How does SkyLight represent an innovation in terms of the business model?
Jan Wilhelmsson: We are shifting from selling installations to offering analytics and optimisation sold fully as a monthly service. The industry formerly consisted of ship owners who owned and operated their vessels, whereas today, the vast majority of vessels are not owned and technically managed by the same entity that commercially operates them. So, what we’re doing here is adjusting to the market rather than attempting to change it.
This necessitates considering all the value chains separately. Ship management is now separate from commercial operations, for example. This has happened across a number of industries, but since it has now occurred to such a large extent in shipping, we need to rethink our role as a market service provider, rather than a product vendor. Of course, this is not news at Wärtsilä. In that sense, Eniram’s way of thinking fits quite nicely into the bigger picture.
What does Eniram as an existing organisation bring to Wärtsilä?
Jan Wilhelmsson: Eniram is a company of digital natives. The founders are all highly educated in mathematics, statistics and IT-related fields. Add a few of us complementing this with shipping backgrounds (in fact, I’m one of the few people in the company who can’t code), and we are now able to support the industry’s move to digitalisation with tangible value propositions. So it’s very much an IT and tech-oriented company which has, over the years, also accumulated a great deal of knowledge about shipping.
The core value of the company is in its know-how and the solutions it has developed. Speaking from my own point of view, what I’m seeing now is an opportunity to get those solutions to the market much faster, thanks to the direct customer access that Wärtsilä can provide.
Secondly, we have a further opportunity in the enriched potential for development, which up to the moment of the acquisition was self-financed. This was a great way to do things but it also had some limitations. Now we have a parent company with a great deal more resources. We are yet to determine the ways that these might be employed, and in one sense of course, SkyLight as it currently exists is just the first step. But it’s easy to point out that you can accomplish much more being part of a strong global organisation.