SAN FRANCISCO – Vantor will operate and enhance the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (GEGD) platform, an unclassified web-based system, under a $70 million award announced May 4.
Under the one-year contract option, Vantor will continue to upgrade the latest version of the platform, GEGD Pro, which provides secure access to commercial and government-furnished imagery and data for U.S. national security and civilian agency users.
With the rapid expansion of the commercial geospatial industry, NGA and other government agencies have access to abundant sources of imagery and data. Increasingly, the challenge is not in acquiring imagery of a certain location, but of fusing datasets, analyzing the results and delivering information.
“GEGD Pro is a good example of that shift because it is giving users access to imagery and the software infrastructure that brings different data sources together — imagery, maps, change-detection information, derived products — and makes it usable for different missions and operations,” Susanne Hake, executive vice president and general manager for Vantor’s U.S. government business, told <em>SpaceNews. “We’re providing the software and infrastructure that allows all of that data to be integrated and then to be readily accessible to all of the users of GEOINT across the community.”
GEGD Pro is a data-agnostic platform that provides access to Vantor’s extensive archive of high-resolution electro-optical imagery along with imagery and data from other electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar satellite operators.
Vantor is focused on enhancing GEGD Pro to allow user to “search for, identify and analyze” geospatial information quickly and easily, Hake said. “Decisions are being made faster and faster. How quickly can we get imagery and information into an analyst’s hands?”
While GEGD Pro was built for NGA, the underlying software platform could serve international customers seeking sovereign capabilities.
Increasingly, countries want “trusted systems that let them analyze and control their own intelligence and how it’s integrated and delivered,” Hake said. “This is a dual-use platform that can be used by different countries.”
Vantor has won three NGA contracts in the last year. In addition to GEGD Pro, NGA awarded Vantor a $2.3 million contract to provide intelligence on space objects and a $5.3 million award to identify changes to physical terrain, under the Luno program.