CASE STUDY
S
ecure and reliable data
communications are essential when
you possess the world’s largest fleet
of vessels for transporting liquid natural
gas. The Qatar Gas Transport Company
Ltd, known as Nakilat, which is Arabic for
‘carrier’ has 65 liquid natural gas ships and
four liquid petroleum gas ships that operate
as a ‘floating pipeline’ carrying Qatari gas
around the world. The fleet represents 12%
of total world carrying capacity.
To support this, Nakilat has a complex
network of wholly owned and joint-venture
operations in ship repair, construction,
shipping agencies, warehousing and other
maritime support services.
Nakilat recently consolidated its IT
operations into a single organisation.
As CIO Hamad Suwaid said: “The biggest
challenge was bringing everyone together
and enabling secure access to information
from anywhere in the world.”
After evaluating numerous vendors, Nakilat
decided that Fujitsu demonstrated the best
technology, expertise and cost-effectiveness.
Together with Fujitsu, the firm rolled out SAP
HANA using Citrix and Microsoft Azure with
the Fujitsu Integrated System PRIMEFLEX
platform, combined with Fujitsu FlexFrame
Orchestrator for SAP, as the basis for a
highly efficient cloud solution.
The centralised IT operation serves a
complex mix of recently acquired businesses
and joint-venture operations. Because of
this, it uses a hybrid IT environment that
combines Microsoft Azure cloud resources
THE BIGGEST
CHALLENGE
WAS BRINGING
EVERYONE
TOGETHER
AND ENABLING
SECURE ACCESS
TO INFORMATION
FROM ANYWHERE
IN THE WORLD
with its own on-premises data centre.
Citrix NetScaler provides secure access to
Nakilat’s on-premises resources, including
Microsoft SharePoint and SAP. Hamad said:
“All of our internal application publishing
uses NetScaler, and it also provides load-
balancing across our services.”
Nakilat uses Citrix XenApp to virtualise its
core business applications so that remote
and joint-venture users have access to
Nakilat information and resources. NetScaler
interoperates seamlessly with Azure ID
Management to ensure security for all users.
Effective and secure sharing of apps
and information with third-party,
joint-venture partners
Nakilat now saves time and money by sharing
access to information and applications with
users from partner organisations.
For example, Nakilat holds millions of
dollars’ worth of spare parts for its ships. By
using Citrix to securely share its inventory,
kept on SAP, with its shipping joint-venture
partners, Nakilat can supply any required
parts to ships when they dock to take on
their cargo of gas.
With a cross-fleet view of requirements
and inventory, Nakilat avoids over-stocking
expensive parts. By making the ordering,
delivery and fitting of spares more
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