Former Inmarsat maritime boss Frank Coles says more reality needs to be injected into discussions about smart shipping.

Speaking at his company’s conference, Coles, who is now chief executive of maritime systems supplier Transas, said there was a need to “distinguish between the blue sky and the blue ocean”.

Coles said he expected to see changes like those which hit companies such as Kodak and Blackberry so hard, but believed the transformations were likely to be biggest in the cargo shipping supply chain.

Huge retailers such as Alibaba, Amazon and Walmart, which are now major e-commerce players, are “starting to disrupt the shipping space, as they strive to take greater control over logistics and directly over transportation”.

Coles said these retailers had until now largely focused on last-mile logistics and delivery, but were now moving into the “first mile” of ocean shipping.

Walmart is looking to take control of its own shipping and Alibaba has signed up with Maersk Line, CMA CGM and Zim Lines in recent weeks.

“For the container and parcel delivery segments of the shipping industry, it is easy to imagine electronic cargo booking and digital port operations, with the e-commerce giants owning ships, owning ports or sections of them, controlling the complete logistics chain,” Coles said.

“What then for the traditional maritime company?”

However, smart ships are likely to evolve as part of this development and, even in the bulk sectors, “smart operations and even automated ships leads to a scaled operation requiring super-size ship management companies”.

Coles said maritime communications suppliers could be at risk as he did not think smart vessels needed to be in constant contact with the shore via massive broadband networks.

“The analytics and decision support could reside onboard, and only in times of urgency would the communications and data grow,” he said.

As a result, equipment suppliers seeking to reinvent themselves as service businesses monitoring data analytic packages from their own local service centres will struggle as the market seeks greater efficiencies that can only come from their consolidation.

“There will be an emerging requirement for larger shared service centres in shipmanagement operations,” Coles said.