Port Authority was established in July 2014 with the amalgamation of the Sydney, Newcastle and Port Kembla port corporations following the long-term leasing by the NSW Government of each corporation’s landside operations - Sydney and Port Kembla in 2013 and Newcastle in 2014.

Following the amalgamation, there was an opportunity to transform the organisations back-end IT infrastructure and networks with a view to consolidate and future-proof services whilst minimising disruption to the wider business.

Ian Chilton, Port Authority’s Senior Manager, Solution, Development & Services is responsible for the delivery and support of the organisations Information Technology strategy and infrastructure services.

“A key consideration was to provision a more flexible and scalable IT architecture, we’ve gone through a lot of changes, including a period of partial privatisation, and we’ve merged with other ports within the state. So, we were really looking for infrastructure offering flexibility, scalability and resilience at this stage whilst also making some cost efficiencies,” said Ian.

A key success factor to the transformation program was to identify and engage appropriate partners and vendors who brought not only the right technology to the table, but the right approach to a productive long-term working relationship. After a rigorous procurement process, Port Authority chose Vocus to deliver its corporate layer 2 network across the organisation’s various sites in 2016.

“Working closely with Vocus has enabled us to successfully deliver a stable and scalable network and positioned us well for the next phases of our transformation,” said Ian.

To this end Port Authority with the Vocus team, recently completed a major undertaking to upgrade the Corporate WAN to layer 3 topology to deliver greater network autonomy, flexibility and resilience.

“The upgrade of our network to layer 3 has been a key enabler for our wider strategic objectives, to future proof our infrastructure and move to more flexible and managed services such as SD-WAN in the near future.”

Keys to success

Ian was asked on what he thought were the key elements which have delivered success of his overall program.

“You can never do enough change management and stakeholder communication, he said, we had strong support for the IT transformation from the Executive who understood the program was a key enabler to support the integration and business direction.”

“The program was supported by an extensive change management plan which aimed to minimise outages and disruption to the business,” expressed Ian “We sought to minimise complexity, leverage latest generation technology and minimise business interruptions.”

“Finding the right partners was also a key to making the program work. A key benefit of working with the Vocus team was their willingness to get involved early to understand our environment, manage risk and put the right resources in place to complete the upgrades.” Ian said.

A path to the future

The transformation of Port Authority’s IT infrastructure aims to position the organisation to better meet the demands and challenges faced by the fast-changing Ports and logistics industry by providing flexible and scalable IT infrastructure.

“By engaging the right technology partners, like Vocus, and building trusted partnerships we are on the right path to ensure that we get the support and services the team needs to meet the demands of the business going forward,” said Ian.