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Voyages of Discovery
TESTED IN ANTARCTICA:
Doherty’s remote IT support for the M/V Discovery, an Antarctic cruise ship, saves the owners £100,000 a year.
“Doherty has in effect become Voyages of Discovery’s outsourced IT department for the ship’s computing environment. We developed a partnership based on shared trust. They did everything we asked and more.”
David Yellow, Managing Director, All Leisure (Voyages of Discovery Division)
A cruise ship is a hotel afloat on the high seas. It has passenger cabins and restaurants, bars, fitness rooms, swimming pools, shops, an internet café and night clubs. Passengers need to be checked on and off the ship, cabins cleaned, facilities maintained and repaired.
At the heart of operation lies an extremely reliable, robust and fault-tolerant computer system. It needs to withstand the motion of the waves, cope with the vessel’s electricity generation (less clean than the National Grid) and survive power spikes and surges. Any cables running below the waterline cannot compromise the integrity of waterproof compartments.
Doherty’s relationship with the All Leisure Group dates back to 2000 when the MV Discovery was being refitted as a cruise vessel. The Group were looking for a system that required no specialist on-board IT management. As David Yellow explains, “
Recruiting, managing and maintaining good IT support staff is difficult and expensive even on land, but it is a whole different concept at sea, on a 600 berth cruise ship, sailing to places such as the Antarctic and the Scandinavian Fjords.”
Terry Doherty, CEO of Doherty Associates, visited the ship and created a design for its IT systems that incorporated a remote support capability.
Going the distance
Equipment was ordered and a prototype set up at Doherty’s West London office. This was then transported to the ship in its wet dock in Genoa and staff flew out to install and test it.
Back at Doherty’s helpdesk, on-screen displays were set up to track the status of the ship’s systems. Any changes, such as a PC failure or virus identification, alert Doherty’s engineers immediately. They can then log onto the ship’s systems remotely to fix the problem.
If a particular unit cannot be fixed, the ship’s on board personnel replace it with a spare and connect it to the network with help from Doherty’s support team. Doherty then installs the new unit’s software from the on-board server.
According to David Yellow’s calculations, “
Doherty saves us around $100,000 per year which we would otherwise have to spend on wages, recruitment costs, training, flights, accommodation and catering for on-board IT staff.”
The savings don’t stop there. Thanks to Doherty’s provision of Terminal Services, staff at All Leisure’s HQ do not need to go on board to conduct their work. The company’s accountants, for instance, can connect to the ship to run reports and update ledgers.
As David reports, “
By choosing a remote solution that is robust, resilient and requires no technical manpower on board, we have avoided these costs and, I feel, gained a better level of service and support than we might have managed in-house.”
Tested in Antarctica, available in the UK
Nine years on and several upgrades later, Doherty Associates still support the MV Discovery and since 2007, a second vessel, the M/V Minerva.
Doherty have provided All Leisure Group with an enterprise-standard system for a small to medium business network and budget. The model works – wherever you are. Land-based businesses can have state-of-the-art computing facilities, without the need for highly skilled and expensive in-house IT staff.
In the words of David Yellow: “
The overall benefit is tremendous peace of mind, which leaves us to focus on what we are good at; providing relaxing and friendly cruise holidays for our passengers".