A coalition of Norwegian shipowners and a Maltese mosquito take different tacts to software integration issues.
By Ryan Skinner (email)
In the last part of this series, Wartsila explained how it sought to solve software integration problems by offering an entire portfolio within their own proprietary system. Now we look at two different efforts to set up an open standard.
For Arnesen and Wilhelmsen, there are at least two other viable strategies to creating a shared software framework across the industry. One is a cooperation called "Environment-Friendly Shipowners". The other is called MARSEC-XL. The first is a small coalition of shipowners coordinated by the Norwegian Shipowners' Association to run common projects and share expertise on green shipping. The second is an industry- and EU-backed organization driving open platforms in marine software engineering, where Arnesen has taken an advisory council position.
Environment-Friendly Shipowners includes five major industrial shipowning companies in Norway: Wilh. Wilhelmsen, BW Gas, Hoegh Autoliners, Grieg Shipping and The Torvald Klaveness Group. Together, the group has begun sharing experiences, and has developed a co-operation that includes an effort to drive software development around open protocols. The result they're after? The kind of system interoperability Arnesen felt was lacking in order to create a consolidated picture of a ship's operation.
The structure of Environment-Friendly Shipowners may enable its success. Historically, efforts to build an open software framework or architecture in any industry have stranded when too many players are involved. An open framework competitor to Microsoft called OpenDocs foundered because each of its supplier partners sought to squeeze its aims into the framework. And AUTOSAR's success may be partially attributed to shrugging off government backing, and thus avoiding too many hands in the process.
MARSEC-XL takes another approach entirely. Spinning off some of the same spirit of LINUX's founder Linus Torvalds, they hope to fashion a community of contributors to develop pieces of an open framework around marine systems and software architecture. The beauty of this approach is that it lifts up the entire industry without giving any single company a benefit. An open platform gives marine technology companies and their products a foundation for communication and interoperability, without crimping competition.
Ironically, the beauty of these processes is also their foremost obstacle. It requires a level of trust and an acknowledgement of mutual gain between competitors. "Once you have a success story, then the big players realize that there is a cost in not being involved with this, and they adopt it. But getting to that first success story is the challenge that we're working on now," says MARSEC-XL co-founder and CEO Geir Fagerhus, who saw the same kinds of events unfold in the cellular phone industry two decades ago while working for Ericsson.
The foundation has gained some government seed funding to begin work structuring a project that would result in an open architecture for shipboard systems. An official with the EU's Directorate General for Information Society and Media confirmed that they viewed open platform projects like MARSEC-XL's as crucial for maintaining Europe's competitive advantage in the maritime industry. Support for these kinds of open platforms can be seen explicitly and implicitly in recent EU policy of funding industrial R&D projects.
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