Technology advancements have accelerated into the maritime ecosystem at breakneck speed over the past ten years fuelled by a glut of new money, eager to enter the maritime sector.

From a time of on-premise solutions that enabled only a select number of users to interact with closed proprietary solutions with defined inputs and outputs, to today, where a plethora of companion applications have come onto the market. They’re designed to provide narrow answers to the big problems operators face, whether improving operational visibility, efficiencies or regulatory compliance.

In truth, the ease in which companies and their developers can create new and exciting platforms creates a world addicted to APIs and operators held captive between multiple vendors. Worst still, the long-term market presence of some of these vendors might not yet be solidified, thereby putting operators in precarious positions.

Andrew Ward, Sales Director, Shipnet

The technology itself is not the issue, it’s the relationships to other business critical solutions that generates ambiguity and frustration in operators keen to have seamless transitions between systems in order to shed light where they didn’t deem there to be a problem.

In an ideal world scenario – a planned maintenance system (PMS) that fed decision making when it came to which equipment to install on new build vessels at the shipyard, would use the data in the crewing, and learning and assessment solution to identify current skill sets with future requirements accurately. In short, the PMS with AI document management interfaces could create training and recruitment content specific to the operators needs for defined future timelines. With data-backed probabilities on failure likelihoods by whom and when and place actual financial numbers to back up vendor selection. Consider this a step further, an operator could quickly start benchmarking vendors, and shipyards based on probable outcomes.

Within this scenario, there are multiple vendors present all at different life cycle points, either mothballing technologies or introducing new ones. The data relationship breaks down quite rapidly, it also means operators are stuck in long-term contracts where they know they are not achieving the insight they hoped for.

Therefore, the future is not about the applications themselves that are mostly all sophisticated in capturing data, it's in the ability to provide agnostic data that is easily transported, interrogated and harmonised outside of their own applications.

Shipnet has developed HELIX for this very purpose. As a full suite of end-to-end shipping operations software, it is arguable that we have access to the widest and deepest data available in the market today. Imagine the ability to use this data in unison with other third party data streams and gain insights way beyond what we ever thought possible.

The old saying of “data is the new oil”, however it's still unrefined and is actually already a thing of the past.