Essentially, this means that the shipping line can now monitor and control all stages of a voyage for every single one of its more than 600 container ships. “Maersk software engineers now spend less time on container software management and more time on innovation and value-added projects. "The resulting business value is savings on resource costs, faster solution delivery time, and the ability to attract expert IT talent,” says Necip Ozyucel, cloud and enterprise business group lead at Microsoft. 

“This system enables Maersk to optimise its routes in real-time across the 350 ports it services,” he explains. “It can re-route ships around weather systems, reduce insurance costs by only paying insurance on risks that are current and not historical, prevent ships being delayed outside ports through slow-steaming if there’s a backlog and so on.”