PARIS – Comtech Telecommunications, a company known for providing satellite and terrestrial communications equipment and services, announced plans Sept. 12 to provide government and commercial customers with communications networks established “in a matter of hours.”
Through BRIDGE solutions, Comtech is offering “portable, adaptable, full-service communications networks” to help bridge gaps in satellite and terrestrial infrastructure, according to a Sept. 12 news release. BRIDGE solutions is intended “to meet the urgent needs” of “emergency service providers, remote communities, military operators and maritime customers.” (BRIDGE stands for blended, resilient, integrated, digital, global, end-to-end.)
The “infrastructure, cloud and application agnostic” BRIDGE solutions “can continuously evolve over time to meet emerging government and commercial” demands, according to the news release published at World Satellite Business Week.
Connective Tissue
BRIDGE solutions reveals an important shift underway at Comtech, a Melville, New York-based company that has acquired more than a dozen communications technology businesses over decades.
Comtech is “finding that we can pull capability from across our enterprise and be the connective tissue between ecosystems that historically have been independent and now are converging together,” Ken Peterman, Comtech chairman, president and CEO, told SpaceNews.
Hybrid networks that include satellites in various orbits are one example of convergence. In addition, Peterman pointed to the convergence of satellite and terrestrial networks. Further convergence of geospatial and satellite communications networks is on the way, he added.
“We’re looking at the ability to seamlessly get information all the way to the edge, so that insight is available and actionable with as low latency as possible,” Peterman said.
Breaking Silos
When Peterman became Comtech president and CEO a little more than a year ago, the company was comprised of “14 siloed businesses operating independently to a large degree on their own tools, processes and systems.”
Since then, Comtech has merged the siloed business units, allowing them to share resources.
“Bringing these 14 silo businesses together, reduces costs substantially and improves our efficiency,” Peterman said. “The second thing it does is enables us to operate collaboratively.”
Innovation Foundry
An engine for that collaboration is the Evoke innovation foundry established in 2022. There, Comtech’s “most entrepreneurial and innovative engineers” figure out how to bring together the company’s various technologies and capabilities to build new subsystems and systems, Peterman said.
“In collaborative workshops, we identify the customer challenges and put our collective technologies to work to create a more comprehensive value proposition for that customer,” Peterman said. “We’re finding significant growth opportunities there.”
Collaborative workshops often lead to pilot projects “where we demonstrate something so a customer can empirically assess how it increases their customer experience and how it improves their financial performance.” Peterman said. “We can move from there to actually tailoring a BRIDGE solution on a customer-by-customer basis.”
