[Satellite News 05-25-10] Hughes Network Systems’ quest to provide U.S. state governments with Spaceway 3 satellite service has taken a leap forward this week with the award of two Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts from Texas and Colorado to support the states’ park systems.
    Colorado State Parks, a division of the State’s Department of Natural Resources, contracted Hughes to provide Spaceway 3 satellite broadband service to operations at 15 state park sites. The contract, awarded through the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Cooperative Purchasing Program, is for a period of one year with two option years.
    Under its contract with the State of Texas, state agencies, local governments, public school districts, and public higher educational institutions may purchase Hughes satellite services to meet emergency preparedness and management priorities. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department placed the first order under the contract for a back-up network to support 90 state park sites. The contract is for a term of one year with three, one-year options.
    For both of its state customers, Hughes will broadband service access continuity solutions including, voice, video, and data application support, site-to-site and site-to-data center connectivity, managed network services and a hubless architecture that delivers secure, low-cost private satellite networks
    Tony Bardo, assistant vice president for government solutions at Hughes, said the contract vehicle in Colorado opens up new enterprise connectivity opportunities for his company. “With over 11 million people visiting its parks and recreation programs each year, Colorado State Parks depends on reliable network connectivity to support its online reservation system, serve its customers, and manage facilities. Some of these park facilities are in remote locations where terrestrial networks are either cost-prohibitive or non-existent.”
    In Texas, Hughes was given a similar opportunity. “Texas agencies and local governments are on the front lines of citizen service, both in the day-to-day operation of government and during an emergency—when secure, reliable network communications are essential to meeting expectations,” said Bardo.
    Bardo’s sales team now boasts ten U.S. state government contract vehicles. Bardo told Satellite News that Hughes’ sales strategy has stayed under the radar because of the time and effort investment required to make the strategy work. While the commercial satellite industry is far from ignoring government contract vehicles with its activity in providing military bandwidth and winning international broadband provision contracts with top-level governments, Hughes may have found that rural and remote local governments in the United States are a market that lies just outside of its competitors’ focus. According to Bardo, a 30-year veteran of government sales, the challenge of forming a sales team to capture that market may seem too difficult for a company without the resources available to Hughes.
    “After Pradman formed our group, we began to develop our strategy. We began by identifying and understanding the problems that federal, state or local government agencies have which can be solved specifically by broadband solutions in order to find a focus,” said Bardo. “We then embarked on a strategy to build a portfolio of contract vehicles. We started from the top-down, with the U.S. General Services Administration [GSA] on the federal side and had some success there in getting our services on the GSA schedule and a contract award for the Satcom 2 program.”
    One of the most important connections that Hughes’ government sales team attempts to make is the need for the state to have diverse, robust emergency services. It is a very personal connection to make with a local government representative, according to Bardo, because of the national attention that Hurricane Katrina brought to mobile infrastructure. “Depending on their size, population and geography, each state has both remote areas with no access to broadband and the need for public safety connectivity. Rural areas are held captive by single-threaded, mostly terrestrial communications. Massive flooding on the level of Katrina will leave single-threaded telecommunications systems on the ground helpless. So we try to advocate a couple of things: That satellite is location indifferent and that we can solve several related problems at one and that, at the same time, we understand the need for state and local governments to have diversity in their communications. They need another way out, so to speak.”