French Companies Join Forces to Intensify Deployment of Geoinformation Services

Airbus Defence and Space has signed a partnership agreement with TerraNIS, a geoinformation services company working in the fields of agriculture, environment and land management, and ARTAL Technologies, a company specialising in software development. This agreement aims to boost the use of services based on satellite imagery by private and public players, both in France and internationally.

The new partnership will further intensify the deployment of geoinformation services through robust processing channels and an expanded customer portfolio, ranging from SMEs and local authorities to national institutional entities. All of these services will benefit from the advantages offered by the fleet of satellites operated by Airbus Defence and Space, which is the market’s most extensive in terms of resolution, reactivity and availability: radar satellites with TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X and soon PAZ, optical satellites with SPOT 6 and SPOT 7, DMC-2, DEIMOS-1, plus the constellation of very high-resolution Pléiades 1A and 1B satellites.

Bernhard Brenner, head of Geo-Intelligence at Airbus Defence and Space, said this collaboration will enable a large number of private and public players to access the best of the company’s space technology, thanks to tailor-made services developed to precisely address their needs. For more than 30 years, Airbus Defence and Space has been providing geoinformation services using satellite imagery, across a broad market spectrum comprising mapping and land management, the environment and agriculture, oil and gas exploration and defence and security.

Eugenius

Marc Tondriaux, CEO of TerraNIS, commented that thanks to the ‘Eugenius’ (European Group of Enterprises for a Network of Information Using Space) initiative that they have just launched and are coordinating, the company will be setting up a network of European SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) that, each in their own region, will be providing these services, using the same technical platform and sharing a common catalogue of products and services.

TerraNIS specialises in the development and marketing of geoinformation services in the fields of agriculture, environment and land management, and also provides consulting, support and expertise for users of Earth observation-based technologies. For several years now, TerraNIS has been offering worldwide operation and distribution of the Pixagri and œnoview precision agriculture and wine-growing services developed by Airbus Defence and Space, in partnership with ICV (Institut Coopératif du Vin) for wine-growers.

ARTAL Technologies is an IT consulting and services company that has real expertise in the architecture of software infrastructures for industrial fields such as aeronautics, space and defence. Thanks to this technical expertise, ARTAL provides industrialisation and lifetime maintenance for the production tools developed by Airbus Defence and Space and TerraNIS for the benefit of their customers, said Pierre Duverneuil, CEO of ARTAL Technologies. The activities of ARTAL Technologies involve around one hundred staff, with offices in France and Canada.