StormGeo, a leading player in weather intelligence and operational decision support and part of Alfa Laval, has entered into a partnership with Closelink, a Hamburg-based digital bunker platform provider connecting buyers and suppliers. The cooperation brings together the expertise and capabilities of the two organizations to better serve existing and future customers and drive innovation in the maritime industry.

“Closelink and StormGeo both embrace the idea and benefits of a networking economy,” said Søren Andersen, CEO of StormGeo. “We aim to promote innovation by enabling collaboration between different stakeholders, sharing of knowledge and expertise, and creating new opportunities with the clear focus to improve our customer’s daily operations today and in the future.“

As a first step, Closelink has integrated the AI-driven capabilities of StormGeo’s s-Insight | Bunker planning tool into its bunker procurement platform. s-Insight | Bunker supports bunker buyers in choosing the best port and volume for bunkering. It is based on the solution previously provided by BunkerMetric, a company acquired by StormGeo in 2022. The integration leads to a comprehensive state-of-the-art planning capability for Closelink’s customers within a single, streamlined user interface.

“It is not only great to see that StormGeo and Closelink share a common vision when it comes to the wider digital ecosystem in the maritime space. We were also impressed by how quickly we could turn our ideas into reality,“ said Philippe Lavarde, CEO of Closelink. “Such partnerships are crucial to support the industry in tackling the challenges of decarbonization and continuous efficiency improvement.”

The partners agree that while many new digital solutions are arising in the maritime space, many often only solve one particular pain point. The combination of the Closelink and s-Suite platforms creates functionalities that will strongly improve the optimization of operations and decisions across several of the customers‘ functions and teams. Allowing a seamless data flow between established and new platform solutions and, wherever suitable, integrating capabilities to facilitate the individual user experience is important to improve customer performance and develop new, disruptive solutions.

StormGeo and Closelink will go live with their first shared solution in May 2023.

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