Signal Ocean, the maritime data platform, has launched a cloud-based Data Warehouse providing a central source of commodity shipping market data that can be streamed in real-time into in-house data environments, helping to automate market reporting. The new way of accessing maritime market data enables market analysts and traders to build their own bespoke reporting capabilities in-house, doing away with countless hours of data crunching daily.

The Signal Ocean platform uses AI, advanced geospatial models and predictive technology to provide ship owners, brokers, traders, charterers and market analysts with real-time shipping market data – combining industry insight with a breadth of vessel information relevant to chartering and trading decision-making. This is integrated for each user company, with their own proprietary data automatically extracted from emails and messaging systems to create unique and secure private market dashboards that give at-a-glance market views.

The Signal Ocean Data Warehouse provides an alternative solution for accessing the complete body of Signal Ocean data for companies that prefer SQL (Structured Query Language) to power their business intelligence platforms, including Microsoft Excel, Power BI or Tableau. Using the Data Warehouse and a suite of sophisticated APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), users can live-stream Signal Ocean’s data directly into their own applications – automatically combining precise real-time market data with their own proprietary information.

Dimitris Tsapoulis, Group COO, Signal Group, explains: “The sheer scale of data now available to brokers and analysts in the current trading environment is overwhelming to anyone still trying to run the entire data crunching process manually. Our Data Warehouse offering will do the heavy lifting for them by seamlessly streaming the data Signal Ocean curates into their own systems and dashboards and automatically integrating that data with their own information. This will save hours a day and – crucially – make sure users are not on the back foot in what is an exceptionally fast-moving and volatile trading environment.”

“We’ve also made sure that the Data Warehouse solution is as close to a plug-and-play solution as you can get – there is no need for extremely resource-heavy IT integrations or investment in additional storage infrastructure, because our data is hosted on the cloud and our APIs are constantly updated. In short, with the Data Warehouse, companies of any size can harness all available market data without the huge costs in time and money of sifting through a mountain of data and information while their competitors beat them to the fix.”

The Signal Ocean Data Warehouse converges data that spans the entire spectrum of a shipping analyst’s requirements, including vessel particulars, daily AIS, voyages, tonnage list, daily vessel status, distances, vessel emissions, vessel valuations, port expenses, geos, market rates and freight data – and makes them available through a single unified SQL database.

“Data Warehousing is not a new innovation in IT; but this approach has not been applied to shipping data analytics on this scale ever before. It will be a game-changer and will help to level the playing field in terms of data accessibility and control and will also mean that brokers can focus on delivering real value – concentrating on making connections and closing deals,” adds Roussos Paschopoulos, Chief Strategy Officer, Signal.