Patrick Brant has joined SkyPort Global Communications Inc. as president and CEO, the company announced April 30.

Brant most recently served as CEO and president of Loral Skynet, the satellite operations unit of Loral Space & Communications Inc. He has served as an advisor to SkyPort’s board of directors for the past three months, and will assume his new roles following the retirement of Roger Klotz, a long-time telecommunications industry veteran and the company’s president for the past four years.

Brant helped negotiate the $3.2 billion purchase of Telesat Canada by Loral Space & Communications, a transaction resulting in Loral Skynet’s merging with Telesat and moving to Ottawa, a geographical move required by Canadian law but essentially which precipitated Brant’s announced retirement before he began advising SkyPort. Dan Goldberg, president and CEO of Telesat, was named president and CEO of the new company.

If his retirement proved premature, Brant is confident that his timing with SkyPort will prove auspicious. "There are a number of applications that we’ll have now and in the future," he said. "The organization today is doing business worth about $15 million. In 2007 it will be $20 million, and in 2008 we expect to double that."

SkyPort intends to position itself more firmly in the integration business through acquisitions and the leveraging of its ground-based teleport infrastructure. The company believes that with larger scale and good management, the integration business will provide steady growth and profits.

"I look at the satellite industry as having three tiers," Brant said. "There are the owners and operators, leasing capacity directly to broadcasters and large enterprises and government, too. They also lease to the second tier, to integrators such as Cyberstar, SkyPort Global, etc., providing unique, end-to-end solutions. The third tier includes facilities and equipment providers for teleports and connectivity to the Internet or phone lines in order to complete systems and services."

Nearly half of all transponder capacity is sold through integrators, yet it remains a market where most middlemen find it difficult to achieve a profit because they are too small or too specialized, said Patrick Boyle, a spokesman for SkyPort. Given that, even large satellite operators find themselves pulling away from allocating resources to the integration side of the business, because the profit margins by their standards are too slim to bother.

Nevertheless, enterprise and government customers are increasingly interested in and reliant upon integrators offering a satellite solution to their communications challenges.

"The top tier has gone through a great deal of consolidation, to where there are just four global operators today," Brant said. "I think that consolidation is about done. As we’ve recently heard, Intelsat may be back on the market again, but it won’t change the focus of its business and its leasing satellite capacity."

Correspondingly, "the middle tier has become an interesting place," Brant said. "It’s a very challenging arena. In the middle of that tier, there are hundreds of companies trying to find a way to distribute their products. Each has to create his own infrastructure, which makes it very difficult to compete. It leaves a hole for a company like SkyPort to come in, grow exponentially and perhaps help fill some of the gaps."

Brant said his specific plans for SkyPort’s destiny is to become a dynamic agent in bridging and bonding those disparate technological situations.

"We want to become a very vital, energetic player in the middle tier. SkyPort Global owns a teleport in Houston and has won awards with the National Guard. Our strategy is to maintain that center and grow our integration through organic intensity and award-winning integration systems, but also grow through acquisitions throughout the industry, both large and small."

Brant said his company is thus positioned to provide large multinational organizations with completely private wide-area networks spanning the globe. Be it in China or Thailand, communications with the home office through phone, Internet, etc., can all provided by a SkyPort network via satellite. "There are niche operators who focus solely on enterprise businesses," Brant said. "We’ll explore organizations in these realms daily."

– J.J. McCoy