IBM has announced that Coscon, China’s largest container shipping company, is relying on IBM software and services to help streamline its business processes, increase efficiency and enhance collaboration with its customers, partners and suppliers.

As a leader in the shipping and logistics services market, Coscon has 127 container vessels, and has shipped more than 320,000 containers to date. Its ships are regularly deployed to ports across the globe each with their own regulations. To support these diverse requirements, Coscon had an electronic data interchange (EDI) system that consisted of 21 different applications with a variety of architectures and development languages supported on multiple servers. As Coscon’s business continued to grow, its complex IT system hampered the company’s ability to respond quickly to its ports of call and its external and internal customers.

To become more competitive, Coscon tapped the software and services expertise in IBM’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Design Center in Beijing. The IBM center designed a solution based on IBM’s WebSphere software that integrated Coscon’s existing EDI applications by deploying an SOA.

The open standards based technology approach from IBM enabled Coscon to connect its silos of data and software applications to allow its internal business to better interoperate with its customers, partners and suppliers. In addition, IBM consolidated Coscon’s infrastructure by reducing the number of servers from 17 to three. This solution leveraged the existing resources within Coscon and augmented it with a solution that improved productivity, allowing for more efficient communication and enabling the company to quickly react to changing market conditions.