Maxar Announces Leadership Changes, Maintains Technology Focus

New management and a rebranding initiative are two signs of change for Maxar in 2019, but the company’s focus on growth and delivering innovative technology remains the same.

Radiant Solutions, SSL and DigitalGlobe were consolidated into Maxar. The company is focused on two strategic market segments, earth intelligence and space solutions.

Tony Frazier, a 2019 Wash100 winner and former president of Radiant, became executive vice president of global field operations for Maxar, a technology innovator powering the space economy. In an interview with Executive Biz Frazier outlined the changes occurring inside the company.

Daniel Jablonsky, a former president of DigitalGlobe, took the reins as president and CEO in early 2019. Among its multiple government contracts Maxar is helping NASA build a spacecraft that will demonstrate on-orbit satellite refueling technology which is scheduled to launch in 2022.

Following changes to the executive team Frazier is taking on an expanded role. At Radiant he was responsible for a segment that made up 12 percent of Maxar’s revenue. Now he is responsible for planning and executing the company’s go-to-market strategy.

“I have more global responsibility,” he said. “At Radiant 90 percent of my time was focused on supporting U.S. government clients across the intelligence community and the Department of Defense.”

Frazier handles all customer facing activities including sales, business development and service delivery. Given the robust demand for Maxar capabilities one of his biggest challenges is attracting and developing talent with more than100 open positions available for software developers, data scientists and intelligence analysts.

“Every day is an adventure,” Frazier said. “We’re looking at how to drive growth for the company, meet our customers’ needs and build a better world.”

Maxar is still early in the transition stage with its rebranding efforts. The first public appearance since the changes were announced occurred at the Space Symposium in April. Frazier said the company will continue sponsoring events such as Satellite 2019 in May and the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation GEOINT Symposium in June under the Maxar brand.

Earth intelligence obtained through satellite imagery, radar data and other forms of geospatial information remains one of the company’s greatest revenue sources. While the demand for communication satellites has waned, Frazier emphasized that the Maxar Space Solutions manufacturing operation remains a strategic asset for earth observation and space robotics.

Maxar generated $ 2.1 billion in revenue in 2018 with about $800M from federal government clients including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Army and Air Force, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.

“The world is going through continuous change,” Frazier said. “Our national security and commercial customers have an insatiable demand to see and understand changes on the ground at global scale. New strategies from the defense and intelligence community outline a desire to tap into new data sources and analytic methods like AI and machine learning to transform how they make decisions.”

In addition to the U.S. government, Maxar also serves many international allies such as Canada, Australia, Japan and dozens of other countries across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and South America. In many cases Maxar can develop a capability in one customer segment that can be adapted to serve global customers.

Some of the company’s top commercial clients include technology giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber and Facebook.

“We have a unique model,” he said. “We take a commercial approach to provide earth intelligence services from a constellation of satellites that we own and now manufacture. We collect data and deliver information and analytics as a service to both the federal government, dozens of international allies, and thousands of commercial customers.”

Maxar specializes in high resolution mapping and is investing $600 million in WorldView Legion, a new generation of commercial satellites scheduled to launch in 2021 that will provide hourly monitoring capability over hotspots around the world.

“We provide end-to-end earth intelligence from manufacturing all the way to service delivery,” he said. “We can shape the roadmap. We build satellites to support data collection, data enrichment and delivery of insight. That’s what we were built to do.”