By Jeff Heilman
<p><span class="cap">E</span>ven if we are only half right about the opportunities now before us, we are about to boldly go where no commercial earth-imaging company has gone before,” says Jill Smith, president and CEO of <b><a href="http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/dgi.html" target="_blank">DigitalGlobe Inc.</a></b> (DGI) during the Oct. 8, 2009, launch of WorldView-2, the company’s third and most powerful satellite in its high-resolution, remote-sensing constellation. “This is the tipping point,” she announces while seated in the control room of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with WorldView-2 just outside, encapsulated in a rocket and nearing liftoff. We are entering a whole new arena.”</p>
<p>Overseeing the countdown from DigitalGlobe’s headquarters in Longmont, Colo., is Walter Scott, the company’s founder and CTO. “The Russians have a saying about rocket launches,” he says calmly. “Toast not to success, for that would be hubris; toast instead to your preparations.” A Harvard- and Berkeley-educated scientist skilled in space, defense, computing and remote-sensing programs, Scott, 51, takes it all in stride. “We’ve been through this before,” he says. “We’ve done our preparations, our training, our reviews, our checking. The main activity is waiting and trusting that the work we’ve done over the past few years will pay off.”</p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<h2>MORE ON DIGITALGLOBE</h2>
<b><a href="greenmachine" target="_self" class="actionlink">Green Machine</a></b><br><br>
<h2>VIEW THE FIRST IMAGES FROM WORLDVIEW-2</h2>
<b><a href="dglaunch" target="_self" class="actionlink">WorldView-2</a></b>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<p>Collecting around 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of images daily, DigitalGlobe says its other satellites — QuickBird-2, launched in 2001, and WorldView-1, launched in 2007 — helped elevate the company to the top of the burgeoning field of commercial geospatial imagery. WorldView-2, says Smith, is expected to double DigitalGlobe’s image-collection capabilities to more than 500 million square kilometers of high-resolution imagery every year. </p>
<p>The much anticipated launch of WorldView-2 went smoothly, says Smith. An hour after blasting off, she explains, WorldView-2 separated from the Delta vehicle and commenced initialization of its onboard processors. And just 11 days later, on October 19, DigitalGlobe released the first images from WorldView-2. The company says that WorldView-2 is expected to achieve full operational capability on January 4.</p>
<h2>Applications </h2>
<p>Beginning with Landsat, the satellite observation program launched in 1972 and still active today, earth imaging was long the exclusive domain of the U.S. and Soviet militaries. Since 1993, when Scott founded DigitalGlobe’s predecessor, WorldView Imaging Corp., commercialization has steadily expanded. From governmental to gaming applications, it’s a market projected to go galactic, say analysts. In a 2009 report from satellite sector consulting and analysis firm Euroconsult SA, the global satellite-imagery market was forecast to surpass $1 billion in 2009 and to grow by 16 percent a year during the next decade.</p>
<p>Historically, the company reports, the U.S. government has been DigitalGlobe’s largest customer. But it also sells its satellite images to international defense and intelligence concerns, domestic and international civil government agencies and various commercial enterprises around the world, Smith says, including Google and Microsoft.</p>
<PAGEBREAK>
<p>The New Orleans Regional Planning Commission, a transportation planning agency for the greater New Orleans area, was already a DigitalGlobe customer when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Citing the considerable challenges presented by the New Orleans region, a temperate zone with frequent storm activity, Lynn E. Dupont, NORPC’s principal planner and GIS coordinator, says, “Our imaging window is extremely narrow, limited to the time of year when the leaves are off the trees, which, of course, is when there is the most cloud cover. DigitalGlobe completely understood our needs and was able to produce despite the constraints of this hit-or-miss process.”</p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
From basic images and 3-D terrain models to its CitySphere map collection of more than 300 cities worldwide, DigitalGlobe’s products and value-added services are multidimensional.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<p>DigitalGlobe was among several imaging companies that supported the rescue, relief and recovery efforts after Katrina. “We were very happy that DigitalGlobe was involved,” says Dupont. “In the daily triage of deciding where and how to respond, their daily updates on floodwater status, used in coordination with digital elevation data to produce flood depth analysis, proved most helpful.” Dupont says that the generosity and overall response of DigitalGlobe and the geospatial industry “made you feel good.”
