Wärtsilä Voyage, a marine IoT solutions provider announced to have entered into a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Now, through an integration with Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, the company plans to accelerate its efforts towards industrialising IoT for shipping through a highly scalable cyber-secure platform. The Wärtsilä platform is said to help the company and its partners deploy digital solutions to the market faster and more easily.
“The maritime world is entering the digital era where mutualising our investments into common platforms and standards are a prerequisite to successful innovations for a more sustainable and efficient maritime industry,” said Sean Fernback, President, Wärtsilä Voyage and Executive Vice President, Wärtsilä.
“The Wärtsilä common platform will act as an enabler to deploy future technology for autonomy and emissions reduction. We want to focus our efforts on those fields with commonly shared standards that give vessels easier access to innovative solutions,” added Fernback.
Wärtsilä Voyage will also focus on strategic themes spanning industrial remote operation capabilities, state-of-the-art cybersecurity with active monitoring, runtime, and commonly shared data standards to ease collaboration between maritime stakeholders.
“The same way smartphone and some automobile manufacturers are able to update, deploy new features, and improve their systems remotely, the new generation of digital ships needs to constantly adapt, update to keep up with their evolving ecosystems while staying cyber secure at all times,” said Pierre Guillemin, vp, technology, Wärtsilä Voyage.
Through its secured-by-design remote operation capabilities, the Wärtsilä platform will enable immediate access to the latest solutions onboard. Asset commissioning, diagnostic, updates, and upgrades will be performed remotely — streamlining maintenance, speeding up deployment, and increasing vessel uptime.
Wärtsilä Voyage will also integrate several Microsoft Security and IoT solutions to strengthen the platform with monitoring, security updates and asset management services.
With this, the company is said to focus on accelerating its efforts towards building an open development environment with standardised data formats and APIs that reduce fragmentation, integrate systems to reduce the complexity of digital services lifecycle, and have multi-layered cybersecurity built into every smart ship and maritime ecosystem solution.
According to the partners, the collaboration will further help unlock autonomous capabilities.
