Looking ahead to the tech trends of 2022
How can shipowners and operators extract more value from the data their vessels produce to achieve greater fuel efficiency and simplified compliance?
18.01.2022 – As 2022 gets underway, Tore Morten Olsen, President, Maritime, Marlink, joined other industry leaders talking to Splash247 about the technology trends to watch out for as more owners upgrade their communication services and solutions to achieve the benefits of digitalisation and meet the challenge of decarbonisation.
To judge by the majority of comments, owners and vendors are aligned on the challenges, the opportunities and the tools the industry will need.
Max Wong, head of IT at Eastern Pacific Shipping, told Splash that technology in shipping could potentially create a new business model.
In our minds, the two biggest opportunities that shipping companies have are decarbonisation and the enabling capabilities of technology. These are levers that give the opportunity to differentiate and create new value.
With high bandwidth connectivity increasingly in place for maritime, the trend in 2022 will be to extract greater value from vessel performance data. Marlink is already working with some of the world’s largest shipping companies to identify the most relevant Key Performance Indicators for safety, efficiency and environmental protection and compliance and put the data in their hands.
Rajesh Unni, founder of shipmanager Synergy Marine Group, said that the ‘buzz’ of digital must translate into increased productivity and potential savings. Unni is hoping that this year will see a real breakthrough in artificial intelligence adoption, something he feels is long overdue.
Clearly shipowners see the need for digital transformation, but what they are grappling with today is to find practical ways to transform the business and operating models.
The transformation needs to have technology, people and process, and aligning these three to make shipping more sustainable, decarbonise and improve the efficiency, are the key.
The shipping industry is still in the early days of leveraging data to improve operational efficiency but Olsen is confident Marlink can help add further value for operators who want a simplified method of extracting KPIs from the oceans of available information.
There are clearly advantages for early adopters where they can maximise scale, but this kind of information is also important for owners of older tonnage or mixed fleets. These operators need a simple way to gather data with minimal investment and receive results that can be quickly used to drive smarter, safer and greener operations.
And there will be new services to look out for too. James Collett, managing director of navigation service provider Sperry Marine said shipping should be aware of the importance this year of new Low Earth Orbit satellite networks reaching an initial operating capability disrupting the VSAT space with OneWeb likely to be the first of these to provide a service to maritime users.
To find out more about how Marlink is helping vessel owners leverage its hybrid network to achieve smarter, leaner, greener operations, click here.