Modernising ShipServ for Greater Agility and Innovation

About Shipserv

ShipServ is the world’s leading and most extensive integrated e-Procurement platform for the marine industry founded in 1999. ShipServ helps shipowners and ship managers find the best suppliers easily, trade efficiently and securely, and build trusted relationships. Shipserv operates in multiple countries and has a presence in the Middle East (UAE, Oman), the UK, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Denmark, and the USA.

ShipServ’s core product is called TradeNet which connects a buyer’s purchasing system with all their suppliers so they can send purchasing transactions electronically. Currently, they house over 75k suppliers on their Supplier platform. Buyers speed up their purchasing process and save money, Suppliers serve their customers better and find new customers and markets.

Shipserv’s revenue is largely based on in-house developed applications to allow a richer portfolio to their TradeNet platform. ShipServ technology leadership aspired for full automation utilizing modern industry DevOps tools. This opened doors for the partner Logicera to drive a future business transformation drive starting with DC migration and DR to full optimization with DevOps, migration, and modernization of databases for future scale and agility.

Customer Challenge

Shipserv had a strong business solution however the challenges of the legacy architecture of over 2 decades and solution evolution were being done to address temporary business ask rather than long-term sustainable run. This resulted in a technical landscape that evolved over time through vast reactions to the industry with a focus on single customer requirements but lacking a coherent planned objective. The current technical landscape hindered ShipServ’s ability to be reactive and agile to market demands, where any change/update to the existing platform needed to be done in various isolated systems across various technologies. This process also added a large risk of failed implementations as the change in each system was highly dependent by virtue of the data layer and associated services coupled tightly together.

In addition, the customer had complex uptime and SLA asks as their business revenue gets impacted by downtime, several legacy applications, and Oracle DB that was out of support.

The ask was to modernize and structure resources to build a modern platform for a scalable e-procurement business to allow revenue optimization with speed in supplication and API development and have data insights guiding performance.

Our Solution

Understanding the customer’s challenge and asking, LogicEra commenced the customer dialogue on parameters of modernization of the business and future scalability starting with Windows server migration to Azure and SQL server migration to Azure. This was further enhanced by showing a structured roadmap to a full DevOps practice.

Approach taken was

• Multiple engagements with the customer on the value proposition of Azure, current and future platform capability, and scalability.
• Dedicated architects from Logicera were assigned to the project to drive POC and deployment.
• Leverage OCP resources, Architects to advise and troubleshoot, and support the partner.
• Leverage Fast Track to support the partner and customer best practice architecture advisory.
• ECIF to showcase a successful POC for Circle CI, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins environments for the customer to test the deployment of Micro Services for error-free and quicker deployment. (10 Micro Services, 16 Applications); Set up of Kubernetes Cluster, HDInsight-Kafka, Spark.; Showcase of Azure functions capabilities to replace the existing complex codes running on VMs. Refactoring the existing complex codes to be able to run with Azure Functions. Showing the management capabilities of the services.
• Datacenter Migration to Microsoft Azure
• Azure SQL
• Azure DevOps
• AKS
• Azure Synapse (under implementation)
• Oracle on Azure
• HDInsight

Result

The migration was completed in record time and LogicEra delivered a robust, compliant, highly-available e-procurement platform. With improved tools and processes, LogicEra reduced the time to deploy solutions.