Israel-based XT Management operates a fleet of vessels, consisting mostly of container ships. With expansion plans, the company is the latest to partner with Navarino in order to enhance its vessels’ connectivity solutions. In this article, Avi Lavi, XT’s CIO, discusses the factors that resulted in selecting Navarino as technology partner.
‘Previously, our fleet was equipped with Inmarsat Fleet Broadband’ he says. ‘We started looking for new solutions due to a variety of reasons. Firstly, our crews’ welfare is one of our top priorities and so we wanted to be able to offer them a more capable solution with higher speeds than Fleet Broadband.
We also wanted to implement a new ERP system, which necessitated quite a high amount of data transfer and data creation. Finally, we wanted to have the option to remotely install new software on board and to remotely provide effective support.
To achieve this, we had developed a clear picture of what we would need – in short, we wanted to replicate nothing less than a shore office IT environment onboard our fleet.
Navarino had exactly the solution we were looking for. The combination of higher bandwidth over Fleet Xpress with the full redundancy of Infinity Cube really was everything we had been looking for years and comprised exactly what we needed to achieve all our objectives, with nothing missing.
Following an initial meeting with Navarino at our Headquarters, we immediately decided to go for a trial of their solutions, which went really well, and we are currently in the process of installing FX with Infinity on a few more vessels. We are now able to do so much more for our vessels from our office, whether it’s creating a new server, adjusting firewall settings or a variety of other extremely useful actions remotely. In the near future, we intend to rollout the same installation across the fleet.
I believe that most modern shipping companies have the same connectivity and technology requirements these days – if a vessel is without communications for even short time, it can be a big problem. This is why we chose Navarino – they provide very robust solutions, the speed of our connections is vastly improved, and equally importantly, their support is very fast, professional and effective. When searching for providers who could meet our needs, I looked at several other companies, but I did not find any other provider who could deliver all the things we required under one roof.’
Ivo Terhell, Navarino’s VP Sales Europe & Americas added ‘It is an enormous privilege to work with a company like XT Management and we are very proud that they have selected Navarino as their technology partner. I am very pleased that we were able to deliver the enhancements that they were looking for so comprehensively and I look forwards to a long-standing cooperation with Avi and his team.’