Smart ships are no longer a fantasy of the future but are the reality of our industry, says Vinay Gupta, Managing Director, Union Marine Management.
He made these remarks whilst opening Fathom Maritime Intelligence’s Smart Operations Conference being held in Singapore last week.
Gupta knows what he is talking about. He started Union Marine Management Services just four years ago and already had nearly 30 vessels under management.
The rapid expansion has been enabled by a simple, clear vision to operate clean, safe and happy ships, he reflected.
A minimum requirement of the vessels that Union Marine operate is that they have an open, unlimited internet connection seeing this as an absolute requirement to meet this vision.
At the same time however Gupta recognises this is not the standard across the whole industry acknowledging that there are indeed still vessels operating without any internet.
He says with the shipping industry has been far slower to respond to developments in IT and digital technologies than land based industries.
However, Gupta believes that we need to prepare ourselves for ‘the whole package’ as digitalisation will be the industry reality.
There will be measures including cyber security that need to be taken to prepare for this future, however it will be the future.
As Gupta so eloquently puts it: “if every cloud has a silver lining, then the silver lining in the digitalisation of shipping is that we will have a far better industry once we embrace this reality fully”.
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