The client provides advisory and expert guidance in assurance and risk management. More than 300 maritime companies leverage the client’s ship management tool to streamline operational, technical, and compliance aspects for more than 7,000 vessels.
The Challenge
The client’s ship management software, built-on legacy technology and hosted in an on-premises
data center, struggled to serve the evolving needs of its maritime clients. The software’s crewing,
ship maintenance, defect reporting, and compliance documentation modules were maintained
by different teams and had different User Interfaces (UI), leading to inconsistent user experiences.
Ship-to-shore communication was hard-drive dependent, creating latency and information gaps that
could increase customers’ operational and compliance risks. Moreover, the on-premises data center
did not support the isolation of tenant data, leading to additional compliance risks. This complicated
architecture made it difficult to roll out updates or new features, and the client could only manage
two releases per year.
The Solution
The client embarked on a journey to modernize its ship management software by migrating it to
Microsoft Azure to address agility, performance, and user experience challenges.
The client commissioned Persistent to help migrate individual modules to the cloud with minimal downtime. Our Azure experts took ownership of the cloud modules and leveraged Azure Data Factory to migrate on premises data to the cloud. While migrating customer data, we ensured it was stored in isolated databases, and we enabled data interoperability between the cloud-hosted servers and the ship’s onboard systems to make information transfers automatic and software-driven.
The cloud version of the application, designed using microservices and a micro-frontend architecture, has not just improved but significantly enhanced user experiences. The client has built a central services hub for shared elements across modules to ensure component reusability. Persistent contributed to this hub with a common business component library for UI and backend services, enhancing the application’s agility, functionality, and consistency.
The Outcome
With a cloud-hosted application, the client can potentially:
- Accelerate release cycles by a factor of six, from bi-yearly to monthly.
- Deliver a consistent and intuitive user experience across modules with a modern UI.
- Enable seamless ship-to-shore communication with automatic transfer of information.