From basic images and 3-D terrain models to its CitySphere map collection of more than 300 cities worldwide, DigitalGlobe’s products and value-added services are multidimensional. “Our brand of information is location-based, which is essentially an unexplored dimension,” says Steve Milton, the vice president of product development, a commercial-software veteran who leads development of the company’s software systems. “It is something of a new reality in business planning and decision-making.”</p>
<p>COO S. Scott Smith (no relation to Jill Smith), an aerospace industry veteran who spent 15 years with the <b><a href="http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/lmt.html" target="_blank">Lockheed Martin Corp.</a></b> (LMT), gives this overview of the various ways in which DigitalGlobe’s technology can be utilized: Urban planners and civil engineers can use images to map out investments in multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects; in the energy industry, the images can help identify natural resources and monitor pipelines and facilities; and the government can employ the company’s satellite images to support U.S. troops and protect borders. When the media need evidentiary support, he says, such as to refute Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s claim that he was not razing villages, DigitalGlobe’s images have been irrefutable. Count environmentalists, farmers, insurance companies and game developers in the mix of customers too, says the COO.</p>
<h2>High Vision</h2>
<p>Energetic and smiling as she talks, CEO Smith, 51, was born in London and came to the U.S. in 1983 to attend business school at MIT. After three years back home, she says, she relocated to the U.S. for good to be with her future husband. An athlete who works out five or six days a week — often at four or five in the morning — Smith says she is “driven by challenge and opportunity.” She has a history of leading high-growth technology companies to prove it. For example, she points to her contributions to SRDS LP’s becoming an electronic publishing leader, the successful IPO of the Web-hosting division of <b><a href="http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/lcddata.html?ticker=MU" target="_blank">Micron Technology Inc. </a></b>(MU) when she was its COO, and <b><a href="http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/alu.html" target="_blank">Alcatel-Lucent</a></b>’s (ALU) acquisition of collaboration software provider eDial Inc. when she was its president and CEO.</p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<h2>MORE ON DIGITALGLOBE</h2>
<b><a href="greenmachine" target="_self" class="actionlink">Green Machine</a></b><br><br>
<h2>VIEW THE FIRST IMAGES FROM WORLDVIEW-2</h2>
<b><a href="dglaunch" target="_self" class="actionlink">WorldView-2</a></b>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<p>When asked by a DigitalGlobe investor to become the company’s chief executive, Smith relates, she initially declined, because she was reluctant to move from Boston to Colorado and also was flirting with the notion of retiring. She did take a board seat, though, and soon changed her mind — even, she says, after subsequently becoming CEO at Website-performance tracker Gomez Inc., in Waltham, Mass. “I had yet to encounter a company with such assets and breadth of opportunity, such high IQ and such a solid reason for being,” she says of DigitalGlobe. “The more I learned, the more my passion for the business grew.”</p>
<p>Even though just one satellite was aloft when she came aboard in November 2005, Smith knew she was onto a solid bet. “The company had a clear path ahead, high vision, significant contracts in place and many downstream opportunities,” she says of the company that now counts 500-plus employees and $275 million in annual sales (2008). Yet she knew that “pretty pictures” alone would prove inadequate in an emerging field. In 2007 she called the industry “highly fragmented in terms of content and distribution,” with “few aggregators or content owners” able to “offer consistent, complete sources of imagery and data.”</p>
<p>In addition to preparing DigitalGlobe for its May 2009 IPO, Smith has dedicated the past four years to the parallel tasks of priming the market’s appetite for earth-related content and readying DigitalGlobe to supply that content in an easily digestible way. </p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
“At heart we are a content company,” says DigitalGlobe CEO Jill Smith, “with a massive and growing library of images supplied by our satellites and our aerial partners.”
