Paul Sells, President & CEO, ABS Wavesight

GT: As the saying goes, time flies when you're having fun. To kick us off, can you please give us a recap of ABS Wavesight as it celebrates its first anniversary?

PS: Yeah, absolutely. We're coming up on one yearvsince we launched ABS Wayside at last year's work boat event in New Orleans. It's been quite a year. It has flown, as you said. We had three big things that we wanted to get done this year, and I'll talk about it that way. We wanted to grow the company, we wanted to really focus on and delight our customers, and we wanted to become a world-class product company in the maritime space.

Those have been our three guiding lights for the year, and I'm happy to report that we're making amazing progress on all of those. We've certainly grown the company: we're over 300 people; we've grown it by over 100%. We've got a lot of work that we want to get done, a lot of value we want to add to our products. Not just what's currently in the pipe now, although that's getting a lot of love and attention for current customers, but also where we want to go in the future.

We've had over 20 new clients join us this year as we go on this journey together. We've obtained a significant number of necessary certifications. We've been working on strengthening and make sure we have a hard platform that's safe, secure, reliable. We've obtained a lot of security certifications. As we've spoken about before, cybersecurity, it's a responsibility that our customers place on us as well. We take it very seriously.

We have been adding things to the product as well. So, if we think about delighting our customers, that's been our second objective this year. We've made significant enhancements to our flagship product, Nautical Systems. It's been in the market for quite a while. We released over 100 enhancements this year and done a number of releases, but we've got even more in the pipe that's coming for next year—we're excited about that—building toward new architectures and employing some of that progressively as we go through. We released a lot of native web-based interfaces that our customers have been asking for. We've got some more that we're working on that are coming out next year, but that that's more to come.

Then becoming a world-class product company is something we've talked about as well. It's part of our strategy to look at both the maritime domain and bring in people with strong maritime domain expertise to really understand the business of shipping. But also, to bring in very strong technologists. Product managers, engineers, quality people, just people that know how to make enterprise software and know how to make it well. I'm happy to report that we've met our objectives for growth in that perspective; we've got the people that we've been looking for. Also, that's created the engine, as it were, to really accelerate our development and be able to add value to our products going forward.

Photo: ABS Wavesight

Nothing is more important to us than the success of our customers' businesses. When they're successful, we're successful. Paul Sells, president & CEO, ABS Wavesight

GT: I understand that ABS Wavesight recently announced a number of updates and enhancements to its fleet management software, Nautical Systems. I know you referenced this quickly in the last question, but can you talk us through not only what has changed, but discuss why?

PS: So, in terms of how we're focusing on Nautical Systems, we think about it in terms of the features that we expose to our customers. That comes through things that we develop organically and also integrations that we provide, as well as the non-functional requirements, the things on the backend that really sort of set us up for the type of performance and future compatibility that our customers are looking for.

We've announced integrations, for example, for our purchasing manager that allows purchasers to look at different prices and lead times when they're going out, putting things out for bids. We've made improvements to the maintenance related processes as well. We have an interface with ABS directly that allows for the removal of some time, let's call it. Some streamlining a process between the maintenance you do on your ship and the class certifications as well. So things to take time out of people's day and give it back to them.

Then also, we've made improvements to the parts of Nautical System that we use to manage crew and payroll. So, lots of improvements on our crew manager to help people make great decisions about how they staff their vessels.

All of that has been on our house directly, but we also have improved the degree to which we're able to do integrations with other customers or with other partners. So, improvements to our APIs that make those types of integrations more easy today and more feasible going into the future.

GT: Creating innovative technology is one thing. Creating innovative technology that is meaningful and impactful for your clients, ship owners and ship operators is a whole different ballgame. How does the ABS Wavesight team engage with industry to ensure that its products are on targets with industry needs? What are the demand trends that you're seeing today?

PS: This is something that's near and dear to us. When we look at the demand trends—let's start at the 80,000-foot level—we think about four things that we're trying to plan products around.

