Toll Global partners with Versent to transition logistics app to cloud

Toll Global Forwarding, the company renowned for solving transport and supply chain issues for over a century, recently joined forces with cloud consulting experts, Versent, to undertake the significant task of migrating its monumental logistics application, CargoWise One, to the cloud.

Serving its 20,000 customers across 150 countries, CargoWise One is one of the globe's largest logistics applications and carries out an enormous one billion transactions each day. However, the outdated and complex legacy infrastructure behind it was resulting in slow operation as well as being incapable of scalability and recovery from disaster risks.

Following two significant cyber-attacks in early 2020, it became crucial to modernise and safeguard the system for future use. After a worldwide hunt, the Australian-founded Versent was chosen for their specialist cloud consulting expertise. AWS was selected to assist in building a sophisticated platform that would bring both immediate and future value to CargoWise One.

Versent took on the challenge with a multidisciplinary team, diving deep into the business to determine the key priorities for transition, including enhancing the security and stability of existing applications, modernising operations, and ensuring scalability.

Over the span of 12 months, the first three months solely focused on exploration and solution development, Versent with the assistance from Toll's team was successful in constructing the new cloud-based system. They then proceeded to test it thoroughly before moving CargoWise to AWS's modern, scalable cloud infrastructure.

Michelle Shirton, Head of Digital at Toll Global Forwarding, praised the joint venture saying, "Working with Versent, it became apparent quickly that they were not only going to help us migrate to the cloud, but they were also going to help improve how we operated." She further stated the vital role of building a valuable working relationship with Versent in more rapid decision-making.

Justyn Green, Versent Cloud Practice Lead, also echoed Shirton's sentiments on the collaborative approach. He mentioned the project's dual purpose, not just a technological shift for Toll but also about unlocking value for their business.

Since the migration, Toll has observed numerous advantages, including a 40% reduction in CargoWise's storage footprint, user experience enhancements due to faster and smoother operations, faster reporting time, real-time data analytics, and increased platform stability. Disaster recovery timings have been enormously reduced from weeks to less than two hours, and problem-solving has gone from taking countless hours to mere minutes with the new improved infrastructure and application performance visibility.

Justyn Green emphasised the project's pioneering nature, stating, "Working with Toll was exciting because no one else in the world had attempted to do something of this scale before. The solution needed to be robust and resilient."