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TECHNOLOGY “We saw an opportunity in this market and built this application for termi- nal operators. Our ? rst customer came in October 2015 in Port Au Prince,

Haiti, with a terminal operator named IMT. They do about 65,000 TEU’s and it was quite a success story. We improved their productivity by about 50 percent. It was such a success that the other two operators at the port – there are three – decided to use Octopi.” – Luc Castera, co-founder of Octopi did not seem to be interested in our business. The implementa- for implementation, time spent understanding your operation tion time was too long and customization to take into account and requirements and a short training window to bring work- some particulars of our market were very costly.” ers up to speed. “When I say training,” adds Castera quickly,

Baussan touted the cloud-based nature of the Octopi sys- “it takes just 30 minutes to one hour to train one employee. tem. “There was no need to install and maintain costly servers After that we simply charge a license fee that covers all host- in Haiti. This is being managed by the Octopi team and al- ing and maintenance. That’s a yearly fee, based on the size lows us to concentrate on our core business.” Once installed, of your port.”

Octopi moved his terminal from a ‘Pen and Paper’ operation Beyond their unique pricing model, Octopi also allows to a paperless one, improved data accuracy and transparency customers to have as many users as they want. This includes with EDI, provided remote live dashboards and created a user- allowing the terminals to give access to different traders in friendly truck appointment module. As a result, he said, truck the supply chain. Castera explains the practice, saying, “The turnaround time inside the yard improved. beauty of that is that you can access it from anywhere – you

That cloud based solution helps in other ways, as well. don’t have to be physically located at the port itself. The ship-

When hurricane Matthew blew through Haiti in October, Oc- ping line in Egypt, for example, could be given access so that topi never missed a beat on the tiny island. “That showed the they have more data transparency. And, we are ? nding that power of the cloud. The IT team in Port Au Prince went to consignees get tons of value from those privileges. But, we bed and had a good, sound sleep because they didn’t have to don’t charge for that extra seat. We’ve talked to terminals who, worry about their servers,” said Castera, adding, “Actually, given that option, would charge others for that access, but no, at 7 AM of the next day after of hurricane, we started seeing we don’t intend to do that. It is possible that our customers movement at the terminal. We had 100 percent up time – the system never went down.”

Separately, says Castera, the security of the cloud manifests itself in other important ways, as well. The all-important topic of cyber security begins, insists Octopi’s founders, with physi- cal security. Castera told MLP, “Physical security involves our cloud based servers being located in what we call bunkers.

You have to go through a lot of security check points just to get in. So, physical access to these servers is extremely dif- ? cult. And, this involves back-up generators and other safe- guards built into that bunker.” The alternative, he says, is to have a server located at the port. “We have seen more than one terminal where these servers were not considered high secu- rity locations. I could have walked right in, stuck a USB stick into the server and gained access.”

Pricing

In a market so opaque that it is dif? cult to ? nd comparative pricing information, what a terminal might pay for a TOS solution can vary greatly from project to project. Castera has a different plan. “From our side, we’re trying to keep the pricing simple. We have a onetime upfront cost which pays 60 Maritime Logistics Professional 4Q 2016| | 50-63 Q4 MP2016.indd 60 11/9/2016 11:39:43 AM