William McCormick
Dan Jablonsky, CEO of Maxar Technologies and a 2022 Wash100 Award recipient, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding his strategic goals to continue the company’s growth across the federal landscape as well as how recent partnerships and company culture are driving talent recruitment and new market expansion during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.
“We’re seeing a major inflection point as we move from 2D to an immersive 3D world. That shift unlocks a lot of new opportunities. We’re really excited about what that will look like as our customers begin to adopt these new technologies and capabilities on a global scale.”
You can read the full interview with Dan Jablonsky below:
ExecutiveBiz: What are your strategic goals for Maxar for the rest of the coming year? What do you hope to accomplish and any new markets that you’re keeping an eye on in the federal sector?
Dan Jablonsky: “We are in a phase of accelerated growth and will continue to expand our market position in our Space and Earth intelligence sectors—diversifying the customers we serve and the products and solutions we deliver.”
Maxar is a global leader in our industry, and we’re seeing increased awareness of our capabilities and demand for our technologies. There are many opportunities ahead for us with all we can offer to customers and partners to help them achieve mission success. This provides great potential for us to build out our customer sets in the near and long-term.
Maxar has seen strong growth in our Earth intelligence business, even before our recent NRO contract award. We had $100 million of product growth last year, driven in large part by our 3D capabilities, which includes our high-quality base map data sets of the globe. It’s been great to see our product strategy taking hold.
The NRO EOCL contract was a great win and continues our long-term partnership with the U.S. government. The contract includes ongoing foundational service, with additional options for our high-resolution data and analytics and increased collection capacity after WorldView Legion is in orbit. This will grow our business with the federal government in the years ahead.
For example, our data is integral to U.S. Army’s One World Terrain program, a 3D synthetic training environment that simulates the complexity of the real-world operating theater.
On the Space side, Maxar has been awarded some nice wins in civil space with NASA, with commercial customers, and we’re working to expand our capabilities for US defense and intelligence missions. This reflects our strategic goal to diversify across sectors.
We have been investing in different capability sets like proliferated low Earth orbit satellites. We expect to see strong growth as Maxar continues to serve our clients in the GEO market and continues to diversify product and customer sets.”
ExecutiveBiz: How have recent partnerships been able to assist Maxar Technologies expand its position in the federal marketplace, drive innovation and new capabilities and ultimately help complete your mission?
Dan Jablonsky: “Maxar is laser focused on working closely with our current customers and partners—large technology companies, defense companies and telecommunications organizations across the globe. We want to diversify and expand those relationships.
Maxar is growing fast and to achieve our ambitious goals we will continue to strengthen our ecosystem of partnerships across the federal landscape and other industries.
Maxar is making investments in companies to advance data capabilities more quickly. For example, a company like Blackshark.ai has interesting flight software tools that have been running in Microsoft flight simulators. Through our strategic partnership with Blackshark, we’re bringing additional 3D capabilities to broader markets, and Blackshark is leveraging Maxar’s global basemap to create a photorealistic 3D map for customers in gaming, the metaverse and mixed reality environments.
We’re working with radar, radio frequency, and data science companies to support their customer needs that can only be met through partnering across organizations. Our future is tied into how Maxar can expand and grow these relationships, build a strong partner ecosystem and get to the best possible customer solutions.
As we continue to grow on the Space side, Maxar is expanding our partners ecosystem as well. These partnerships are important with large defense companies as we develop efficient and commercially oriented solutions for national defense, security and civil missions.
Maxar brings unique assets to the table. We’re not the same scale as L3Harris, Boeing or Lockheed Martin, but our capabilities add value as we partner with organizations to provide solutions for our customer’s greatest challenges.”
ExecutiveBiz: What are the core values that are important to your company’s culture? How does Maxar address the uphill challenge to recruit and retain the best talent in the federal market?
Dan Jablonsky: “Maxar employs more than 5,000 people the globe, and what unites all of us is our shared values. We are a values-based company, and those values are fundamental to our culture. We know our employees are our greatest asset, and we make great efforts to retain our team with development opportunities and a path to career growth.
We want Maxar to be a great place to work, since the best way to attract new talent is through the referrals of our team members.
We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace and have accelerated our outreach to attract talent from underrepresented groups to our company and to encourage the next generation to pursue study in STEM fields and join our industry.
Maxar is a mission-driven company. That resonates with the people on our team and the people we hire. Working for us is a job, but one with purpose and impact.”
