James Cargo Services Ltd: Evolving IT to Support Global Growth

Incorporated in 1984, James Cargo Services are a medium-sized company which has kept a focus on excellence in service and providing personalised solutions for their customers. In addition to general cargo forwarding services, James Cargo Services have specialist departments for livestock, motorcycle and high-end vehicle transport and project cargo. Operating from their HQ in Heathrow and branch office in Manchester, alongside fulfilment operations in The Netherlands and Hong Kong, James Cargo have a global presence yet remain customer driven, placing the utmost importance on developing long term business relationships through personal contact with their clients. 

Albacore have supported IT services for James Cargo since 2008. We have overseen and supported their continual growth and delivered dependable and reliable IT systems for them utilising appropriate technologies and requiring controlled capital investment only when necessary. 

Until 2020, James Cargo had an on-premise server solution. It delivered a trouble-free platform and included some resilience, but some aspects were in need of modernisation. The brief for the server renewal project was to add significant resilience and scalability to the solution while simplifying on-premise deployment to fuel rapid expansion and control future capital investment in server hardware. A hosted server was selected as the best solution for these challenges. 

After consultation and auditing of the existing system and discussion with James Cargo directors to understand the main drivers for the new system, Albacore designed and quoted for a hosted server solution and a mixture of on-premise thin clients as well as traditional Windows PC’s for some staff to allow ultimate flexibility of working. 

Reliable backup and DR arrangements was a strong feature of the new solution, so the solution includes monitored backups of the primary servers to an adjacent on-premise unit, monitored online backup functionality, and near real-time replication of servers to an offsite datacentre. The replication service provides a maximum 4 hour failover time to a fully working system in the event of a DR scenario at the live hosting platform. The functionality is demonstrated quarterly to James Cargo personnel to ensure it’s always working should it be needed. 

Each application and data set in use was migrated to the new hosted server environment in a controlled way, with works completed both in working hours and out of hours to minimise impact to the business. Once all work functions of all users were moved to the new hosted environment, Albacore engineers deployed new client hardware to all locations and ensured users had engineer contact to iron out any issues. 

“We choose Albacore for our IT because they are specialists in our industry and they are approachable, flexible and professional. The hosted server implementation was a significant change for us because our IT systems are the foundation of our business. Albacore communicated clearly with us and delivered a very smooth migration to the new system. We knew the hosted server was the right choice for us, but it demonstrated its flexibility earlier than expected as a result of the national lockdown back in March.”

James Cargo Services Ltd
Daniel Edwards – Director