P&O Ferrymasters selects Forward! by Unisys Platform

P&O Ferrymasters, one of Europe's leading supply chain and logistics providers, has selected the Forward! by Unisys™ enterprise computing platform for its key mission-critical freight management application.

P&O Ferrymasters expects the Forward! platform to enhance performance, security and operating costs for the test and development environment of its Fr8Manager application. The company relies on Fr8Manager for all operational processes and functions, including booking, billing and routing of customers’ road, rail and sea shipments throughout Europe.

Fr8Manager now supports approximately 550 internal users, as well as users from customers, partners and national authorities. P&O Ferrymasters decided to implement the Forward! platform rather than a virtualised system for the Fr8Manager application.

“Initially we virtualised our test and development environment to reduce costs and speed up deployment of our internal software projects,” said Steve Walters, chief information officer, P&O Ferrymasters. “However, Unisys showed us that the Forward! by Unisys platform can deliver greater performance and better security for our mission-critical freight application than a virtualised system, at even lower cost. We view the Forward! platform as key to realising our vision of leading the European freight market through innovative use of IT.”

The Forward! platform combines industry-standard Intel Xeon processors with Unisys’ secure partitioning (s-Par®) software and high speed interconnect technology in an advanced fabric architecture linking all computing resources and components. The Forward! platform goes beyond traditional virtualisation technology by creating a secure partition with dedicated resources for each mission-critical application workload – eliminating the resource contention that often accompanies virtualisation and enabling faster, more predictable performance.

In third-party testing conducted earlier this year, the Forward! platform decisively outperformed a virtualised environment using an industry-standard hypervisor, delivering up to 38 percent better throughput and up to 122 percent faster multiple-workload performance.

“We are delighted that P&O Ferrymasters has chosen Forward! by Unisys for the company’s most mission-critical application,” said Nick Fraser, managing director, Unisys UK. “We are confident that our Forward! platform delivers the superior blend of power and predictable performance that P&O Ferrymasters needs to accommodate a steadily escalating volume of application demands and customer requirements.”