When Columbia Shipmanagement (CSM) decided in 2014 to migrate the application and IT systems made available for the entire globally active corporate group from the data centre then operated in Hamburg to Düsseldorf, and to place technical and operational responsibility into the hands of SAIT, this marked the beginning of an extremely successful collaboration that goes beyond the usual customer-supplier relationship. This decision was preceded by a bidding competition in which SAIT’s presented IT solution fulfilled the high demands placed on service level agreements in an almost ideal manner.
Besides the usual suspects such as ERP, DMS, PMS, DWH, BI, SAIT operates a number of specialised maritime applications for us in SAIT's own data centres located around Düsseldorf Airport. To connect our worldwide locations and our commercial fleet of ships, comprised of tankers, heavy load vessels, container and cruise ships, which we manage on behalf of our customers, we rely on the communication services from our parent company SITA and benefit operationally, technically and commercially from the seamless combination of hosting and communication by SAIT and SITA. Thanks to SAIT, our own IT now takes more care of our processes, our users and our customers and without worries – less or not at all about soulless "metal”. This “metal” constitutes powerful, highly efficient, completely virtualised and redundantly available computer and storage systems, which communicate via secure high-performance networks - this is something we don’t even notice anymore.
Our close collaboration allowed us to commission the hosting of our previously dispersed corporate portals with SAIT in 2016, and to benefit from the proximity to the major Internet hubs ECIX and DE-CIX. In doing so, we were able to seamlessly expand the classic data centre to include a public and private cloud service, always exactly as we needed it and not like other suppliers are able to. The somewhat overused distinction between “on premises”, “private cloud” and”public cloud” is not important to us. SAIT is able to offer these concepts in any combination and integration depth with ease.
“North German sea bears” and “Rhenish cheerful natures” have grown together to form a very successful and efficient team whose focus is not on bare IT but on the entrepreneurial success of both partners. Getting everything from a single source is attractive, but getting everything from a “good” source is not always a given. That's exactly what we've done here. And if you can say so as a “customer”: it's fun.
Oliver Krüger
Senior Enterprise Architect (Corporate IT)
Columbia Shipmanagement (http://www.columbia-shipmanagement.com/)