JDS and GKC keep SeaRoad afloat using Cisco

Shipping and logistics firm SeaRoad has taken charge of missing trucks and lost containers using Cisco’s observability solutions. 

The Melbourne-headquartered company has deployed Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability Platform during a three-year IT transformation process in order to gain better visibility of its operations. 

To manage and support the Cisco FSO deployment, SeaRoad partnered with Melbourne’s JDS and GKC in New Zealand.  

“When I came to Searoad, it was very different IT-wise,” SeaRoad CIO Simon Pearce said. “We had cables running all over the floors. We had systems that looked like Apollo 64… with no disaster recovery or backup. 

SeaRoad has since confirmed to ARN that it did have a back-up provider at the time of Pearce joining. 

“We’ve been on an amazing journey to completely rebuild this organisation. Applications are our business. Day after day, we have stevedores who load and unload our ships with our new version of applications that are cutting-edge. 

SeaRoad specialises in transporting goods between Melbourne and Tasmania and is responsible for 30 per cent of goods going across the Bass Strait. 

To underpin this, SeaRoad has two large freight vessels, 250 trucks and five warehouses, which need to be managed continuously. 

According to Pearce, these have all been upgraded and modified with Cisco FSO to stop issues such as lost or missing vehicles and containers, as was happening before. 

“When we went onto a new technology stack and a new platform, we needed to get transparency on our operations, all the way through to the database to business transactions in real-time,” he told an audience at Cisco Live in Melbourne. 

In particular, he explained, visibility was needed after the digital transformation to prevent downtime in the event of an IT event.  

“SeaRoad has three hours to unload a ship every day so there cannot be five-hour outages,” he said. “We need to know about things before they happen and in minutes.” 

Speaking of the partnerships with Cisco, JDS and GKC, he added: “It’s been a real partnership to bring this together.  

“We’re not a large company. We don’t have hundreds of IT people to run a nearly half-a-billion-dollar business. So, we rely on partners to help us deliver our vision. We have to run very efficiently. If we cannot detect something very quickly, we cannot run our business.