Andy Start, president, Inmarsat Global Government.

[Satellite TODAY 05-14-13] Inmarsat has completed its acquisition of Australian company TC Communications, a satellite communications provider. Inmarsat will now integrate the company into its existing operations with a particular focus on supporting its expanding global government and enterprise business units. Andy Start, president, Inmarsat Global Government, told SatelliteTODAY.com that the deal did not take long for the company to complete.

    “The first conversations started around Christmas time. It has taken us a few months to get through to closure but it has been relatively quick,” he said.

    As of 2012, TC Communications had 24 employees and according to Start, the deal made tactical sense in terms of expanding the company.

    “The acquisition came about following our strategic decision to maintain the direct government business we had in four countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Netherlands,” he said.

    According to Start, his business had well established “customer relationships” with those governments but still needed to develop a strategy to strengthen his company’s position.

    “We appreciated the need to strengthen both our engineering and sales capabilities. Having taken this decision, it was obvious that we had a partner in Australia that had lots of capabilities for which we were going to recruit and train,” he said.

    According to Start, this partner was already working on programs that were directly adjacent to his own.

     “So, we started a dialogue about how we could work more closely together. As we started to look at those opportunities, it became clear that best solution was to bring the partner into the Inmarsat family,” he added.

     Due to the relationship the company has with TC Communications, Start is expecting the integration process to be seamless.

     “The process will be very quick because TC already provided a lot of Inmarsat services and solutions. From an organization standpoint, my existing team that addresses the markets in Australia and Canada fit very neatly with TC Communications. We have already been through our first post-merger integration sessions. We think it will be a very rapid transition,” he said.

     Additionally, with Global Xpress coming online, Start believes the deal with TC Communications will bring a lot of overall benefits.

     “As we bring on our new Global Xpress spacecraft, the real benefit is the additional engineering and execution capabilities, particularly around VSAT technologies, which you need to implement the sort of solutions that Global Xpress will bring. It gives us a project engineering capability to really leverage the strength of our product portfolio and to bring on those new services, which will come with Global Xpress. These capabilities extend to both defense and enterprise clients in Australia. But, we can also do something similar in Canada. That is the core of the opportunity,” he said.