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Situation 05 · Fleet IT retainer

You have a fleet and no IT department

Between two and fifteen vessels, there's no IT department. There's a superintendent who also does IT, a favourite integrator, and a growing pile of contracts nobody has read. A fractional fleet IT manager is the missing role.

What goes wrong

  • Every vessel has a different network, different firewall, different remote access, because each was done by whoever was available at the time.
  • Renewals, licences and support contracts lapse or auto-renew unnoticed.
  • Vendors set the roadmap. The fleet buys what it’s sold.
  • When something breaks, the person who understood it left two years ago.
  • The class cyber question lands on a superintendent with no time to answer it.

What we do

A retainer. A fixed number of days per month, a named point of contact, and the authority to act as your IT superintendent.

  1. Standards. One way of doing networks, remote access, backups and credentials across the fleet, written down, applied at the next refit or handover of each vessel.
  2. Vendor management. We sit between you and your suppliers. Quotes get reviewed, contracts get read, renewals get negotiated. We hold no vendor relationships that pay us.
  3. Budget and roadmap. What needs replacing, when, and what it should cost. Planned, not reactive.
  4. On call. When the bridge network drops at sea, someone who knows the vessel is on the phone.

Who this is for

Management companies, family offices with more than one vessel, small cruise and expedition operators, and any owner who’s tired of being their own IT department.

Scale

We’re a small group of working practitioners, assembled per engagement. That’s how we keep the overhead off your invoice and still cover a fleet.