Cisco Helps World’s Leading Maritime Services Company to Cut IT Footprint by 85% Across 200 Port Locations

Cisco Application Networking Services Solution to Significantly Reduce Energy Consumption While Increasing Network Bandwidth Optimisation by 50%

LONDON, February 2008 - 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 data centers.

“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 data centre, 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 128 Kbps - 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 U.K. 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. The application and the data may be hosted in the U.K., 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.

“Through using intelligent Cisco technologies, global operations like Inchcape Shipping Services can operate more effectively in difficult and challenging geographical regions while enjoying real business benefits in terms of cost savings, improved operational efficiency and a reduced carbon footprint,” said David Critchley, operations director for enterprise, manufacturing, retail, energy and transport, Cisco UK & Ireland. “Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services is designed to help organisations like Inchcape Shipping Services which have large numbers of branch offices to deliver centralised applications with LAN-like speed to remote users while preserving visibility and branch security; to consolidate costly branch office servers, storage and backup infrastructure into data centers; and optimise bandwidth usage.”

The Cisco data centre solution at Inchcape Shipping Services comprises Cisco Catalyst® switches and a Cisco IPsec VPN for the LAN and WAN infrastructure. The Cisco Application Networking Services solution will include Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Software and Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) Appliances. Inchcape Shipping Services has started to deploy a Cisco Unified Communications system with the implementation of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CallManager) Version 5.0 and 80 Cisco Unified IP Phones 7900 Series in the U.K. and hundreds more in Dubai, Chennai and Oslo. The company is also making use of the Cisco IP SoftPhone for their mobile workers on the road as part of the Cisco Unified Communications system. The Cisco solution at Inchcape Shipping Services is being implemented by Dimension Data, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner.