Navarone is an Athens based ship owner/manager and operator with a fleet of 27 bulk carriers. In this interview, their IT manager, Mr Kostas Sakellakos describes how they use the power of Fleet Xpress from Navarino to drive the ongoing digitalisation of their fleet.
‘At Navarone, past collaborations with connectivity providers were severely impacted by supply chain disruptions, therefore we were seeking a strong, stable partner on whom we could rely on for our next 5 year connectivity plan. We are happy to say that the partner we chose for that stability is Navarino, who provide us with FX on the 2MB Entry plan and Infinity. Besides stability, one of the main reasons we chose Navarino was that we felt that they were one of the first companies who foresaw the way technology would become ever more important to maritime, and the huge increase in demand for software on ships, as vessels become more and more like an extension of our offices.
Navarino also is a well-organized company, where each department is focused on what they need to do, and furthermore we are very happy with their support, while the whole team is eager to intervene to help resolve issues whenever needed.
Navarino’s Infinity Plus solution is installed on all our ships and we use mainly its connectivity functionalities, while added services on virtualization, security, crew welfare, asset management etc are currently evaluated, partly deployed or kept as backup.
With this range of services, we have the peace of mind of being able to transition them between partners – platforms and be resilient against the most disrupting supply chain – vendor attacks/issues.
Crew welfare is something we take very seriously, and we want to support our colleagues on board while they are at sea away from their families as much as we can, so having reliable connectivity is extremely important. We offer our all our seafarers 4 GB of usage a month for free and we are considering upgrading the FX plan to ensure that there is enough bandwidth to allow business operations to continue unaffected by crew use. Infinity’s Quality of Service feature does help a lot in this regard too, as it stops crew traffic from becoming too heavy.
Another Navarino solution we are looking at is Spectrum, which is a very well-designed product with lots of functionality to really drill down and see the complete picture of all the onboard IT infrastructure. If the IMO requirements on asset management reporting increase, we shall definitely be considering Spectrum for the whole fleet.
We were also pleased to hear about Navarino becoming a Starlink reseller – this is a potentially very interesting new connectivity option. If its deployment plan is kept we forsee that vessels will be just office nodes much sooner than expected with FX’. We plan to combine this with our current service for complete coverage and failover.
Ioannis Brougiannakis, the Navarino Account Manager for Navarone added ‘Vessels today are becoming an extension of their shore offices – real-time data exchange is widespread and a ships’ operational efficiency depends on the continuous monitoring of the vessel. What’s more, given the current market conditions and the geopolitical challenges worldwide crew welfare is extremely important. We are very happy to successfully offer our solutions to these maritime needs to Kostas IT team and to Navarone’s fleet and we look forward to an ever closer partnership in the coming years.
