Viasat Commercial: How the digitally mature ship of 2030 will operate

The next phase of digitalisation, according to Ben Palmer, president of Viasat Commercial, will be defined by measurable returns and technology that solves problems rather than creating new ones.

Ben Palmer is unusually candid about what Inmarsat got wrong as maritime digitalisation accelerated over the past five years.

The mistake, says the president of Viasat Commercial, was underestimating just how quickly shipowners’ expectations would move beyond discussions about satellite coverage, bandwidth and individual networks.

“I think we, along with much of the industry, underestimated the speed at which expectations would change,” Palmer tells Maritime CEO.

Inmarsat spent years talking about coverage, capacity and satellite technologies. All remain important, he stresses, but increasingly they are not conversations customers particularly want to have.

“They want their vessels connected. They want applications to work. They want their crews to have a good experience. And they want somebody to take responsibility when things do not work as expected.”

LEO connectivity helped change the benchmark.

“LEO played an important role in resetting what people believed was possible at sea,” Palmer says. Crew expectations shifted quickly, cloud adoption accelerated and the comparison increasingly stopped being with what ships could do five years earlier and became what people already experienced ashore.

“The lesson for us was that the customer should not have to care which network is delivering the experience. That is our problem to solve, not theirs,” he says.

That philosophy underpins NexusWave, Viasat’s managed multi-network maritime connectivity service, and Palmer sees it as part of a wider shift in what shipping should expect from its technology suppliers.

Multi-orbit connectivity has become one of shipping technology’s dominant themes, but Palmer cautions against assuming that simply bolting more networks onto a ship automatically creates resilience.

“Redundancy only has value if it translates into continuity,” he says.

A vessel with multiple satellite connections may appear more resilient, but if crews or shore teams are still required to switch manually between contracts, networks and hardware, owners may simply be replacing one vulnerability with another layer of complexity.

“The real question should be: if one part of my connectivity environment is degraded or unavailable, do my critical applications and my crew continue operating without having to think about it?”

For Palmer, that means the underlying technology should increasingly disappear from view.

“Multi-orbit or multi-network connectivity should ultimately make life simpler for the shipowner, not more complicated,” he says.

Connectivity itself is becoming part of the vessel’s operating infrastructure. Modern ships rely on it for navigation support, cyber security, maintenance, regulatory compliance, operational decision-making and crew welfare.

“I would not suggest propulsion, navigation and connectivity carry identical consequences if they fail,” Palmer says, “but the direction of travel is very clear.”

As vessels become more digital, secure connectivity becomes fundamental to more of what happens onboard.

“And that importance will only increase over the lifetime of ships entering the fleet today,” Palmer explains.

The rapid expansion of maritime technology also raises a more strategic question: who actually controls the digital architecture of the vessel?

Palmer’s answer is the shipowner. That does not mean owners need in-house expertise covering every satellite constellation, OEM, cloud application and onboard system.

“But there is an important distinction between outsourcing complexity and outsourcing control,” he says.

Owners need to understand where their data resides, who can access it, how systems interact, what happens when connectivity fails and how easily new technologies can be added later.

They should also be wary of architectures that effectively lock a vessel into a particular technology supplier for the remainder of its life.

“The strongest model,” Palmer says, “is an ecosystem where the owner defines the operating requirements and trusted partners make the technology work together.”

Increasingly, Palmer argues, the role of the connectivity provider is therefore expanding beyond simply delivering bandwidth.

That evolution also changes how technology investment should be justified.

Palmer argues that selling connectivity on price per vessel misses the point.

“A CFO is not really interested in buying more bandwidth,” he says. “They are interested in whether the business is becoming more efficient, more resilient and less exposed to avoidable cost.”

The metrics should therefore be operational: downtime avoided, technical problems solved remotely, travel eliminated, fuel performance improved, applications deployed faster and seafarers retained. There is also a multiplier effect.

Owners are spending heavily on analytics, cloud platforms, automation and digital tools. Weak connectivity underneath those investments potentially limits the return from all of them.

Palmer puts the argument like this: “The question for the CFO should not be, ‘What does connectivity cost me?’ It should be, ‘What value am I unable to unlock without it?’”

That same discipline needs to be applied to the technology itself. Palmer is reluctant to nominate one fashionable technology that shipping will later regret buying. His concern is broader.

“What I do think the industry will become much less tolerant of is technology for technology’s sake,” he reckons.

AI is an obvious example. Palmer expects it to have a profound impact on shipping, but warns against adding AI simply because customers expect to see the letters somewhere in the product description.

“The value will come from solving specific operational problems, improving decisions and reducing workload,” he says, “not from adding AI labels to existing products.”

Nor should every new capability create another dashboard or another job for already stretched crews.

“If a technology makes the vessel more complicated without making the operation materially better, it probably has a short shelf life,” he says. 

By the end of the decade, Palmer expects the most advanced ships to be distinguished less by the amount of technology visible onboard than by the intelligence operating quietly behind it.

Today, connectivity largely allows information to move between ship and shore. By 2030, the relationship between vessel, fleet and wider organisation should become far more continuous.

Maintenance becomes predictive rather than reactive. Shore teams gain richer situational awareness. Routes, fuel consumption and operational decisions are continuously optimised using vessel and external data. Cyber security becomes more dynamic as the number of connected systems grows. The onboard experience should change just as dramatically.

“Seafarers should not have to understand which satellite or network they are using,” Palmer says. “Applications should simply work, whether they are operational systems or a video call home.”

The irony is that the increasingly sophisticated ship may ultimately feel less complicated to the people operating it hopefully.

“In some respects, the most digitally mature vessel of 2030 will actually feel less technologically complicated to the people onboard,” Palmer says. “The complexity will increasingly sit behind the experience.”

That is also the lasting lesson Palmer takes from the past five years. Technology providers will not always predict correctly how fast their markets will change. What matters is recognising when customers have moved on.

“In technology, being right about the direction of travel is less important than being willing to change course when the industry moves faster than you expected,” Palmer concludes.

source : splash247