The Data You Own But Cannot Use: Why Maritime’s Fragmentation Tax is Rising

Ship owners all agree they control their operational data. So why are so many still paying vendors to read it, and what does that mean for the industry’s digital future?

By Steve Hemmings │ Maritime CTO, Insight │ Maritime Hub, Issue 6

A ship manager with seven vessels and three satellite connectivity providers recently described a simple problem. To produce a monthly report on internet usage, his team had to pull data by hand from three separate vendor dashboards, load it into a fourth environment and reconcile it line by line. “At the end of the day,” he said, “this data belongs to the company.” The room nodded. Everyone recognised the problem. Nobody was surprised it still existed.

That exchange, at a recent Digital Ship Summit 2026 panel in Athens on 15 October, where I was a speaker, says a lot about where maritime digitalisation stands in 2026. We are past debating whether data matters. The sector now generates a huge operational record: engine telemetry, fuel consumption, maintenance histories, emissions profiles, crew records and voyage performance. The commercial value is clear and the regulatory need is undeniable. Yet the industry is still wrestling with a more awkward question: who actually controls it?

On paper, the answer is simple. Ship owners own their data. That principle won almost universal support on the panel, from IT directors at Navigator Gas, Laskaridis Marine and Dorian LPG, through to me, speaking for the integrator side. But as the conversation went deeper, the picture got more complicated. Ownership without access is a hollow right. And access without the ability to interpret, export or act on that data is barely better than no access at all.

This isn’t an abstract worry. It is a commercial and operational reality that shapes procurement decisions, vendor negotiations and fleet modernisation programmes. Increasingly, it also shapes an operator’s ability to adopt AI, meet regulatory obligations and evidence ESG performance.

Ownership without access is a hollow right.

The Fragmentation Tax

The maritime sector is now paying what I’d call a fragmentation tax. It is the cost of working in an environment where operators technically own their data, but a scattered ecosystem of OEMs, software vendors, connectivity providers and platform operators control it in practice. The tax rarely shows up on an invoice. It shows up as integration costs, duplicated effort, delayed projects and vendor lock in. Most damaging of all, it shows up as the opportunity cost of transformation projects that never leave the dock because the data underneath them is too hard to work with.

BIMCO reached much the same conclusion this year. Its Declaration on Shared Principles for Maritime Digitalisation notes that fragmentation leaves owners and operators facing higher integration costs, duplicated effort and dependency on proprietary platforms.¹

Three patterns came through clearly, both on the panel and in recent industry research.

Three Problems Hiding in Plain Sight

1. The contract problem
Many maritime technology contracts were written when data was a byproduct, not an asset. They often fail to define what 'your data’ actually includes. Does it cover raw sensor feeds, or only aggregated dashboards? Does it include configuration settings, audit trails, attachments and metadata, the very things that make records credible to surveyors and auditors? Can you export it in a usable format, or only in a proprietary structure that needs the vendor’s own tools to read? These aren’t edge cases. They are gaps that turn into expensive problems at contract renewal, platform migration, or regulatory audit.

2. The interpretation problem
As one panellist put it: “An owner can sit on terabytes and still be locked out, paying for the privilege of reading their own information.” That is the difference between holding data and being able to use it. A stream of machinery signals is of little value without the codebook that explains what each point means. Whoever controls that layer of interpretation, whether it’s an OEM withholding API access or a software vendor charging for extraction, effectively controls the information, whatever the contract says about ownership.

3. The ecosystem problem
Maritime operations never sit inside a single vendor relationship. A modern vessel deals with connectivity providers, performance platforms, maintenance systems, compliance tools, class societies, port community systems and charterer reporting portals. Data flows across all of them. When each relationship runs on different terms, with different export rights, data models and levels of cooperation, you end up with an estate that resists integration by design. Odfjell’s Gunnar Eide stressed the importance of thisat the Digital Ship Summit in Athens, describing how vessel positions, inventories and maintenance records sat in separate systems until the company brought them together in Microsoft Fabric.²

Where Orchestration Comes In

From Insight’s point of view, this is exactly where the orchestration model earns its place. Our role is not to own the data. It belongs to the operator. Our role is to make sure the operator keeps practical control of it.

That means designing architectures where data sovereignty is a principle from day one, not a fix added later. It means agreeing contracts that set out export rights, API access and portability before deployment, not in the middle of a dispute three years on. And it means building reference architectures, such as the Insight Maritime Reference Architecture (IMRA), that treat interoperability and data governance as core requirements rather than optional extras.

The Practical Dimension

For a CIO planning a fleet digitalisation roadmap, this creates a specific set of challenges. You can’t simply ‘buy AI’ or ‘adopt digital twin’s if the data those capabilities rely on is fragmented, out of reach or tied up in contracts. The foundation has to come first. In practice, that means three things:

1. Procurement discipline
Buyers need to ask harder questions at vendor selection. Can we export all our data, including raw telemetry, in a documented format? Can we reach it through an API? What happens to our data if we end the contract? Who owns the derived analytics? These should be dealbreakers, not nice-to-haves.

2. Architectural intent
Fleet IT strategies need to be built around how data flows, not just what applications do. Where does the data start? Where does it need to go? Who needs to interpret it? Which standards will enable systems to work together without vendor specific middleware? BIMCO’s declaration, released after its March 2026 workshop, gives a useful framework here. It calls for harmonisation over fragmentation, interoperability by design, and the IMO Compendium as a shared semantic reference.^1,3 These aren’t lofty ideals. They are practical design principles that cut the fragmentation tax.

3. Contract governance
The relationship between vendor and ship owner has to evolve. Contracts need to go beyond service levels and pricing and deal openly with data rights, portability and exit terms. This isn’t anti-vendor. It’s pro-clarity. Vendors who genuinely add value should be comfortable with transparent terms. The ones who rely on data captivity to keep customers are the ones who avoid the conversation.

An Inflection Point

The maritime sector has reached a turning point. The data exists. The technology exists. The business case for using that data to drive efficiency, cut emissions, improve safety and optimise operations is proven. What’s left is a governance and architecture challenge; making sure the operators who generate the data, carry the risk and fund the investment, keep meaningful control of it.

No single standard, new regulation or better dashboard will solve this. It will be solved by disciplined procurement, deliberate architecture and a collective refusal to accept that 'ownin’g data and ’using’ data are two different things.

At Insight, we see this as central to our role as orchestrators. We don’t own your data, and we don’t want to. But we are committed to making sure you do, and that you can prove it, export it, interpret it and build on it without asking anyone’s permission.

The fragmentation tax is optional. It just doesn’t feel that way yet.

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Further Reading:  From the Insight Maritime Hub and the Industry

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