Imagery Market Booms as DigitalGlobe Imagery Hits the Cloud
By Jeffrey Hill | October 9, 2012
[Satellite TODAY Insider 10-09-12] It was a busy day in the satellite imagery sector as DigitalGlobe unveiled a new cloud services platform and NSR released a new analysis report that predicted the satellite-based Earth observation market would triple in size to reach $6.2 billion by 2021.
DigitalGlobe officially introduced its My DigitalGlobe cloud services platform at the GEOINT 2012 conference Oct. 9. The company said the new service aims to give customers access to more than 200 million square kilometers of its most current imagery and geospatial information from desktops, portals, intranets and mobile devices around the world.
The solution also features an online browser allowing access to multi-temporal imagery and metadata, while providing add-as-you-go library for organizing, downloading, and extracting data directly into workflows.
DigitalGlobe Senior Vice President Scott Hicar said the service bundle includes content from its Global Basemap, First Look and Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (EGD) platforms.
“In short, the simple and intuitive My DigitalGlobe user-interface further enhances the experience for government and commercial customers through a greater ability to access and manage the information they need when and where they need it most,” Hicar said in a statement. “By giving our customers quick and simple access to geospatial imagery and information anytime and anywhere, they can make smarter decisions faster.”
Separately, industry analysis firm NSR released the fourth edition of its “Global Satellite-Based Earth Observation” report, which contained very good news for a market that is in transition following the merge of DigitalGlobe and its former rival GeoEye earlier this year.
NSR Analyst and Report Author Stéphane Gounari said the Earth observation market is considerably improving its value-proposition and is progressively moving from growth fed by governmental and military contracts to one based on a more balanced mix of end-users.
“These conditions [in the Earth observation market] are laying the groundwork for a decade of growth in both data and value-added-services (VAS) segments,” Gounari wrote in the report. “Despite the budgetary situation of the traditional largest end-users in Europe and North America and the coming cuts to the NGA’s EnhancedView program potentially totaling $130 million, Earth observation satellite operators are rather optimistic, with some reason … However, revenues from defense and intelligence and public authorities verticals should not be considered as a lost cause as they are based on solid needs. As UAV-based services rapidly improve their value propositions alongside satellite-based services, satellite will increasingly compete in each market.”