Pfizer’s high-performance computing software and systems for worldwide research and development support large-scale data analysis, research projects, clinical analytics, and modeling. Pfizer’s computing services are used across the spectrum of research and development efforts, from the deep biological understanding of disease to the design of safe, efficacious therapeutic agents.

Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wanted to share the launching of Curiosity with fans by providing up-to-the-minute details of the mission. Supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent visitors to the website would have been very difficult since NASA did not have significant web and live video streaming infrastructure.

Vodafone found that traffic for the applications peak during the four-month period when the international cricket season is at its height in Australia. During the 2011/2012 cricket season, 700,000 consumers downloaded the Cricket Live Australia application. Vodafone needed to be able to meet customer demand, but didn’t want to invest in additional resources that would be underutilized during cricket’s off-season.

ACTi recognized the potential for cloud-based IP video surveillance and realized that cloud technology could help customers avoid the cost of deploying large physical infrastructures and maintaining a team of security professionals. ACTi wanted toseize these opportunities and make cloud-based solutions available to companies of all sizes.The company started developing a cloud-based surveillance and big data analytics system, but ran into technical difficulties. These challenges disrupted the company’s own plans to switch its internal systems from on-premises to a cloud-based platform. It had no option but to find a cloud-service provider since the situation limited growth potential and the organization’s ability to reduce operating costs.Peter Wu, sales director at ACTi Corporation, says the company was dedicating an increasing amount of budget to support a 20 percent increase in data per year. “We wanted a cloud-based solution to reduce our IT overhead, but the priority was to develop our cloud-based IP video surveillance solution to drive our market share worldwide,” he says.

With the acquisition of hardware and platform partner, AlertMe, in 2015, Centrica Connected Home was faced with the prospect of a significant shift in focus. Previously the relationship had been one of vendor-customer with AlertMe also pursuing it's own goals for expansion and licensing of its software. After the acquisition, Centrica Connected Home moved to quickly integrate the technical talent from the two companies and then to realign the development efforts of the teams.The new common goals of product evolution, feature enhancement and international launch, presented a number of challenges in the form of a rapid scaling requirement for their live platform, whilst maintaining stability and availability. Added to these demands on the company were an expansion into new markets, and brand new product launches, including smart boiler service and a growing ecosystem of new Hive smart home devices. They even found the time to develop deeply functional Alexa skills for their products and hence be a Smart Home Launch Partner for the Amazon Echo in the UK in 2016.

 Brooks Brothers frequently launches new business initiatives, which helps the company stay competitive in the retail industry. The organization needed a more agile way of quickly testing these new projects. “When we embark on a new initiative, as with anything in the retail industry, it has a short timeframe from the initial idea to solving business needs, as driven by consumer preferences,” says Philip Miller, director of infrastructure and technical engineering at Brooks Brothers. “We’re very good at deploying technology that will exist for the long term in our data center, but we’ve struggled to spin up resources for testing new projects. We wanted to become more agile in moving concepts into an environment we could easily access and possibly move into production.”The organization was also seeking a more cost-effective way to manage its SAP HANA in-memory database management system, which would support a new customer relationship management (CRM) application. “We wanted to save money when we implemented the CRM system on SAP HANA, and we also wanted to be able to test out new projects on that platform,” says Miller. 

At Atlassian, growth is on a fast track. The company adds more customers every day and consequently needed an easy way to scale JIRA, which is growing by 15,000 support tickets every month. The instance supporting this site was previously hosted in a data center, which created challenges for scaling. “The scale at which we were growing made it difficult to quickly add nodes to the application,” says Brad Bressler, technical account manager for Atlassian. “This is our customer-facing instance, which gathers all the support tickets for our products globally. It’s one of the largest JIRA instances in the world, and growing and maintaining it on premises was getting harder to do.” For example, the support.atlassian.com instance was hosted on a single on-premises server, which the company needed to frequently take down for maintenance.The company also needed to ensure high availability for JIRA. “This is a mission-critical application, and the number of customers potentially impacted by downtime is huge,” says Neal Riley, principal solutions engineer for Atlassian. “As we grew, we became more concerned about the resiliency and disaster-recovery capabilities of the data center.”To move into a more scalable, highly available environment, Atlassian created JIRA Data Center, a new enterprise version of the application. However, JIRA Data Center required shared storage. “We needed a shared file system so the individual application nodes could have a shared source of truth for profile information, plug-ins, and attachments,” says Riley. 

