DEPLOYING A NETWORK AND HOSTING ENVIRONMENT TO EFFECTIVELY LINK LOCATIONS AND CLIENTS TO A STRATEGIC BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

HORIZON LINES, INC. IS THE NATIONS LEADING JONES ACT CONTAINER SHIPPING AND LOGISTICS COMPANY. THE COMPANY RECOGNIZES THE STRATEGIC BUSINESS ADVANTAGES OF THE INTERNET AND WANTS TO REMAIN FOCUSED ON EXPANSION OF THEIR LOGISTICS CAPABILITIES, INTERNET BOOKING SYSTEM, AND CONTINUED MIGRATION OF CUSTOMERS TO THEIR WEB BASED SYSTEMS WHICH ALLOW CUSTOMERS TO TRACK ALL ASPECTS OF A SHIPMENT FROM ORDER THROUGH DELIVERY.

Horizon Lines, Inc. is the nation’s leading Jones Act container shipping and logistics company, operating 16 U.S.-flag vessels on routes linking the continental United States with Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico.

Horizon Lines maintains offices throughout the continental United States and operates port terminals in Anchorage, Kodiak and Dutch Harbor, Alaska; Honolulu, Hawaii; and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Horizon Lines also owns Horizon Services Group, an organization with a diversified offering of cargo management and tracking services being marketed to shippers, carriers and other supply chain participants.

Today as the only Jones Act vessel operator with one integrated organization, they are uniquely positioned to serve customers in more than one market.

The Business Challenges

Maintaining an edge in the highly competitive Shipping and Logistics market requires Horizon Lines to be extremely sensitive to system and network availability as well as changes in their computing environment.

Horizon Lines’ two core goals for the transition and new data center were:

• Creation of a resilient, high capacity network to leverage for competitive advantage by supporting technologies such as VoIP, RFID and Horizon’s suite of browser based business applications
• Provide a secure, flexible and recoverable computing environment that meets the demands of daily operations and regulatory compliance

Our Solution

Horizon Lines selected Atos Origin Managed Operations to provide a new redundant network design and flexible hosting environment for its 1800 end users in 20 locations.

Atos Origin provides network design and management as well as hosting services that include the following activities:

• Redundant network connections with up to three levels of connectivity to ensure key sites remain connected to the central data centers
• Hosting and management of the Horizon Lines computing environment in a dual Data Center environment
• High end disaster recovery allowing for failover of one or many servers to the twin data center and replication of data
• Virtualized server environment allowing Horizon Lines to make the best use of their hardware investment
• Network and server availability designed to exceed contracted SLA requirements of 99.95%
• Flexible storage allowing expansion and contraction of the storage environment to meet the needs of the enterprise

The Results

Atos Origin was able to implement the environment without affecting Horizon Lines business and maintained 100% uptime throughout transition. The redundancy built into the network has resulted in near 100% uptime for remote sites and has helped ensure that Horizon Lines customers continue to receive the support they expect.

“Atos Origin is an ideal partner for Horizon Lines because of its global experience, and also because of its compatible culture and partner approach,” said Rick Kessler, CIO of Horizon Lines. “We are pleased to have an IT provider of Atos Origin’s caliber as a partner and believe the relationship will result in solutions that make it easier for our customers to do business with us.”