Imagery Investments
Simon Willis, vice president of Cisco System’s Internet Business Solutions Group global public sector, is in search of satellite partners for an imagery project designed to assist municipal governments with a variety of managerial applications. "Our project will use space segment imagery to help urban and rural city governments collect the information they need to develop intelligent transportation, renewable energy, electrical smart grids, water grids, recycling, and intelligent urbanization," he says. The result is Planetary Skin, a non-profit organization backed by Cisco and NASA that will use $350 billion in funding per year between 2010 and 2020 for infrastructure to provide information related to global adaptation to climate change. The organization has a wide range of projects and goals that will depend on strong support from the commercial satellite imagery sector.
"We will be announcing partnerships soon, and we are very active in seeking out what we need," says Willis. "We already have several governments from major cities on board that want imagery to provide them with comprehensive sets of data, such as how efficiently a certain area of a city is using its electricity or even assessing the cause of economic growth or decline in certain neighborhoods. We know that space imagery has the potential to do this." Willis says the project is a zeitgeist of U.S. President Barack Obama’s support for renewable energy and smart-grid technology, as outlined in his 2009 economic stimulus package signed in February, and Cisco is not riding the wave alone. Google, Microsoft and Cisco all released statements following the passage of the stimulus package lauding the bill for providing them with an incentive to back supporting industries such as satellite.
The major software players were not slow to act on their promises. Satellite imagery provider GeoEye has won numerous delivery contracts with Google. In March, the GeoEye-1 satellite was contracted by Google to deliver a bank of new map-accurate global imagery. Google also has been a loyal customer of GeoEye’s rival, DigitalGlobe, since 2002. In September, Google extended and expanded its service agreement with the company in a multi-year, non-exclusive advanced Earth imagery content agreement utilizing the WorldView-2 satellite. "One of the things that satellite imagery improvements will allow customers to identify is, to different degrees of variance, wet versus dry ground cover. This is very important not only in agriculture but important in oil, gas and mining as well as other environmental and energy areas," says Michael McCarthy, DigitalGlobe’s senior director of business development. "We see enthusiasm continuing through WorldView-2 and the next-generation satellites that are on the horizon today. We also continue to see interest and demand for alternative energy exploration increase as we continue to see demand using this data from the satellite for analysis and exploration of opportunities there."
DigitalGlobe’s clientèle also includes Microsoft, which has contracts with the company to provide 460 million square kilometers of satellite and aerial imagery for the software giant’s Virtual Earth program. The fact that DigitalGlobe can share business between two of the largest competitors in the world illustrates the value of the space segment commodity. "We have chosen not to do any exclusivity. The market requires variety and we are an equal opportunity provider, so to speak, of imagery to both the consumer online portal space and the enterprise online mapping space," says McCarthy. "We have had a relationship with Microsoft for a couple of years. Our deal with them is really a formalizing of that imagery provider relationship. What is exciting about it is the inference that this relationship could lead into other areas of partnership with Microsoft."
Willis says satellite imagery partnerships with software giants are the clearest and most immediate examples of how satellite companies can use their exclusive resource to benefit from cooperative civil space projects. "Planetary Skin is a golden opportunity for satellite providers and an opportunity to advance research that benefits society and our environment as a whole," he says.
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