|
Carrier Services
Verizon Business Keeps on Trucking
Managed Hosting Environment Stores Transit Data for Freight Industry
by Jim Barthold
Keeping track of trucks zigzagging across the country to pick
up and deliver freight is a gargantuan chore. While
Power2Ship, a Boca Raton, FL-based technology company handles
the front end of that job for its 4,000 trucking customers, it
needs help on the back end so it uses Verizon Business’s
managed hosting environment to handle supply chain asset
tracking, visibility and real-time information.
“It’s very important to have the 24x7 redundancy that a
Verizon offers as far as the network and the support of being
co-located at one of those locations,” said Michael Darden,
president of Power2Ship. “Their facilities are much more
powerful and economical to process these volumes of
information that come in for shipments that are in transit.”
Power2Ship uses GPS systems to track not only the vehicles
but the freight being hauled – to the point where trucking
companies know about both deliveries and potential pick-ups.
That’s especially important for the majority of trucking firms
that have about 30 trucks running at 78 to 80 percent
utilization rates, Darden said.
For trucking companies, Power2Ship offers a Web-based
management tool to tell trucks where to move freight by
dispatching a driver and equipment and then picking up
goods that are tracked via a GPS tracking device.
“Our technology provides a level playing field for multiple
vehicle tracking devices to collect the location where vehicles
are. It’s a real-time marketplace that provides a central
repository of a single carrier to track where all their trucks are
currently located, where they’re going to be located and
then display their availability to shipping customers,” he said.
The other part of the technology is a “traditional
transportation management system” where a shipper can
work with 20 different carrier companies to move freight.
“We can create either a complete open architecture public
marketplace of unused vehicles or it can be used as a private
marketplace for a shipping customer to tender to their own
carriers. Each one of those shipment updates is populated
into a single repository of our Web-based applications that is
hosted at Verizon,” Darden said.
The point, he said, is this is “a lot of data that’s moving for
each one of those shipments and maintaining that data
integrity through a partner like Verizon makes a lot of sense.”
Trucks aren’t the only things that are at remote locations. The
Verizon data storage is in Virginia; Power2Ship is in Boca
Raton and it’s IT staff is in Chicago.
On top of everything else, Darden said, there is an increased
element of security; Power2Ship works with Homeland Security
to maintain a data base of what’s being shipped while at the
same time it maintains some degree of secrecy to protect
data from competing trucking firms.
“Our system is architected in the way that the server banks
hosted at Verizon are protected and enable security
information to reside in the data base where it’s only
accessible by the authorized user,” he said.
|
