Many maritime companies have invested heavily in building their own internal software. It often starts with a good idea: “Our business is unique, so we should build it ourselves.”
In PwC's report, “Bridging Strategy and Execution – Unlocking Real Digital Transformation in Maritime”, several consulting companies warn that maritime organizations are investing millions in digital systems that end up being barely used. The report cites poor integration, outdated processes, lack of coordination, and resistance to change as reasons why digital initiatives fall short.
You don't just build it once. You have to maintain it, improve it, integrate new data sources, manage infrastructure and security, fix bugs, support users, keep up with changing technology, and continuously invest to prevent it from becoming outdated.
Meanwhile, your employees may still rely on spreadsheets, email, separate AIS systems, and other external tools because the internal solution doesn't give them everything they need.
Companies and project managers underestimate the costs and time involved in gathering feedback from users, organizing and evaluating the feedback, communicating and managing projects with many different stakeholders, bug fixing, testing etc.
The cost of developers, product management, infrastructure, data licenses, integrations, and ongoing maintenance quickly add up.
Internal systems also tend to become driven by specifications and internal priorities rather than continuous feedback from a broad community of daily maritime users, because it is quite exhausting and complex to bring many different types of stakeholders together and unite on a roadmap and execution.
But perhaps the worst is that your best people complain, find their own private workarounds and ergo become disloyal to the internal software.
The world around us is changing faster than ever. Technology is evolving rapidly, AI is transforming how people work, new data sources are becoming available, regulations are changing, and geopolitical events can quickly reshape maritime markets and workflows.
Tech components are frequently updated. User expectations change. AI models change. Maritime data providers change. What seemed modern a few years ago can quickly become legacy outdated software.
Unless developing software is your core business, you might also need to hire expensive external contractors to develop and maintain the software.
Contractors are not paid to be innovative. They charge per hour for a spec you require, so tech innovation becomes your responsibility. Are you sure you have the expertise and talent you need to drive such innovation internally?
When you build and maintain your own software, keeping up with the tech innovation becomes your internal responsibility.
Working in shipping means operating in a world that rarely stands still.
Vessels move. Positions change. Cargo opportunities appear and disappear. Port conditions change. Bunker prices move. Weather changes. Regulations evolve. Customers call. Competitors act.
That creates two challenges: risk and attention, and in shipping, attention has commercial value.
You need the capacity to:
So unless developing software is your core business, developing internal software is probably not where your best people create the greatest competitive advantage.
Instead of allocating resources to software development, maintenance and fragmented systems, your organization can focus on what actually differentiates you:
Your customers. Your people. Your maritime expertise. Your business.
ShipIntel is an interesting alternative to the traditional approach of buying several separate maritime software solutions or developing internal software. Its main proposition is not just vessel tracking or maritime analytics, but combining maritime intelligence, everyday workflows, team collaboration, and private company data in one environment.
ShipIntel by Maritime Optima helps our company to reduce the costs and time associated with developing and maintaining software. ShipIntel is a SaaS software continuously developed and maintained by Maritime Optima without putting the invoice on our desk.
ShipIntel gives our employees the possibility to contribute to developing a software helping us to develop a better tool for doing more business which our employees want to use, without us carrying the costs and risk for developing and maintaining it. All product development and improvements are included in the annual fee per seat we pay to Maritime Optima.
With an almost a 24/7 support channel with a human in loop, Maritime Optima always want to help our employees with answers and guide them when they need help. Instead of sending support tickets that might be answered within the next month, Maritime Optima send their answers almost immediately.
ShipIntel helps us tap into a solid high-quality maritime data fundament and become ready for the potential value that AI can unlock for us. For many years, Maritime Optima have collected, and keep on collecting, live raw AIS data from satellites, terrestrial and dynamic AIS sources along with other publicly available maritime data. They have also used these datasets for training their text parsing models. Since Maritime Optima clean, unify, and process all these data sources in-house and have trained AI models to understand what shipping is all about and specific niches of the shipping industry, we also learn how to work with AI models and our private unstructured data.
Maritime Optima have built a very advanced maritime sea routing engine, with vessel-specific routing intelligence, and constraint-based optimization. Which they also expose in a separate API.
By bringing data, workflows, collaboration, and AI readiness into a single platform, ShipIntel helps us to learn and explore new tech, reduce costs, be innovative and work smarter. We also feel that ShipIntel, together with the people working at Maritime Optima, helps us to unlock new opportunities for growth.
