Page 24: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (February 2014)

24 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • FEBRUARY 2014

SATELLITE COMMUNICATION

I n the eyes of Ami Daniel and

Matan Peled, co-founders of

Windward Ltd., nearly two-thirds of the world – the oceans – has lit- erally been “the wild west.”

Until now.

In 2010 this pair of naval offi cers founded Windward Ltd., a maritime an- alytics company that brings the power of smart analytics to the oceans. “With the advent of satellite technology, it is now possible to know the whereabouts of vessels globally, but the amount of data is vast and largely meaningless without smart analytics,” said Daniel.

Founded to bring transparency to world fi sheries, specifi cally to tackle the multi-billion-dollar problem of il- legal fi shing around the world, the company has since spread its focus to include the intelligence community, and most recently the offshore oil and gas business, as it quickly realized that the fi sheries market was too limited for a young start up, and more important- ly that very few organizations in this space are interested, or able, to tackle the problem through an investment in technology. The company scored a nice reference last year when it coop- erated with Reuters to provide insights and analysis for the ongoing coverage of the Libyan oil crisis, Daniel said.

Worker protests had halted oil exports from the country, and Windward was able to provide a full arena analysis on all tankers in and around Libya, includ- ing their oil capacities and historical oil trade before the current situation. “From the get go, we understood that the key was in analyzing the vast global movements of vessels and un- derstanding when a specifi c ship – or group of ships – was showing unex- pected ‘behavior,’” Daniel said. When the company realized that the illegal fi shing market was not suffi cient or funded well enough to support the company, it turned its attention to the intelligence community. “We designed our fi rst product to meet the needs of intelligence communities, which have a huge interest in understanding the cross-border movement of ships, and a corresponding willingness to invest in cutting edge technologies,” said Dan- iel. “Obviously, an intelligence agency would want to know when ships are act- ing suspiciously anywhere in the world.

Windward’s technology has been ad- opted by intelligence agencies around the world and widely recognized for its unique operational contribution. Now, we have set sail to engage the oil and gas market, giving this industry the ability to have full visibility across the very complex, cross-border operations of oil and gas companies that provide the world’s energy fl ow.”

Meet Marint

The Windward technology takes the vast amounts of data and distills it into insights and information at a single ship level. Its fi rst product, MarInt, is described by Daniel as the fi rst satel- lite-based maritime analytics system in the world, developed specifi cally with the needs of intelligence communities in mind. While he was, of course, not at liberty to explain the exact methodol- ogy behind the system, he was able to put in perspective the toll and time it takes to launch such an endeavor. “We set out to deeply understand and try to solve burning operational chal- lenges,” said Daniel. “A start up is – has to be – a work of love, as it truly takes over not only your life, but the lives of your family and friends. In the course of these four years, we’ve invested more than 100 man years in developing the smart algorithms that make sense of maritime data. We have fl own hundreds of thousands of miles a year, connect- ing the fi eld insights to our develop- ment teams’ innovation. And we have been fortunate to attract investors with a passion for our technology and a deep commitment to what we are doing.” “What has guided us throughout the development of our technology is mak- ing sure that we don’t solve “theoreti- cal problems” but provide a response to real-world problems that organizations need to solve,” Daniel said. “We made it our mission to deal with the problem of scale: The Windward technology al- lows us to apply expert analytics to all vessel movements worldwide. Wind- ward provides full visibility on ves- sels globally, based on their historical, current and projected behaviors. This full visibility across the seas is unprec- edented.”

The beauty of Windward and its mis- sion, could be, above all else, timing.

While communication capability on land zips along at light speed, infor- mation from, to and about the world’s

You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

Windward Ltd. has taken advances in sat- ellite communications at sea plus the massive amounts of new data available from ships, and created a satellite based maritime analyt- ics system that provides information and insight on unusual vessel move- ments globally. Co- founder and CEO Ami

Daniel explains.

By Greg Trauthwein

Windward provides full visibility on vessels globally, based on their his- torical, current and projected behav- iors. This full visibility across the seas is unprecedented.

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