Mendix

ProRail, a company assigned by the Dutch Government to maintain over 6,800 km of their national railway, faced a significant challenge in managing its complex operations. The company's mission was to ensure high-quality, safe, on-time, and convenient passenger and freight rail travel in the Netherlands. However, the logistical challenges were immense, requiring the company to maintain a high-quality workforce and systems. The company was organized into three infrastructure management organizations, each with its own set of responsibilities. The IT department was responsible for the processes that enabled the railway network to operate properly. However, the company's core systems operation was sophisticated and of high importance, requiring a substantial amount of IT oversight. At the same time, the business was constantly generating new ideas to create efficiencies in their processes, which often led to a growing backlog and a proliferation of Shadow IT.

Regional banks play a crucial role in the economic health of communities by offering greater access to funding and personalized services. However, over the last two decades, these institutions have found it increasingly difficult to compete with larger national banks due to customer demand for more convenience and digital touchpoints in banking, and their lack of IT expertise to deliver them. Large national banks have hundreds of people dedicated to software development and can make up for their lack of personal client relationships by offering sleek, easy-to-use applications. This has become particularly important in a post-COVID era, where digital convenience often overshadows the personal touch of in-person banking. Regional banks are at a crossroads – their lean IT budgets are hardly enough to develop enterprise-grade software with traditional code, and commercial-off-the-shelf solutions are typically restrictive.

ABN AMRO, the third-largest bank in the Netherlands, was facing a growing demand for digitalization of their services, a need that was further amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. With over 3 million customers and €197B in assets, the bank was under pressure to offer more digital touchpoints for both customers and employees. The bank's workforce of 19,000 employees began resorting to shadow IT solutions to meet these needs, which posed a risk given the high regulatory and compliance standards of the banking industry. In 2016, ABN AMRO reassessed their IT landscape and determined that they needed a more efficient development platform to deliver innovative solutions quickly while maintaining a level of governance that met industry standards.

AESSEAL, a subsidiary of AES Engineering Ltd, is a global company with 235 locations in 104 countries, specializing in engineering products and systems for pumps and rotating equipment. Despite its industry-leading portfolio of custom predictive and preventive engineering products, AESSEAL faced a significant challenge. The company needed to bridge its core legacy systems with a modern technology stack to keep up with its own progress. The existing siloed legacy manufacturing systems, coupled with significant technical debt, hindered the IT team from delivering new, innovative solutions. The team was stretched thin managing continuous upgrades in Windows and Oracle, refreshing legacy applications, and addressing challenges from non-standardized shadow IT solutions created by the business. The need for a solution that could extend development capacity and solve their integration challenge was evident.

Ensuring the quality and safety of medication is a complex task due to the intricate lifecycle of pharmaceutical products. From production to warehouse to patient, each stage requires careful handling to maintain the potency of the medication. This is a global challenge, with over 275 million people using prescription drugs worldwide. AntTail, a Netherlands-based IoT services provider for the cold-chain logistics of medical supplies, has been working to address this issue. However, they faced challenges in building custom applications for medicine-related logistics quickly and efficiently. They also needed to ensure data availability, security, and scalability for their applications. Furthermore, they had to deal with the complexities of monitoring conditions of medications in patients’ home refrigerators, maintaining stringent standards in warehouses, and dealing with the traditional method of monitoring with wired sensors, which was costly and required frequent maintenance.

BAE Systems, Europe’s largest defense contractor, was facing a common challenge in the IT sector. The company was struggling with a backlog of demands to maintain or replace mission-critical core systems while also delivering new, innovative solutions. The shortage of resources to deliver in all areas was leading to the growth of opaque shadow IT solutions. The company was also reliant on third-party providers for managing their systems, which made getting applications into production and retaining control in-house a challenge. The IT team had adopted an agile way of working, but the current suite of tools and partners did not fit with this cultural shift. The team was looking for a platform that would enable them to deliver faster on bespoke development demands to prevent the creation of shadow IT, while simultaneously keeping their core clean and reducing their reliance on external development support.