Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/467551
March 2015 | Boating Industry | 15 www.BoatingIndustry.com Boating Industry: How is the health of the electronics segment today? OTTOSSON: Today, I would say there are fi ve major players in recre- ational boating electronics. Each one of those players is an excellent company, provid- ing healthy competition. The pace of innovation is fantastic and much, much higher. That comes from us pushing each other. Pricing wise, we see prices coming down every year. We're seeing more technology being pushed into the product. For the consumer, I think it has been a win and for the industry I think it has been a win because we are competing with each other in a way … where we are helping each other to get a little bit further along. Boating Industry: You mentioned GoFree earlier. How important is that going to be for the brands going forward? OTTOSSON: GoFree is going to be very important. Consumers are going to ask for a more holistic ex- perience. … For us, the starting point was that we got together a group of people together, put them in a room, and said, "Let's think about what a boater needs before, during and after a trip. We identifi ed 750 different use cases … and we looked at how can we make it safer, how can we make it more fun, how can we make it a little bit easier. In order to provide a lot of this, we need to combine a lot of what we are doing, with what other people are doing, and that's where this possibility of connected products and connected services came from. Take a look at your car today and that con- trol panel. It is providing more and more things for you. JOURLAIT: I think the parallel with other industries is important. There's a desire to quantify, to remove some of the frustration and bring in a lot more enjoy- ment and the marine electronics industry hasn't done that yet – it's moving that way. To plan your outing, enjoy it when you're out and afterwards to enjoy it, and the layer that Go- Free provides is truly innovative. There is nothing else like it in the marine industry today. There is an undeniable trend – consumers want it. Boating Industry: In your segment of the marine industry, we probably see more rapid innovation than in any other part. How do you manage that innovation and make sure you're coming up with the right ideas? CHEMI: Essentially what we do is that we have a product road map, so we're looking out at products fi ve years into the future – what is most important to have, what technologies are coming to bear. So there's this "wish list" from the consumer side and the technology roadmap and by looking at when those two intersect, then we get this really tight list of about 150 different projects that we're working on at any given time. Some of those will come out next month; some of those will come out three years from now. It's a continuous evolution of what is the competition doing, what technologies just came to fruition – or came to a dead end. It might have been we thought this display technology was going to revolutionize what we could do and it turned out it's never going to be at a cost the marine industry is going to follow. Our idea there is we de-risk the develop- ment of a product by developing technologies in compartments. For instance, we'll take wire- less technology and develop a Bluetooth module that we'll test and confi rm that we can use in our products, within our set of regulatory re- quirements, and then we'll apply that across the different brands. We build the technology and share it across our brands. Boating Industry: When it comes to new products, of those items you can talk about today, what are you most excited about? CHEMI: It depends on the brand or the segment we're talking about. For the fi sherman, there's no doubt The B&G Zeus2 Glass Helm (above) is the fi rst multifunction navigation system designed specifi cally for sailing. Simrad's ForwardScan offers boaters a clear image of the water column and ocean fl oor in front of the boat.