Fisheries VMS Domain · Lesson 7 of ∞ · ← Lesson 6
Zooming out
"Build a VMS" undersells how differently states and vendors have actually approached this. e-Boat is a specific, deliberate point in that space — not the only option.
Once you've seen one VMS deployment it's tempting to assume the category is settled. It isn't. Four real patterns are worth knowing, because a customer or FAO counterpart will sometimes reference one of them as a comparison point.
The EU's Control Regulation doesn't describe a single system — it describes obligations that scale with vessel size: VMS mandatory ≥12m, ERS mandatory ≥12m, AIS mandatory ≥15m, with Remote Electronic Monitoring (onboard cameras, essentially) layered on top of certain larger vessels specifically to catch illegal discarding at sea. Each EU member state then builds or buys its own system to meet those thresholds — the regulation sets the "what," not the "how."
Source: EUR-Lex — The EU's fisheries control system.
NOAA Fisheries runs a single centralized VMS covering over 4,000 vessels — the largest national VMS fleet in the world — built around type-approved transceiver units reporting 24+ times a day at 100m accuracy. Its stated primary use is concrete and narrow: on the Pacific Coast, position data is used mainly to check vessels against closed groundfish areas. It's a good example of a system whose scope is deliberately kept tight — position-vs-closed-area — rather than trying to be everything MCS could be.
Source: NOAA Fisheries — Vessel Monitoring System.
Many states don't build their VMS software at all — they buy it. A small set of specialised vendors (CLS Fisheries, Satlink, Trackwell, Pole Star Space Applications) sell VMS reporting and compliance platforms, often differentiated specifically on multi-flag regulatory compliance — i.e. one software product configured to satisfy several different states' rule sets. Underneath the software layer sit satellite communications carriers (Inmarsat, Iridium, Orbcomm) who move the bytes but don't own the compliance logic. This is a real alternative to building custom: faster to stand up, proven against many jurisdictions' rules already — at the cost of the state not owning the system or its data pipeline outright.
Source: search aggregation of vendor positioning, e.g. Pole Star — VMS provider for the Queensland fisheries programme, illustrating the "vendor as VMS provider to a government programme" pattern directly.
Worth including specifically because it's a different purpose, not a smaller version of the same thing. Global Fishing Watch fuses public AIS with VMS data that partner governments choose to release, to produce a public map of fishing activity — aimed at researchers, NGOs and journalists, not at issuing violations. It's proof that VMS-style data has value beyond enforcement, but its openness is exactly what a national enforcement VMS (restricted-access, evidentiary-grade, tied to licensing consequences) cannot be.
Source: Global Fishing Watch — What is VMS?
| Dimension | e-Boat's choice | What it agrees with / diverges from |
|---|---|---|
| Build vs. buy | Custom-built (own codebase, own team) | Diverges from the commercial-vendor pattern — closer to the NOAA/EU model of a state-owned system |
| Scope | Position monitoring + violation detection only; catch/licensing stays in eFish | Matches the EU pattern of separate VMS/ERS obligations, not the "one vendor platform does everything" commercial pattern |
| Data access | Restricted to the fisheries authority | Opposite of Global Fishing Watch's openness — by design, since this is an enforcement system, not a transparency project |
| Deployment | Sovereign/on-prem-capable, security-classified (КСЗІ) hosting considered alongside cloud | A constraint most of the vendor-platform states don't carry — data sovereignty and security classification rule out simply subscribing to a foreign SaaS VMS product |
That last row is worth sitting with: it's the concrete reason "just buy Pole Star or Trackwell" isn't automatically the answer here, even though it demonstrably works for other states. A system holding position data on a national fleet, built for a state that treats this as security-classified infrastructure, has different constraints than a mid-sized fishery buying a compliance SaaS product off the shelf.
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