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<p>For Smith, the strategic way forward is clear. “At heart we are a content company,” she says, “with a massive and growing library of images supplied by our satellites and our aerial partners. The key to growth lies in making those images faster, better, cheaper and drop-dead easy to consume.” In DigitalGlobe’s world, a “snapshot” can equal many square kilometers and be several gigabytes in size — not something you send to a client and expect it to manage, says Smith. </p>
<PAGEBREAK>
<div class="leftImg" style="width: 200px"><img src="/statics/Q10_DigitalGlobe_atoll__180x200_TW.jpg" alt="Seychelles" /><div class="caption"><b>BIRD’S-EYE An image of Bird Island, Seychelles, collected by DigitalGlobe with its first satellite, QuickBird-2.</b><span></span></div></div>
<p>Accordingly, she charged her development team with creating an advanced platform for hosting, distributing and integrating DigitalGlobe’s content. “The challenge was to move from talking about a broad-based content strategy to actually being able to deliver one,” Smith says, “which includes making our imagery easily available to desktop applications, portals, intranets and mobile devices around the world.” </p>
<p>Following the launch of WorldView-1 in late 2007, DigitalGlobe reports, the company’s revenues climbed 81 percent, affirming the market’s appetite for earth imagery. DigitalGlobe says it yielded another milestone in May 2009, when, amid a historic tech-IPO drought, the company floated 1.4 million primary shares (and 13.3 million secondary shares) at the price of $19, one dollar above the initial $16-$18 per share range. Its stock price finished up 13 percent after the first day of trading. After cashing out selling shareholders for around $250 million, the IPO and a senior secured notes offering netted a reported $68 million in cash. “Remaining a stand-alone company and having the time to realize our goals made strategic sense,” says Smith. “The success of our public offering affirmed the market’s readiness for the DigitalGlobe story.” </p>
<p>But with its WorldView-1 satellite heavily tasked by the U.S. government, DigitalGlobe needed to up its collection capabilities to meet the demand it was cultivating. Such was Scott’s foresight around 2003 in conceiving WorldView-2, which he says “will massively increase the capacity we can allocate to the commercial side of our business.” Although not entirely make-or-break for DigitalGlobe, the stakes associated with its successful launch last fall were both literally and figuratively sky-high, he says.</p>
<h2>A “Truer” View</h2>
<p>Built by longtime partner <b><a href="http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/bll.html" target="_blank">Ball Corp.</a></b> (BLL) and incorporating imaging sensors from <b><a href="http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/itt.html" target="_blank">ITT Corp.</a></b> (ITT), WorldView-2 is a game changer for DigitalGlobe and the industry alike, Scott says. As he explains, WorldView-2, keener than the human eye and as precise as a fine paintbrush, can collect vast areas of imagery in a single orbital pass; from its 770-kilometer (478-mile) orbit, it will double DigitalGlobe’s collection capabilities. “Today we are growing our ImageLibrary at an average of 275 million square kilometers [106 million square miles] per year,” Scott says. “With WorldView-2, our aggregate annual capacity will increase to more than 500 million square kilometers [193 million square miles].” </p>
<p>With clarity to 0.46 meters (18 inches) and available to commercial customers at 0.50 meters, Scott says, WorldView-2 offers an unprecedented eight multispectral bands, which, he adds, promise an unprecedented analysis and understanding of the earth’s true natural colors. And with speed, accuracy and currency being the industry’s premiums, WorldView-2’s ability to revisit almost any place on earth in an unprecedented 1.1 days, according to Scott, will make DigitalGlobe the industry leader in same-day refresh. “More than just a satellite,” Scott says, “WorldView-2 introduces a truer visual understanding of the world.”</p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<h2>JUST THE FACTS</h2>
<ul>
<li><b>Founded</b> 1993 under the name WorldView
Imaging Corp.</li>
<li><b>Headquarters</b> Longmont, Colo.</li>
<li><b>2008 sales</b> $275.2 million</li>
<li><b>2008 net income</b> $53.8 million</li>
<li><b>Employees</b> More than 500</li>
<li><b>Number of satellites in space</b> 3</li>
<li><b>Location, location, location</b> In 2009, DigitalGlobe responded to its growth internationally with the opening of a London office and the expansion of its Singapore office.</li>
</ul>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<p>“When we began exploring this [commercial earth-imaging] market in the early 1990s,” relates R. David Hoover, chairman and CEO of Ball Corp. and a founding shareholder of DigitalGlobe, “the players were basically Ball, Livermore Lab and EarthWatch [DigitalGlobe’s previous name]. The concept was to use small satellites for imaging, with the U.S. government as the primary market, along with civil, nongovernmental applications such as agriculture and urban planning.” </p>
