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Modern shipping companies are
highly mobile and require large amounts of navigational, legal and technical
information processing for safe and efficient operation at sea. Booming
business has left many shippers and transportation intermediaries in need of
a centralized, scalable, information technologies platform on which to plan,
process, monitor and share shipment information. CargoSmart is an online application and integration services provider that
was savvy enough to upgrade its existing IT infrastructure to support its rapid
growth. Launched in 2000 and built on an open, scalable architecture that can be
integrated into any customer’s enterprise system, CargoSmart delivers
application, integration and hybrid solutions that enable parties with varied
technology capabilities, business needs and roles in the shipment process to
manage their shipments with multiple carriers throughout the shipment cycle.
Those parties can seamlessly connect to their network of suppliers, customers,
logistics providers, ocean carriers and other business divisions. Customers are able to manage shipments using online, offline, mobile and
direct integration solutions. With more than 30,000 customers and approximately
300 new members weekly, CargoSmart adds 215,000 new shipment records to its
system monthly, sends 150,000 shipment status milestone e-mail notification and
exception alerts, and generates more than 25,000 reports. While its system was originally designed to handle high-transaction volumes,
CargoSmart’s success required an infrastructure upgrade to ensure it would be
able to accommodate rapid growth in the future. The company needed to improve
its IT platform to maintain business continuity, as its existing infrastructure
would not be able to cope with the rising number of accounts created by new
clients, as well as the sheer volume of information and transactions processed
and stored on its servers. CargoSmart’s IT department concluded that moving the company’s applications
and database onto a more streamlined IT platform was a strategic necessity.
Apart from a lower total cost of ownership, the migration would help to ensure
24x7 business continuity, as well as establish disaster-recovery capabilities
that would allow the company to resume operations with minimal disruption as
part of its customer-service guarantee. The adoption of a standards-compliant
infrastructure to support the company’s service-delivery system was vital to
managing the needs of the company’s growing business, while responding promptly
to customers’ needs. After a thorough proof-of-concept exercise, CargoSmart implemented new
standards-based systems to power its applications. The company replaced its
database platform with an Itanium 2-based system running HP-UX 11i v2, providing
CargoSmart’s IT department with enhanced levels of application and database
availability and data protection. This 64-bit, fault-tolerant technology
delivers the speed and performance required by CargoSmart to meet and exceed its
customers’ business-critical demands. “The decision to migrate to an Itanium 2-based platform was based on clearly
defined future product road maps and superior server performance,” says Steve
Siu, chief executive officer of CargoSmart. “Our new platform helps us support
high customer transaction volumes and future business growth.” The new infrastructure gives close to 200% more performance per CPU, Siu
says, and a lower total cost of ownership performance as compared to its
previous server platform. The new service-delivery system offers high
availability, with uptime of more than 99.99%. Maintenance and upgrades are
simpler and less expensive, Siu adds. Marc Courchesne is with HP,
Nashua, New Hampshire,
which is a member of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, a global community of
hardware, operating system and application vendors dedicated to accelerating
the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium solutions.
For more information:
www.rsleads.com/607cn-264
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