Big suppliers like Wartsila offer to integrate the whole ship within their proprietary systems. A good thing?
By Ryan Skinner (email)
In the first parts of the series, we looked at industry-wide struggles to integrate software and components, then how the automotive industry tackled similar problems. There, big carmakers drove change; in shipping, the only consolidated parties are suppliers. Are they driving change? Is it even in their interest?
The response of one big supplier - Wartsila - takes a page from Apple's playbook: Integrate, but within your own platform (the "walled garden" approach).
Wartsila VP Magnus Miemois describes how Wartsila acquired three ship design companies so that it could provide what he described as "energy management systems". They choose to answer some of the common framework questions by putting everything in their own framework. The company's turned the thinking into a product, called Wartsila 3C, launched at this year's SMM as "...the first system to integrate the entire vessel's control into one solution."
"We focus on providing the best ship end-to-end. If it's a Wartsila component that fits the need, that's what we use. If it's a competitor, we'll use that too. But like all of the big suppliers, our automation systems are proprietary. We do some plug and play, yes, but today still only within the domain of our portfolio," said Miemois.
Some shipowners are clearly leaping at the offer for more well-integrated ships. Wartsila's sold integrated design and propulsion systems to shipowners in Norway, China, India, Germany, Brazil and the UK. These companies have effectively staked their futures to Wartsila's long-term competitiveness and viability.
The drawback to creating a common framework by choosing one supplier may be a lack of flexibility down the line. What if you need to add a component that doesn't talk to the systems from your main supplier? What if the main supplier goes belly-up, or it changes its systems, which requires owners to make expensive upgrades? What are the industry's alternatives to a ship-wide software framework determined from supplier to supplier?
If the AUTOSAR model won't work because shipowners are too many and too uncoordinated, perhaps there's another model for collaboration. In the process automation industry, there was a new angle taken to the AUTOSAR case. While AUTOSAR was driven by a few big buyers (carmakers), the process industry saw two-dozen suppliers work together with Microsoft to develop an open standard, called OPC, to allow interoperability of components. Why can't a number of marine suppliers work together on a marine OPC?
"We'd be interested in a development along those lines, but it hasn't happened yet," says Miemois, who has some familiarity with the OPC case. "Some might argue that we could lead such a process. For the time being, though, the industry's too disorganized. In this environment, our value lies in being able to deliver systems that are reliable, within a reasonable budget and with high quality. To do that, we need to maintain a certain degree of control."
In the next installment, we see how Wilhelmsen has eschewed this kind of approach, and chosen two other, slightly different paths, to the goal of a more integrated ship.