<p>For Scott, Ball’s ability to build highly capable, cost-effective satellites was a natural draw. Ball has since built all of DigitalGlobe’s satellites; its Colorado location also contributed to DigitalGlobe’s choice of Longmont, just north of Boulder and within sight of the Rocky Mountain foothills, for its headquarters. </p>
<h2>Market: Space</h2>
<p>Opportunities in the field of earth imaging continue to grow,” CEO Smith says. She goes on to say that while there is opportunity across a variety of industries, the continuing embrace of commercial satellite-imagery providers by the U.S. government remains of utmost importance to DigitalGlobe. In October 2008, the U.S. Congress canceled funds for the Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection program, in part because of a recognition of commercial data providers’ growing capabilities; in April 2009, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced plans to increase usage of commercial satellite imagery, based in part on its availability and greater “flexibility to respond to unforeseen challenges.”</p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<h2>MORE ON DIGITALGLOBE</h2>
<b><a href="greenmachine" target="_self" class="actionlink">Green Machine</a></b><br><br>
<h2>VIEW THE FIRST IMAGES FROM WORLDVIEW-2</h2>
<b><a href="dglaunch" target="_self" class="actionlink">WorldView-2</a></b>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<p>DigitalGlobe reports that it also just extended its monthly $12.5 million service-level agreement with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, which it says purchases images for 16 U.S. government entities. The NGA also awarded DigitalGlobe a contract to provide near-real-time delivery of unclassified daily images, the company says. Other recent wins include four new international direct-access-program, or DAP, contracts (in which clients buy direct-access time on the satellites from DigitalGlobe, much as with cell-phone minutes) and a strategic sales alliance with European Space Imaging and Space Imaging Middle East to create the WorldView Global Alliance, according to the company. </p>
<PAGEBREAK>
<p>Scott says that competitors will have to work hard to catch DigitalGlobe. Except for Virginia-based GeoEye Inc., DigitalGlobe is the only U.S. provider of the NGA and the only licensee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Barriers to entering the earth-imaging market can be prohibitive: Building a state-of-the-art satellite costs close to $500 million and takes nearly five years, according to DigitalGlobe. International competitors include Spot Image in France and Kompsat in South Korea, but as analysts at <b><a href="http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/ms.html" target="_blank">Morgan Stanley</a></b> (MS) note, players abroad are “generally government controlled and less commercially focused.”</p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Smith admits that she does not know exactly where the industry is headed. But Wherever it is going, she says, “DigitalGlobe must be the go-to company. We must be at the epicenter of the ecosystem.”
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<p>“Imaging companies may have specific parts of the globe covered, but in terms of digitally painting the entire earth, we have a strong lead,” declares Smith. Her challenge now is deciding where to focus. “While it is tempting to pursue all revenue-stream opportunities at once,” she says, “our core priorities are developing customer-intimate relationships with the U.S. government, international defense and intelligence concerns, Internet portals and location-based service providers, and civil governments in emerging economies like the BRIC countries, where demand for mapping solutions is high.”</p>
<p>Still, Smith admits that she does not know exactly where the industry is headed. Wherever it is going, though, “DigitalGlobe must be the go-to company,” she says. “We must be at the epicenter of the ecosystem.” </p>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<h2>MORE ON DIGITALGLOBE</h2>
<b><a href="greenmachine" target="_self" class="actionlink">Green Machine</a></b><br><br>
<h2>VIEW THE FIRST IMAGES FROM WORLDVIEW-2</h2>
<b><a href="dglaunch" target="_self" class="actionlink">WorldView-2</a></b>
</BLOCKQUOTE> <br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>
335
2010-01-09T16:16:56-06:00
#<User:0xa3272b0>
For DigitalGlobe CEO Jill Smith, things are looking down — and that’s great news as the company expands its earth-imaging business.
View From Above
430
131
false
1Q 2010
DigitalGlobe
2010-01-25T00:00:00-06:00
For DigitalGlobe CEO Jill Smith, things are looking down — and that’s great news as the company expands its earth-imaging business.
DigitalGlobe, Jill Smith, earth-imaging, satellite, WorldView-2
DigitalGlobe
2010-01-22
DigitalGlobe
With the launch of a new satellite, DigitalGlobe is expanding it’s reach.
334
View From Above
2010-01-29T12:17:20-06:00
#<User:0xa324880>