Page 94: of Marine News Magazine (November 2017)

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The Digital Voyage – ‘Onboarding’ Shipping to the Digital Age t Nor-Shipping this year, Akzonobel announced The Digital Revolution De? ned the of? cial launch of its ‘Digital Voyage’ strategy. A useful place to start is to quantify what exactly the

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This program builds on the foundations laid two ‘digital revolution’ is. There are plenty of ways to do this, years ago when the ? rm launched Intertrac Vision, the in- but one of the most telling metrics is the increase in the dustry’s ? rst Big Data tool for predicting coating perfor- amount of data being transferred to and from vessels.

mance. The Digital Voyage outlines the goal of putting a According to COMSYS, the number of active mari- wealth of knowledge in the hands of ship owners and op- time VSAT installations quadrupled from 2008 (6,001) to erators, and helping them make smarter, more economical 2014 (21,922), and it is predicted to exceed 40,000 by and environmentally friendly decisions. 2018. What this means is that the amount of data being

As we embark on this journey, it’s clear that, while the transferred is going to increase rapidly. DNV GL now es- industry recognises the value that digital technology has timates that, in two years, the data capacity of the VSAT to offer, the idea of a digital transformation can be daunt- network has increased from 8.7 Gbps (Gigabits per sec- ing – particularly in an industry with challenging market- ond) to 16.5 Gbps – nearly doubling. If this trend contin- ing conditions, where each operational decision can have ues – and there’s no reason to think it won’t – this capacity potentially serious rami? cations. So, what does the Digital will reach 217 Gbps by 2025. The proliferation of digital

Voyage mean in practice? And how can it help the industry tools in shipping is the result of an increased ability and in the here and now? need to turn this burgeoning mass of data that is being

November 2017

MN 94