Shipping company to slash CO2 and power costs

A shipping services and cargo company that looks after the US Navy and Shell is hoping for massive CO2 and cost reductions by centralising its IT systems.

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Inchcape Shipping Services (ISS) estimates it will cut 85 per cent of its IT hardware from more than 200 offices worldwide using networking technology.

The company manages berthing at hundreds of ports globally for major clients including BP and Exxon Mobil, handling about 58,000 transactions-a-year.

The Cisco Wide-Area Application Services (Waas) system will allow it to replace two or more servers at each of its offices with a single Cisco router, cutting power consumption by about 30 per cent.

Waas allows information that was previously processed and stored on hundreds of local servers to be dealt with at ISS' single data centre based in London.

The system will make ISS' information more accessible to customers and staff, making data easier to manage and protect and helping to ensure that branch offices around the world get fast, LAN-like application performance.

The company is hoping Waas will allow it to realise a 35 per cent return on its investment.

Bryan Phillips, group information director at ISS, said: "This means we can process requests much more efficiently and effectively.

"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 data centre. That information is accessible by anyone in the organisation but, significantly, customers can go online and see what's happening to their vessels. This could mean a saving of 15 minutes working time per ship and you multiply that by more than 55,000 globally you are talking about significant time and cost savings."

Phillips said the system would optimise office bandwidth by 50 per cent, a gain that could make a big difference in more remote locations where data throughput could be as low as 128Kbps.

ISS expects its implementation of Waas and the removal of its servers to be complete by the end of April.

It hopes to take advantage of its optimised bandwidth to implement VoIP calls to improve communication between its 2,450 staff worldwide.

The company will further increase its efficiency by incorporating programmes by shipping software company Shipnet to reduce data entry time.

It says Waas will help boost the company's strategy to double in size and revenue by 2010.