One of the world's leading maritime services company, Inchcape Shipping Services, estimates it will cut 85 per cent of its IT hardware from more than 200 offices in ports around the world by using Cisco technology. A typical small remote office is expected to see two or more computer servers reduced to a single Cisco router, reducing the company's energy consumption costs and its carbon footprint.
Inchcape Shipping Services will achieve the consolidation via Cisco Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS). Cisco WAAS is an advanced application networking technology which allows organizations to optimize and improve performance of centrally hosted applications over a wide area network (WAN) to deliver remote users with a local area network (LAN)-like experience. As a result, organizations can consolidate costly branch servers and storage into datacenters. "One of our strategic goals is to reduce our global carbon footprint, and using Cisco WAAS to cut the amount of equipment we need in each branch office is a key part of that strategy," said Bryan Phillips, group information director at Inchcape Shipping Services. "If you think that each of the servers we had was drawing around two to three amps, and multiply that across all our locations, that's quite a big reduction in energy use."
Cisco is helping Inchcape Shipping Services consolidate virtually all of its business applications into a U.K.-based datacenter, making information much more accessible to customers and staff; making data easier to manage and protect; and helping to ensure that branch offices around the world still get fast, LAN-like application performance. The Cisco solution is also expected to improve operations in regions where telecommunications services are limited - in some cases to just 128Kbps - by increasing bandwidth optimisation by 50 percent.
"Cisco WAAS is about information accessibility," Phillips said. "One of our agents on the bridge of a cargo vessel docked in Singapore can use a GPRS-enabled laptop to exchange information, in seconds, with our UK datacenter. That information is accessible by anyone in the organisation, but significantly, customers can go online and see what's happening to their vessels. The application and the data may be hosted in the UK, but for the agent it performs as if it was on their laptop. This is what Cisco WAAS means to our business." Cisco technology will make setting up new port office locations faster and easier, because it only needs a single Cisco router to deliver all data and communication services to the office. This was already proved in an initial pilot in which the WAAS technology was used to set up a new Inchcape Shipping Services operation in Marseille, France. This supports the company's business strategy to double in size and revenue by 2010.
Cisco technology is also helping Inchcape Shipping Services implement other services such as IP telephony to locations where it would have been impossible or cost prohibitive to deploy this type of technology.