Meeting the demand for more efficient shipbuilding

Fincantieri, one of the world’s largest shipbuilding groups and number one by diversification and innovation is adopting a hybrid cloud solution from IBM to improve the efficiency of designing, building and deploying new vessels in response to the growing global demand for shipbuilding.

According to Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), demand for cruising has increased 68 percent over the last 10 years, helping the global cruise industry generate revenues of 37.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 – a figure that is expected to grow to approximately $39.6 billion by the end of 2016.

Faced with rapidly growing international demand for cruise as well as naval vessels, Fincantieri needed a modern and global IT infrastructure to manage its new Integrated Ship Design and Manufacturing system, which manages the process of designing, fabricating and deploying ships. This capital-intensive and time-sensitive process also required rapid provisioning capabilities, high elasticity and security.

With more than 50 cloud data centers worldwide – including one in Milan – and expertise in managing enterprise cloud services, IBM will provide Fincantieri with a modern IT infrastructure to advance Fincantieri’s global growth goals.

“Fincantieri has always considered technological innovation of products and processes as a way of guaranteeing the company’s high standard of excellence,” said Gianluca Zanutto, CIO of Fincantieri. “When we needed to redesign our IT infrastructure for the future, we trusted IBM Cloud to deliver the highly secure and scalable solution we need to keep up with the sharp growth and complexity of the shipbuilding industry.”

Fincantieri selected IBM Cloud out of a crowded field of competitors to create a global hybrid cloud infrastructure. The hybrid infrastructure connects 13 Fincantieri private distributed data centers with the IBM Cloud data center in Milan.  The result is a hybrid cloud for high-availability, fault tolerance and secure enterprise service levels.

In addition to providing a new flexible and scalable global IT footprint for the shipbuilding world of today, Fincantieri is looking to IBM for a cloud solution built for the future.   The company is mission-driven to stay competitive in ship evolution, yard efficiency and the ability to provide advanced services to ship owners as the industry evolves. Industry researchers, such as Roland Berger and Confindustria, consider cloud computing an essential building block of the Internet of Things, as well as the “smart factory” of Industry 4.0 transformations. By adopting the IBM Cloud, Fincantieri is well positioned for the 4.0 transformation at a global scale.

“IBM’s global network of cloud data centers enables Fincantieri to meet the growing demand of shipbuilding.  We will also help the company easily integrate other subsidiaries and new acquisitions as it continues to expand the company’s worldwide footprint,” said Stefano Rebattoni, General Manager Global Technology Services, IBM Italy. “Fincantieri is leveraging IBM’s hybrid cloud model in an innovative manner to help its digital transformation and usher in a new era of scalability and flexibility, through a high-secure and reliable IT infrastructure”