Haven’s focus on customer service has fuelled a rapid level of growth since its launch in 2006. For its first five years, the company ran on a hybrid infrastructure that was made up of a mixture of onsite and offsite servers. Haven’s systems were not as flexible as it would have liked, with limited support for technology testing and development. The company lacked a complete business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) plan, and needed a technology infrastructure that could both keep up with demand and help drive further growth.Haven had three options: getting a DR solution through the data center of its parent company, Drax Group; going through a third-party re-location disaster recovery service; or moving to the cloud.

Investors use Dow Jones to learn about what’s happening in financial markets throughout the world. “Our mission is to shine a light on dark corners of the world, focusing on news that impacts decision making,” says Stephen Orban, Chief Information Officer & Global Head of Technology. The company relies on cutting-edge technology to keep its customers as up to date as possible on the latest news.In Asia, about 12.8 million people use WSJ.com, which generates about 90 million page views each month. When the lease on its Asian data center ran out in early 2013, the company needed to find an alternative that would help its developers focus more on revenue-generating applications instead of on data center maintenance. Dow Jones also wanted to reduce latency for its Asia-based customers—and it wanted to avoid delays for acquiring and configuring hardware. “My preference is to have my team build products rather than running data centers, Orban says. “Now that data center is a commodity, that’s exactly what they’re able to do.”

Like many aerospace engineering firms, TLG employs STAR-CCM+, a leading industry application, to perform CFD simulations. TLG uses the application to conduct aerodynamic simulations on aircraft and predict the pressure and temperature surrounding airframes. However, the company wanted to reduce the costs associated with running simulations. “We were using a cloud provider to host our simulations, but the cost per simulation was high,” says Andrew McComas, engineering manager at TLG Aerospace. “Running a typical simulation was costing us hundreds of dollars per case, and there may be hundreds of cases per project.”TLG also wanted the ability to scale its high-performance computing (HPC) applications to take on larger simulations. “The trend in our industry is toward doing more complex simulations that require more compute resources,” McComas says. “But with the internal HPC cluster we were using, we were limited as far as the maximum size problem we could run. We were limited to a small number of nodes and couldn’t allocate enough memory to run large-scale problems.”Because it wanted to reduce costs and gain scalability, TLG decided to search for a new cloud provider.

Based on a program need to build a collaborative data repository for the Marine Hydrokinetic Program, NREL wanted to build a secure, yet collaborative, platform to collect, curate, store, and share moderately sensitive data, which focuses on water power research. As part of this effort, NREL built an environment with a Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) accreditation from the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). With a FISMA Moderate ATO, NREL maintains all mandated cyber security requirements, while gaining the ability to manage and share moderately sensitive data with other government agencies and research entities.As it prepared to design the new infrastructure, NREL knew it needed agility and flexibility. “Our goal was to make it easy for analysts and scientists to access and publish data, but we didn’t want to spend our time managing infrastructure to facilitate that. We want to focus on the product—the data itself,” says Webber. For example, NREL uses a dev-ops team approach focused on the needs of the client and ensures that the research metadata is optimized for accessibility. “We need to make sure the right descriptors and keywords are there so we can easily connect our users to all the other research sites,” says Jon Weers, senior web strategist at NREL. “If the data isn’t discoverable, it’s not useful to researchers.”

Socrata, an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), often encountered customers struggling to unlock data from siloed, difficult-to-access systems and put it into a self-service accessible platform. This was crucial for strategic use of data in delivering program outcomes. A prime example was the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), a Socrata customer, which had difficulty using data and analytics in its daily work due to limited access to their business intelligence (BI) software. Only a small group of employees had access to the BI tool, leading to delays in simple tasks like changing a color on a graph. UDOT needed to consolidate different systems and provide more people with access to information and basic analytic tools. This was particularly important as UDOT relied on updated data to secure funding for projects from the state legislature.

IIIEPE was looking for a faster, less expensive approach for deploying Moodle-based online learning environments that would still enable the Institute to meet high service standards.IIIEPE evaluated firms that could assist with this project and decided to work with IT Era.

Salesforce DMP, a leading data management platform, is embedded within every digital interaction between its clients and their consumers. It collects, stores, and makes every piece of audience data continuously available to its clients, managing more than 10 petabytes of on-demand data. This comprehensive data collection approach provides clients with greater accuracy and sophisticated segmentation for targeting and analytics. However, this approach puts enormous demands on the Salesforce DMP system to quickly and efficiently process massive quantities of data. Fast performance and unlimited scaling capacity are crucial to deliver both real-time personalized experiences to consumers and data-driven insights to clients. Salesforce DMP needed tools to ensure it could deliver high return on investment to its clients while continuously developing and bringing new platform features to market.

Salesforce DMP collects, stores and makes every piece of audience data continuously available to its clients, managing more than 10 petabytes of on-demand data.This approach, however, puts enormous demands on the Salesforce DMP system to quickly and efficiently process massive quantities of data. Salesforce DMP needed tools to ensure it could deliver high return on investment to its clients while continuously developing and bringing new platform features to market.

IT Era, an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), often works with public-sector clients who face challenges such as tight budgets, small IT departments, and time-consuming procurement rules. One such client was the Instituto de Investigación, Innovación y Estudios de Posgrado para la Educación (IIIEPE), a publicly funded institute in Mexico that promotes innovation in education through research, technology development, strategic planning, and professional development programs. Until 2015, IIIEPE hosted all its online training programs on Moodle, a free and open-source learning management system, in an on-premises data center. However, when IIIEPE was given the opportunity to assist the Mexican Public Education Secretariat in providing a new platform for online courses for a national professional development program for high school teachers, they faced a challenge. Their on-premises data center was at capacity and setting up a new learning platform would have required procuring, configuring, and securing new physical servers, which would have been time-consuming and costly.

Yieldmo, a mobile-advertising marketplace, was facing a challenge in enhancing its measurement of user interactions for its ad campaigns. The company needed to capture user behavior in real time, across each ad pixel for billions of ad impressions at millisecond granularity. This was crucial for their sessionization process, which involved the collection of user interactions, known as micro-interactions, performed on Yieldmo’s ad units within a user session. The company was also planning to launch a new data platform that would provide in-depth insights into customer engagements. However, capturing hundreds of billions of micro-interactions presented a technical challenge as it would increase the number of requests coming in and require adding many more proxy servers to capture and analyze all these events. Implementing a traditional solution would be time-consuming, expensive, and require a large amount of storage and compute power.

 The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), a Socrata customer, had struggled to use data and analytics in its daily work because only a small group of employees had access to their business intelligence (BI) software.The organization needed to consolidate different systems and give more people access to the information and basic analytic tools.

Yieldmo needed to deploy this solution quickly because it wanted to include sessionization capabilities in its soon-to-be-launched data platform.Plans for the capabilities of the new platform included in-depth insights into customer engagements, making campaigns more effective for advertisers, more profitable for publishers, and, ultimately, more relevant for consumers.

iRobot, a global consumer robot company, faced a significant challenge in 2015. The company had sold 14,000 of its Roomba robotic vacuums on the first Amazon Prime Day, highlighting its reputation for innovation and value. However, this success also underscored a looming challenge. In September, iRobot was set to release its first internet-connected Roomba vacuums. Until then, iRobot had primarily operated as a hardware vendor. The introduction of connected Roomba vacuums meant that large numbers of people would be using the iRobot HOME App to set up and control their robots. This would result in high volumes of traffic through the app, requiring iRobot to run a high-availability, customer-facing cloud application and an Internet of Things (IoT) backend platform. This was a significant shift from their traditional business model and posed a considerable risk.

Hong Kong-based Haymarket Media Limited, a leading media specialist publisher, was facing the challenge of building a digital strategy to offset the decline in print. The company needed to analyze customer behavior online to understand what stories were being read and how recipients were interacting with their email messages. The goal was to make content more relevant by understanding how customers were engaging across multiple digital channels. The challenge was to build an analytics platform, Haymarket Piccolo, to provide customer insight. However, the infrastructure costs of running digital and technology solutions from an on-premises collocation site were becoming a concern. The company needed an alternative solution to run its analytics platform that could scale at low cost as the platform ingested larger amounts of customer-related data.

Hiiir Inc., a leading digital media company in Taiwan, faced significant IT challenges due to rapid growth in demand for its mobile marketing services. The company's on-premises solution was unable to keep up with the need for quick scalability. The procurement cycles for on-premises infrastructure were lengthy, reducing the company's agility and complicating budgeting as IT had to project its spend many months in advance. Furthermore, Hiiir lacked the necessary facilities to house a large datacenter and did not have enough IT staff to ensure optimal performance. The company needed a solution that would allow them to scale their computing capacity as needed to support their services, a requirement that could not be met with an on-premises solution.

