personnel. To help agencies and organizations around the world work together, the solution had to be able to support Web-based applications and websites in multiple languages and character sets serving diverse user communities. With time a critical factor in every case, the system also had to deliver maximum availability under any conditions.

NETinfo, a rapidly growing independent software vendor, was faced with the challenge of providing a cost-effective, fully customizable e-banking multi-channel solution to financial institutions. The solution needed to meet high-performance requirements including scalability, always-on availability, robust security, and full customizability. Additionally, the solution had to support multiple jurisdictions, single sign-on across multiple banks, and multi-signature workflows. The company initially used Oracle for the NETteller e-banking platform, but the high upfront licensing fees and costly ongoing support significantly increased the total cost of ownership. MySQL was also considered but was quickly rejected due to its lack of critical features such as online backup, point-in-time restore, and security features.

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.