Andy Reed
“[We] are well-positioned to create a disruptive force in space-based intelligence. No company has such strong roots in geospatial with our level of scale and a strong commercial mindset.”
 EM: It has been almost three weeks since the MDA acquisition of DigitalGlobe and the dust has hardly settled. But how has it been going with the integration of the companies?
Tony Frazier: Early integration activities have been going really well. Maxar CEO Howard Lance just completed a two-week roadshow visiting our largest offices across the U.S. and Canada. We hosted Howard in Herndon, VA and Gaithersburg, MD for Radiant Solutions town halls. Everyone is incredibly excited about the potential of our combination because of the strong strategic fit of opportunities, technologies, business models and customer bases. Fortunately, MDA and DigitalGlobe have a long history as business partners and a similar heritage as leaders in our respective domains, and our businesses are highly complementary.
With the integration of DigitalGlobe, The Radiant Group, SSL and MDA into Maxar Technologies, where do you see the strengths and positioning of the new company?
Frazier:Â [We] are well-positioned to create a disruptive force in space-based intelligence. No company has such strong roots in geospatial with our level of scale and a strong commercial mindset. We are now part of a $3 billion company with more than 6,500 team members and are positioned as an industry-leading, vertically integrated space and geospatial intelligence powerhouse with end-to-end solutions for commercial and government. We support missions for the U.S. government and its closest allies, the largest online mapping and communications companies in the world, cadastral mapping programs on every continent, and an ecosystem of developers building algorithms to extract information from optical and radar imagery at scale. We can now provide our customers with a full suite of unmatched space-related capabilities, geospatial services, and integrated solutions expertise to help our customers anticipate and address their most complex mission-critical challenges with confidence.
Congratulations on your new appointment to President of Radiant Solutions. Where do you see the new Radiant Solutions fitting in to Maxar Technologies portfolio of products and services?
Frazier:Â Thank you. I am really excited about the role Radiant Solutions can play as the geospatial services business unit of Maxar Technologies. We provide multisource data collection, enrichment and analytic capabilities that reveal insights that help our customers better understand our changing planet. We have more than 1,000 aerospace engineers, geospatial analysts, weather and ocean experts, software developers, data scientists and DevOps engineers supporting national security and commercial customers here in the D.C. metro area and other offices and customer sites around the world.
Where do you see Radiant Solutions delivering the greatest value?
Frazier: We feel growth of pervasive data-gathering sensors, cloud computing, and open innovation in the areas of machine learning and big data analytics is driving change in how our customers will support global mapping and intelligence missions. Radiant Solutions is helping our customers harness the disruptive potential of these emerging technologies and apply them to address customer’s unique challenges to impact missions at scale.
Can you share with our readers what the future looks like for Radiant Solutions?
Frazier:Â Over the coming weeks, we will be announcing more details on where we will be taking Radiant Solutions. But what I can share now is that we have assembled a team of recognized leaders who have been driving change in the geospatial industry in our respective legacy organizations at DigitalGlobe, MDA Information Systems, RadiantBlue and HumanGeo. Now, together under one roof, we see ourselves as a force multiplier with a tremendous opportunity to drive lasting change and provide our customers with geospatial insights to help companies make better decisions and governments keep our nation safe. We believe we will grow Radiant Solutions, and continue to offer some of the most exciting career opportunities in our industry in an environment where talented people get to apply cutting-edge innovation to some of the toughest problems facing our planet.