Hudl, a software provider offering a video and analytics platform for sports teams, was facing a number of challenges. The company was experiencing significant business growth globally, with an increasing number of sports teams using their services to upload game video. This growth, at a rate of about 30 percent every year, required scalability to support and maintain. Additionally, Hudl was striving to provide faster video upload speeds to its customers. Many coaches were requesting quicker video uploads and faster access to videos for analysis. This posed a logistical challenge due to the large video files being moved over long distances. On a typical Friday night in high school football season, Hudl was uploading 39 hours of video every minute for encoding and processing. Lastly, Hudl was seeking a better analytical platform for internal data analysis. Their self-built data warehouse was complicated, expensive, and underperforming.

innogy Czech, a leading European energy company, was faced with the challenge of migrating its mission-critical SAP systems to a new location after the closure of its data center in Brno, Czech Republic due to flood risk. The company had to decide between moving its SAP implementation to a new data center in Germany or migrating to the public cloud, which would align with the organization’s cloud-first strategy. The company’s IT team saw an opportunity to transform operations by moving to the cloud, not only to keep up with future business growth but also to take advantage of the agility, flexibility, and management efficiency of the cloud. The company saw the shift from capital expenditure to operating expenditure as another potential benefit. However, the migration process was fraught with challenges, including the need to migrate dozens of terabytes of SAP data, complete a replatforming of the Linux operating system and Oracle database, and convert the data to Unicode, all without negatively affecting business activities and customers.

Amazon, despite being a leading-edge technology company, was still using Oracle databases for its data storage and management. The company was born before the advent of Amazon Web Services (AWS), during a time when monolithic, on-premises database solutions like Oracle were the norm for enterprise-scale data management. However, disengaging from Oracle presented significant challenges. Amazon had more than 5,000 databases connected to a variety of non-standardized systems, with ownerships and dependencies that were not centrally inventoried. There were also personnel-related risks, as many Amazon employees' careers were based on Oracle database platforms. Furthermore, Amazon engineers were spending excessive time on complex database administration, provisioning, and capacity planning. The company's rapid growth required more Oracle database shards, increasing operations and maintenance overhead. Additionally, continuing with Oracle would increase the millions of dollars Amazon was already paying for its license by a staggering 10 percent annually.

Cedars School of Excellence, a small Scottish preparatory school with about 120 students and 20 staff members, is known for being the first school in the world to introduce a 1:1 iPad-based learning curriculum. However, the school faced challenges in managing its complex iPad deployment and delivering certain parts of the curriculum and testing due to incompatibility of some critical applications with the iPad. The school's IT head, Fraser Speirs, had previously decided to run the school's device-management server, Jamf Pro, on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in 2013. Despite the benefits of this decision, the school still faced limitations in delivering certain parts of the curriculum due to the incompatibility of some applications with the iPad.

FICO, a leading predictive-analytics and decision-management software company, was facing challenges in rapidly developing and deploying its solutions, including its flagship FICO Decision Management Suite (DMS). The company, which provides services to 95 percent of the largest U.S. financial institutions, was traditionally an on-premises software company. This approach often resulted in years-long development and delivery timelines, hindering the company's ability to provide timely solutions to its customers. FICO wanted to focus on implementing its software rather than waiting for customers’ IT organizations to provision and build the underlying infrastructure for its solutions. Additionally, FICO needed to ensure strong security and compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other regulations in its operations.

Globe Telecom, a leading telecommunications service provider in the Philippines, was facing a significant challenge. The company was using Oracle applications in 90 percent of its services, but the cost was proving too high to maintain a competitive position. The company's IT team decided to shift towards the adoption of non-proprietary databases. However, the challenge was to find the best-fit open-source database and to ensure a smooth migration without any interruptions to service quality. Furthermore, Globe Telecom had to ensure that the new platform could handle telco-grade workloads, which are standard for the telecommunications industry but considered heavy in other sectors.

GumGum, a leading provider of programmatic, native, and social analytics software solutions, was facing a significant challenge in managing its data. The company generates more than 1 billion events, equivalent to approximately 6 TB of data, every single day. This massive amount of data needed to be processed continuously to eliminate bottlenecks and expedite decision-making for customers. The company was in dire need of a solution that could scale quickly to handle the rapidly growing traffic and data. The challenge was not just about managing the volume of data but also about processing it in real-time to provide valuable insights to customers.