Taking conTrol of cuSTomer SuPPorT

Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.

UBM, a leading global events business, was undergoing a significant strategic transformation named 'Events First'. As part of this transformation, the company was preparing to complete the largest acquisition in its history - Advanstar, a US-based events and marketing services business valued at more than USD970m. The company faced the risk of human capital flight if it was unable to effectively engage top talent with the new strategic direction. UBM needed to make significant structural, process and systems changes, uniting its previously autonomous regional businesses. The challenge was to ensure all of its employees were engaged and aligned with the new future vision.

Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.

Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the know-how and resources required for thorough IT system monitoring. Wittmann EDV-Systeme wanted to launch a solution to plug the gap – enabling it to improve its own competitiveness and that of its customers. IT landscapes are becoming ever more complex and outsourcing is gaining popularity, IT systems must nonetheless remain easy-to-use and extremely reliable at all times. Automated, round-the-clock system monitoring therefore represents an immensely valuable proposition for companies: downtime for business-critical applications can be avoided, and IT systems remain available at all times.

Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.

Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.