MV Discovery
Remote Monitoring Via Satellite Link
Discovery Cruises wanted to do without on-board IT management. This would enable additional accommodation for passengers and overcome a recruitment problem as retaining IT expertise on a cruise ship is difficult. There need to be two people for holiday rotation and they have costs for accommodation, safety training, flights to and from the vessel and recruitment. Terry Doherty says, “We really focused on the underlying management structure and ensured the system could be managed from Chiswick.”
E-mail alert sent to the Chiswick office from the Ship’s PABX billing system
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The passenger management system has a broadband 24x7 192Kbps bandwidth Telenor satellite communications link to Doherty Associates’ Chiswick office.
To help cover its cost, Discovery Cruises decided to provide an Internet Café facility on board the vessel. Doherty Associates provided purposebuilt passenger ID and billing software for this. Passengers use their swipe cards on special PC keyboards to identify themselves for billing purposes and browse the world-wide web or check and send e-mail.
Passenger voice phone calls are also sent over this link using voice over IP technology. Doherty Associates provided the interface software to bridge between the existing ship PABX and the new system.
A Winning Blueprint
Doherty Associates won the business in January 2003 partly because of the remote monitoring capability, which the competition did not propose. A detailed system specification was prepared plus a quotation, all the equipment was ordered, and a prototype set up in the Chiswick office. Then the equipment was transported to the ship in its wet dock in Genoa and staff flew out to install it and start testing.
There was a shakedown cruise with 200 travel agents as passengers to give the systems a first operational test followed by an inaugural cruise in May. Everything went well.
Network switch status as on the monitoring console at the Chiswick office
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David Yellow, Managing Director of Discovery Cruises UK Ltd, said, “Recruiting, managing and maintaining an IT support staff on land is one thing but it is a whole different concept at sea, on a 600 berth cruise ship, sailing to places as different as the Antarctic and the Scandinavian Fjords. By choosing a remote solution that was robust and resilient and that required 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.
In effect, Doherty became Discovery Cruise’s outsourced IT department for the ship’s computing environment. We developed a partnership with them based on shared trust. They did everything we asked and more.
And, speaking frankly, Doherty Associates could have thrown a huge amount of technology at the solution but, by understanding our needs and thinking creatively, they have come up with a solution that works soundly at a fraction of the cost of say a full blown clustering system.
Thus, 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.” Terry Doherty said, “It all needed fairly lateral thinking and was a fantastic project for us. ”
"In effect, Doherty became Discovery Cruise’s outsourced IT department for the ship’s computing environment. We developed a partnership with them based on shared trust. They did everything we asked and more. "
David Yellow, Managing Director of Discovery Cruises UK Ltd
Discover The Benefits
Through remote monitoring Discovery Cruises is likely to save around a quarter of a million dollars over three years through not having to recruit, train, accommodate and cater for on-board IT staff. The system also enables it to extend passenger facilities, for example, through the Internet Café, with WiFi hotspots for wireless notebooks a future possibility.
What has been achieved by Doherty Associates is the provision of an enterprise-class system in terms of reliability and redundancy for a smallmedium business-sized network and budget. Land-based businesses can take advantage of the same model to have up to the minute computing facilities without needing highly skilled and expensive IT staff. Tens of thousands of pounds annually could be saved by using this kind of simple, reliable and robust IT infrastructure.