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Clarksons improves resilience of global network with BIS managed service
““BIS are really great to work with and understand our business. I would highly recommend BIS to anyone whose business demands a highly available global network.”Tony Catling, Communications Manager Clarksons Plc
Clarksons Plc is the world's leading provider of integrated shipping services with a global network of offices in key strategic shipping centres around the world. With 700 staff spread across five continents, Clarksons provides brokerage, financial services, port services and market research to the global shipping and offshore industries.
Sailing ships were still in use when the Clarksons story began back in 1852. The business expanded rapidly in the 1920‘s when it became the exclusive broker to the oil giant Esso. This established Clarksons as the biggest tanker broker in the world. Unrivalled in scope, Clarksons has played a vital role across every sector of the maritime industry and its expertise ensures the smooth and efficient functioning of global seaborne trade.
Today as a publicly listed company, Clarksons continues the expansion of its core ship brokerage and research activities. By developing a portfolio of businesses, the firm aims to lead the market in delivering innovative shipping services by combining its local knowledge with its global expertise and reach. Typical of other global financial services organisation, Clarksons’ IT is critical to its success. Any downtime would severely impact the firm, both in lost trade revenues and damage to its professional reputation.
Having expanded its presence in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne Clarksons realised that it needed a high performance network to support its growth. As such, they sourced a fully managed Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network for its Asia and Pacific sites.
“As all our brokers trade using the Internet, email and IP telephony, reliability of our network is business critical.”Richard White, IT Director at Clarksons Plc.
When Tony Catling joined Clarksons two years ago as Communications Manager, he wanted to improve the level of service the business was currently receiving from its incumbent global network provider. He set out to eradicate intermittent network issues and failures across its Asia Pacific region which had the potential to impact trading and threaten Clarksons smooth financial operation.
Clarksons had to urgently evolve its network with a solution that was both cost-effective and reliable. Further, they required a solution that was flexible enough to address the differing requirements of each site. Clarksons’ offices around the World have varying staff numbers and a “one size fits all” solution would not be cost effective. The firm required a solution that could provide scalable connectivity, as well as a cost-effective resilient connection for the larger offices to protect against catastrophic network failure.
BIS worked with Tony and his team at Clarksons to design a new highly resilient network. In London, this took the form of a BIS supplied and managed Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) which linked the firm’s data centre in its St Magnus House headquarters to its disaster recovery site as well as linking he BIS gateway to the Clarksons global MPLS network. The BIS gateway was also utilised to onnect all Clarksons’ smaller offices to the new MAN as well as providing resilient Internet beakout or all sites.
BIS took ownership of Clarksons’ network and quickly escalated to the incumbent network provider or Asia Pacific to ensure prompt attention at the most senior levels. The BIS technical team worked ith the incumbent carrier to identify the problems and performed a root-cause analysis which led to he carrier replacing failing equipment.
Tony also called on BIS’ network experts to propose a new backup solution for the MPLS network as his was so critical to their business. BIS recommended a cost-effective backup VPN solution using he Cisco Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) to dynamically route traffic in the event of any network failures. The Clarksons’ team was impressed at how quickly BIS implemented a fully working solution hich ensured resilience across their Asia Pacific offices.
"There were two global MPLS managed network options on the table at the time. The ervices were comparable but BIS offered much better value and our experience to-date as been excellent.”Richard White, IT Director at Clarksons Plc.
Since working with the BIS, end user outages have all but been eliminated. The firm relies on the BIS managed networks team to manage their London MAN, Asia Pacific MPLS network and our global Internet service. The latter is a fully resilient breakout with traffic shaping from geographically dispersed BIS data centres over dual 100 Mbps ports.
“BIS has helped us resolve some network issues. It has put an operational cost-effective backup in place faster than some vendors even responded to our request for a solution.”
Tony Catling, Communications Manager at Clarksons plc.
Tony praised BIS’ technical expertise as well as the responsiveness of the sales and support team as a whole. Tony is also impressed with BIS Operations which owns customer problems and has built relationships with most global service providers so any issues are escalated effectively and solved quickly.
“BIS were instrumental in designing a new highly resilient network for Clarksons. If our main MPLS network goes down, we dynamically route traffic over an auto-failover backup VPN solution. We’re now able to automatically failover during maintenance or for any network hiccups without local users noticing.”Tony Catling, Communications Manager at Clarksons plc.
Clarksons Case Study