One of those are sustainability and the regulatory requirements that are entering the market. So, we saw TII come online on January this year. We have for our customers that do business in the EU, EU ETS coming online progressively beginning in January of next year. We follow those regulations very closely to make sure that we develop products that can help our customers navigate that emerging regulatory field.

The next one we think about is product adoption and usability. We have a saying at ABS Wavesight that whether you're eating or you're using software, you eat first with your eyes. That's because we as individuals, we as people, use software more in our day-to-day lives now than we ever have before. Our expectations of how to interact with that software are set not only in the workplace, but in our cars, in our homes, in our interactions with our loved ones. User experience and user interface is more than just making software that looks good. It's more about how can I make software that functions, anticipates your needs and is easy to get up to speed and learn on.

We demonstrated a lot of that at our user conference, which maybe we'll talk about a little while this past month in Oceanside, Calif. with some of the new releases we have coming out next month on My Digital Fleet and our approach to user experience. But primarily, I just wanted to say, that's one of the forces that we absolutely look at is this expectation for easy to use software.

The third focus area for us is on connectivity and the prolific expansion of connectivity. This is more than just being able to make Zoom calls while you're at sea, or have Netflix as a crew member. This type of transformation where we are, more and more, seeing vessels treated as office buildings with constant sort of high bandwidth, low latency connectivity, that enable architectures and enable transfer protocols that were not feasible even five years ago. We're able to bring in sort of the best of the modern web to help have lightweight installations on vessels to have the most modern tech stack to deliver value. That's something we're seeing kind of fold out or roll out, even faster than maybe we anticipated. So, proliferation of low earth orbit satellites and decrease in costs, et cetera. It's just allowing more modern architectures, let's call it, than maritime was able to benefit from previously.

Then the last one is disparate data sources. Everybody is swimming in data. It's locked away in different parts of your business that may make it difficult for you to access it, do a little bit of work on it and make decisions about how to improve, how you work your business. So for us, that means, again, back to infrastructure, making sure that we have world-class database architecture and the right APIs to be able to expose that information, not only within our software, but giving access to the data that's available within your organization to your workforce directly as well.

Those four forces, the regulatory and sustainability drivers, let's call it the product adoption usability, this phenomenon of consumerization, prolific connectivity, and then finally making improvements of access to disparate data sources, those are the things that we really think about when we're focusing on our current products and focusing on the products that we're bringing to market in the future.

GT: As you referenced, I know you're just coming off your user conference in sunny southern California, but can you give us an overview, a recap of the event with some key takeaways?

PS: We had our 23rd Nautical Systems User Conference, our first one hosted by ABS Wavesight in Oceanside, Calif. [in October]. We had over 150 attendees. We had, I think, over 15 roadmap sessions. We just had a lot of discussions about where we are, where we're going. People got a chance to meet other users, they got a chance to get direct instructions.

User conferences are incredibly important for technology companies. That's part of our commitment and focus on the people who use our products, as opposed to spending the majority of our calories out at other conferences trying to inform people about our products. So, the feedback was tremendous. We've had people that have come for over two decades to these. We had a moment at the kickoff where people were raising hands, how many times have you been here? Have you been here five times? Have you been here 10 times? A few hit the 20-mark, by the way, which is really impressive—some people who really know our products and have been satisfied with them for a long time.

Again, over 150 attendees, and this is such an important event for us not only this year but going forward that we're only going to get better. The things I heard most from our customers were, "This was one of the best events you guys have ever had." Then also, "You're absolutely on the right track. You're doing the right things. Please keep up the momentum and keep doing what you're doing."

So that kind of feedback for us was instrumental, because nothing is more important to us than the success of our customers' businesses. When they're successful, we're successful, and these types of events, this user conference, for us is one of our most important instruments to really get together, be with our customers, hear from them directly, break bread, spend time together, and really understand the journey that we're both on. It should also be fun. I think everybody could report it was a really good time.