The oceans are in the cloud

Riveting hydrographic innovations set the pace for change elsewhere

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Read this, from Peio Elissalde of the little French geo-informatics outfit Marine GeoGarage: "[We're ushering in] a new era of nautical mapping services with the launch of a marine charts portal built on cloud computing technology."

It's probably the first time I've seen the "cloud computing" buzzword in the marine world. What is cloud computing? Basically, you plug into the information and services you want wherever you have Internet access. All those things that you used to find on your hard drive or your company's proprietary servers? Now they're in the cloud - huge server clusters run by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google or IBM.

The crazy idea Marine GeoGarage had was to give marine chart users an online account, from which they can access the latest updated charts from a number of international hydrographic services. The way Marine GeoGarage builds the chart views for users, and how users interact with them, uses cloud computing technology.

Elissalde put it best: "You don't own charts anymore, just use them and share them anytime, anywhere you are via computer, mobile phone or any other Internet device." Google Maps for mariners, in other words.

Meanwhile, another guy named Tim Thornton of TeamSurv has a complementary idea. They want to crowdsource hydrographic data. How? If you put some sensors on any commercial ship or leisure craft to record depth and such, and gather this data based on its location, you have the foundation for making and updating marine charts. Imagine a hydrographic service with thousands of ships creating a firehose of new data, instead of a couple ships with multi-beam echo sounders mowing the proverbial oceanic lawn.

It's not too great a stretch to imagine TeamSurv feeding hydrographic data into the cloud, with hydrographic offices providing norms and quality certification, so suppliers like Marine GeoGarage can package value-added services. Yes, both companies are initially focusing on the light marine market; that's where much of our innovation comes from. In fact, there's every reason to believe the above model resembles the future. Some chart suppliers are preparing themselves for a future a lot like this.

What can the rest of the industry learn from this example? Anyone who can scale services worldwide around a core pool of data or functions, and fashion it into a subscription model service, for example, would be wise to explore a cloud model. Brokers, box-ship operators, even component suppliers, could exploit this. What if you could log in to your vessel from any Internet connection and pull down real-time operating data, with comparisons to similar plants?

The core idea is turning what used to be assets that you had to own and maintain into services you basically rent. Software's an obvious candidate. Hardware and infrastructure will follow. For one client, we held a workshop positing "Propulsion as a Service". Cloud propulsion may be a bridge too far, but it gets minds racing.