The company relied on the expertise of a staff of experienced billing agents, account managers and administrative specialists whose primary tools were one giant customer database built on Microsoft Access, Exchange email and the anachronistic but effective use of paper invoices delivered via fax or snail mail.This process was effective until Irene made it clear that if power went out in the main office Diesel Direct wouldn’t be able to send out that fast flurry of invoices every day. And without that, their cash-flow situation would be greatly impacted very quickly.Their clients, fleet managers for distribution companies, understand quickly how Diesel Direct can save them money by letting them trade a few extra cents per gallon of fuel for the FTE cost of having their own people handle the fuelling and maintenance and reporting, plus the cost of having the truck off the road while they’re doing it. Diesel Direct’s services allow them to skip most of that. The model doesn’t require a lot of technology, but Diesel Direct can’t accomplish anything if its minimal IT infrastructure is offline for any length of time.

With thousands of employees at eight different locations, Booth Newspapers struggled to find a comprehensive solution to secure and manage Internet traffic for all of its employees. Booth was interested in adding Web 2.0 control and additional Anti-Virus measures, requiring three times as many point products and three times as much maintenance overhead in the future.

As the market leader in remote radio metering of energy consumption in homes and commercial buildings, Techem is driving integration and digital processes in the property sector. The company had been using radio-based technology for this for many years. Meter readers used a ‘walk-by’ process to collect readings from electric meters using mobile devices. Plausibility checks were then carried out to avoid transmission errors and other issues. In certain circumstances, Techem also used a stationary radio solution to read meters.Both processes worked well and reliably in practice, but there was still room for improvement. The main disadvantage of mobile data collection was that the company still had to send an employee to the relevant property to take the meter readings. With stationary collection, every master data collector needs 230 volts power supply. Its location also must be chosen carefully to ensure that it has sufficient mobile coverage. Plus, the radio standard currently in use has limitations as it is unable to penetrate thick concrete walls and transmit signals from deep cellars.For these reasons, and to further improve and digitise its processes, Techem decided to look for a simpler and more flexible solution when collecting meter readings.

Greengage was looking for a way to provide ‘smart’ lighting solutions, to provide farmers with an essential system for managing operations and to monitor animal welfare remotely.

The various local and state associations are independent corporations working together to deliver programs under a Code of Ethics that is over a hundred years old. There is an existing centralized database containing members’ billing information.Engagement information such as volunteerism, professional development and committee service is not shared. While sharing member engagement information is essential, it is difficult to get 1200 organizations to agree to contribute and relinquish control of their data to a single database.

As a pioneering IT enabler and technology driver, Intel’s objective was to demonstrate to clients that the modern data center operating environment does not require the level of cooling traditionally thought necessary to guarantee reliable performance. Given the significant energy cost and capital expense associated with cooling technology, there would be considerable potential for dramatically reducing TCO by designing and building data center facilities that run at a higher ambient temperature.Demonstrating the validity of this approach required an accurate and straightforward way to scientifically prove how TCO could be reduced without business risk or compromising IT performance. Intel needed a dependable solution that would rapidly allow a detailed assessment of the entire data center environment under varying workloads and conditions, holistically and at an individual component level.

Denver Green School wanted an optimized rainwater harvesting system to eliminate wet-weather discharge and retain water for irrigation.

Networked applications, such as electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR), are vital for Cook Children’s to provide outstanding service to its patients and physicians. As its network grew in complexity, with data coming in from various wireless medical devices and wearables, as well as remote hosted applications, issues surfaced. The organization’s network manager identified a range of issues that included slow user experience, network monitoring challenges, and an inability to proactively identify application performance concerns.

Across the nation, utility companies, state regulators and policy makers are considering many potential solutions and strategies for managing an evolving power grid and energy industry. From policy measures like the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan regulations, to the President’s first Quadrennial Energy Review, to infrastructure modernization efforts, utility companies and state regulators are in a period of intense progress and scrutiny. Of these measures, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is particularly significant. It aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired power plants. Citing authority under Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, the EPA released the final regulations in August 2015, requiring states to develop and submit state plans to achieve the federal emissions reduction goals. The Clean Power Plan also fosters a spirit of state/federal collaboration urging states to work hand-in-hand with each other and the EPA to come to optimal reduction structures. Despite the debate over the legality of the EPA’s proposed plan, utilities and regulatory bodies are already analyzing the cost and benefits of a variety of measures to respond including coal plant conversions, renewable energy investments, energy efficiency programs and more.

To meet the demands of its rapidly growing business, Senior Lifestyle Corporation needed to provide consistent, high-quality resident care while ensuring its staff could meet the highest standards for excellence and safety.

With recent population growth and aging infrastructure are pressing municipalities to raise water rates between five to 11 percent a year, driving commercial and agricultural customers to consider more efficient water use and promote sustainable practices. Hence, the need for better remote water management is at an all-time high.

Opel Rüsselsheim faced difficulties closely monitor on average about 60,000 messages a day which are critical to it's daily operations. This in turn affects the firm's ability to create innovative technologies that strengthen and guarantee the quality of its automobiles

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. 

• According to Renaissance High School, many Japanese high school students are dissatisfied with the traditional curriculum and prefer to study topics that are of personal interest or related to a potential profession.• Without a high school diploma, students have greater difficulty landing steady jobs, and the full-time employment rate of high school dropouts is relatively low, putting a strain on the nation’s social welfare system.1• Many Japanese high school students are dissatisfied with the inflexible, uniform content of their education and often suffer from loss of motivation.• In Japan, the need for digitization of education has been discussed for a long time; the government has just begun to focus on introducing digital textbooks.

When we first met the team at Maverik Motion Picture Productions, it consisted of 5 full time members of staf. As with many businesses, they were working from a central ofce and sharing one handset between them. As the company grew, this started to become problematic and due to the nature of the business, each member of the team was spending a lot of time on site with clients. This created a real need for each team member to be able to work remotely, using their mobile phones. The businesses central ofce was being rented, which meant the idea of a permanent solution would not be suitable, as they may need to expand or move in the near future.

DOEE identified intelligent retention as an important option for limiting wet-weather discharge, storing water on-site for use, and informing future improvements to District infrastructure.