Satellite Communications
Ben Palmer, President, Inmarsat Maritime
One-on-One: Ben Palmer, President, Inmarsat Maritime
Last month at SMM in Hamburg, we sat down with Inmarsat Maritime President Ben Palmer for an open discussion on all matters maritime communications. The pace and scope of technology evolution is particularly pronounced in the satcom sector, with a plethora of new competitors entering the scene with broad proclamations of connectivity and price. But as Palmer points out, the legacy companies such as Inmarsat, now owned by Viasat, boast not only a long and pioneering history, but a promising future, too, as ships at sea become increasingly connected in the name of crew welfare, business efficiency and machinery health.
By Greg Trauthwein
Ben, to start, let’s talk competition, as there are multiple new players coming into the market, there are multiple legacy players such as Inmarst. When you look at the competitive landscape on maritime satcom today, what do you see?
Well, you've framed it spot on. One of the things that's really exciting about this marketplace is it's growing. It's growing because people are recognizing the value that they can extract from greater connectivity, greater exploitation of data. They're responding to increased demand from crew. It's a growth market, and attractive, scalable growth markets tend to attract investors. As I’ve said in the past, I've worked in sectors of the economy that are not growing and I know which one I like more.
But with that opportunity comes the added challenge of competition. And you're right, we've seen a lot of innovation, a lot of new investment, and a lot of new offerings coming into the marketplace over the last few years.
We've got a fantastic reputation and relationships with some key players in what is a highly relational maritime market. We really understand the maritime customers' need, we've got good insight into the sorts of opportunities and challenges that our customers face … we're close to those customers.
We also have a strong reputation and brand for delivering mission-critical solutions which goes back 40 years. Our roots are embedded in safety, resilience and reliability, on being ‘always on.’ And our roots, too, are in having operated in other mission-critical environments like defense and national security. So we are innovating, we are changing, it's an environment that's changing and we're up for the challenge.
We've been talking about this evolution as the ‘ship as an extension of your office’ for many years. Where are we in that evolution?
What's come quicker has been the evolution of the ship as a home, and that's driven exponential growth in terms of the crew welfare, crew entertainment, the crew retention piece. I think the industry is on the cusp of starting to take seriously the opportunities that come from exploiting data, exploiting connectivity in a much more structured office-like way. And certainly ship-to-shore communications, bridge-to-boardroom, reliable communications, the ability to share data. And increasingly over time, the ability to off-board data and place it in the cloud with all that that means in terms of reliability, resilience, speed, capacity of your comms network.
As consumers, back in the day when the dial-up modem was crunching away, we didn't watch television on our mobile phones. We didn't do our banking on our mobile phones. We didn't consult our doctor on our mobile phones. But as technology has improved and moved forward, we've opened up new use cases that we take for granted now in our domestic lives as consumers. I think the maritime enterprise, is starting to catch up with what we now take for granted in terms of our office enterprise.
So we are seeing increased focus and demand there, just as we are seeing increased interest in that third area. I think about ships as homes, ships as offices, and then it's not quite right to say ships as factories, but ships as massive machinery. It's very sophisticated, increasingly digitalized machinery. And we're starting to see the opportunities that come from greater digitalization, greater remote operation, greater preventative and predictive maintenance, and all of that in even one day greater, dare one say it, autonomy. All of that is going to drive and fuel strong demand-side growth.
Now, we just talked about a lot of the promise. The peril side of that is cybersecurity. When talk turns to cybersecurity, what is Inmarsat's part of that conversation?
Our customers, a bit like us as human beings, want to know that we operating, communicating, exchanging information in a secure, reliable manner. And ship operators, owners, shipping companies are no less vulnerable to harm in the cyber domain, in the information domain, as the rest of us or indeed any other businesses. I think Inmarsat's in a pretty strong position. One is we've always been about the assurance of mission-critical operations, by extension right back into the safety domain. It really helps that we do an awful lot of work in the government and national security defense worlds where this isn't an afterthought, something that people are catching up to. It's been something that people have been very aware of for a long time. And so as an enterprise provider at scale to US government, British government, other governments around the world, we are bringing hardened defense industry, national security levels of expertise, security around the network to bear as part of our offerings into the commercial world in a way that not all of the players out there can say or have grown up or have brought into their DNA.
Let’s talk about NexusWave, your new fully managed connectivity service. What is it, exactly, and what makes it unique?
What’s really exciting about NexusWave is that combination of bringing together multi-layered networks in a fully managed service, in a very convenient package for our customers; a one-stop-shop approach. It obviates the need to have multiple suppliers and multiple bills and multiple people to ask when you need help. What's really attractive to it from a technology perspective is that there are other products in the market which are essentially switching between different underlays to provide you with the best service.
What we've wanted to build is something that layers capability and capacity on top of each other so that everything's on and you're expanding the capacity that's available not to be the sum of the single best part, but actually to be the sum of the total that's available through the various networks and underlays that are in play. And we're also thinking hard about how do we manage the utilization of those most efficiently so that the data that really needs to get there fast, or where there's a high latency requirement, is channeled in one direction. Other data, the other use cases, things which are really mission-critical for the business versus perhaps less critical, true versus the operational stuff that you're talking about, in a much more managed software defined package. The beauty of that is it expands the capacity to be the sum of the parts as opposed to be the best available.
And it will also provide us, as demand expands in the way that we've been talking about, with the opportunity to bring new capacity and new layers seamlessly into play so that we can continue to grow the pipe as the customer demand needs it. One of the things that we are really excited about is when the ViaSat-3 constellation starts to come online next year, that we'll be able to pull that capacity, that very game-changing geo software-defined massive capacity network into play as well, and bolster what we are creating with the GEO, LEO, L-band, and LTE combination that we'll start with.
