Author: John Clifton

We’re Attending Space Tech Expo Europe

Posted on by John Clifton

The count down begins as Andrew Ball and Ewan Lawrenson represent neuco at Space Tech, Bremen!

Space Tech Expo Europe is the continent’s major dedicated supply-chain and engineering event for manufacturing, design, test and engineering services for spacecraft, subsystems and space-qualified components. The exhibition and conference draw attendance from thousands of industry leaders, decision makers, engineers, specifiers and buyers to meet manufacturers across the supply chain for commercial, government and military space.

If you are in Bremen on the 17th or 18th of November, make sure you drop them a note to get in touch!

TRADESHOWS ARE BACK ….Space Tech Expo Europe… it’s going to be a blast!!!

#neuco #spacetechexpo

You can’t be what you can’t see

Posted on by John Clifton

Joining Tegan Valeny and Jake Sparkes for episode 51 of The Tech That Connects Us was Kate Wendelboe.

Kate has had a fascinating career and held senior, influential roles at BT, such as Director of Media & Broadcast and sits on the Board for Rise – a group for Women in Broadcast.

We delved into how Rise is helping address issues of diversity and inclusion, as well as a few other questions around inclusive teams and fitting in, here’s what Kate had to say.

How are Rise helping address issues of diversity and inclusion?  

“One of the best things we do with Rise is making sure that there’s that pipeline of talent coming up. Because that is it; it’s educating children from the youngest of ages, about the opportunities that are out there for them to open their minds up to industries like media broadcast and cyber security. 

With Rise we have a whole series of programmes where we’re looking at the pipeline, all the way from school, up to supporting professionals who are decades into their careers. Our Rise Up programme goes into school and we get kit and link it to some of the science curricula and talk about how images appear on screens. Then we get them to set up a studio in their classroom, so it’s a hands-on experience. Then in the afternoon, they film a game show which brings the whole thing to life for them. 

We’re then finding ways to keep in touch with them as they progress through the education system. We’ve set up a mentoring scheme for people who are at university, we’ve then got a second scheme for people who are early in their career and then networking events throughout to promote the network and to allow people to feel supported.”

So how can we make our teams more inclusive? 

“We’ve just had a brilliant series of events at BT about race, diversity and inclusion, and it’s something that we’re talking a lot about internally. You can have diversity but without inclusion, it’s important to make sure there’s representation. So we’re making sure that we have enough of different groups represented. So that everybody in the team can look around and see somebody who is a bit like them in some ways. And that very much helps in gender inclusivity and makes diversity sustainable. 

‘You can’t be what you can’t see’ 

This all comes back to culture it’s so important that we create a culture where these things can be discussed, and myths can be dispelled and people limiting beliefs about themselves can be worked through and dispelled as much as possible.”

What would your advice be to someone worried about fitting into the industry or concerned about being different? 

“Make sure that you’ve found as many different people as you can within the industry, to make sure you’re getting lots of different perspectives and find somebody that you can trust to talk to. It may be easier said than done but those conversations that you can have when you find somebody you can be open with will help you dispel some of the myths.”

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What does the threat landscape look like right now for OT?

Posted on by John Clifton

Joining us for episode 50 of The Tech That Connects Us was David Brown Vice President and General Manager, International Sales – ZeroFOX. We heard his insights on the OT domain – where he’s headed up both IPOs and acquisitions, what really keeps CISOs up at night, alternative models for industry events, how to recognise the potential in new hires and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

One question Jake Sparkes and John Clifton put to David was ‘What does the threat landscape look like right now for OT?’ Here’s what he had to say.

“There’s no doubt that there are more types of attacks now on OT. We’re seeing ransomware popping up a lot more commonly, or at least we’re hearing about that more now. 

One of the interesting bits about OT is actually when you look at the infrastructure it’s built on. I’d still say that Windows NT and XP are probably the most prevalent operating systems in an OT environment around the world. 

So what does that mean? It means that there’s a tonne of exploits available straight off the internet, you don’t need to be that smart. But if you work up through the levels of sophistication and if we’re talking about large organisations they’ve got quite a sophisticated security posture. 

The two things that I think are really interesting at the moment in that space is the consolidation of the technology to see what’s going on in your OT network. Because if you are a CESO or an information security director then you’ve got more flashing lights than you know what to do with. You may also have an ageing workforce without the domain expertise to understand what’s going on. 

So I think there’s going to be a bigger drive for how do you consolidate all that stuff into a single pane of glass, there’ll be a drive to provide either AI or a managed service that provides recommended actions and remedial work for the top three to five actions that the organisation needs to be focused on. And those actions will be evidenced by what’s going on outside in the rest of the world. 

The second thing that’s of interest at the moment is risk. So you’re seeing now there are new bills going through in the US, and CESOs are looking at what’s the risk across all of my platforms IT and OT. A drive for this is that it’s not been so easy to understand what’s going on with OT, because you’ve had all these flashing lights and an unconnected system, with a lot of tech but it’s just not connected.  

The reason they want to know what their risk is because there’s also a developing insurance market where a number of insurers are getting together and looking at how they can take IT and OT cyber risk and turn that into a sellable product. When we look at the potential of that market it’s probably 30-40 times the size of the complete OT market. What I can see we will get to in the next 2-3 years is a similar system to the black boxes currently being used by vehicle insurers, so you’ll have a premium and it will vary depending on your attitude to risk and your controls that are in place across the whole estate. That then allows organisations to make an economic decision because you might say I will stand the increase in premium which justifies me doing these things across my plant. 

This then becomes a very much return on investment decision. It’s not about fear, uncertainty and doubt it’s actually about economic imperative.” 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Why the space industry needs to be thinking about refuelling.

Posted on by John Clifton

Joining us on episode 49 of The Tech That Connects Us was Daniel Faber CEO at Orbit Fab. Daniel joined Andrew Ball and Ewan Lawrenson to discuss the future of the space industry and how Orbit Fab will fuel it. The vision Daniel has for the future of space is nothing short of spectacular!

So why does the space industry need to be thinking about refuelling?

“The problem is nobody is buying fuel in orbit yet. It’s worse than that, as nobody has fuelling ports. Everyone is in a paradigm where you just don’t refuel satellites. We’re working on getting people out of that paradigm and shifting that mindset. 

‘don’t disrupt your customers, disrupt your competition’ 

 So we’re trying to convince our customers, the satellite operators whose business is providing telecommunications service to people on the ground, they’re focusing on that, so they don’t want their business disrupted. 

 What we decided to do instead was realise that they shouldn’t be our first customers. The satellite operators will come along eventually but for now, we’re looking to partner with other satellite servicing businesses. For example, companies that are building tow trucks in space, these tow trucks are used for rendezvous and docking, it’s part of their procedure. 

 What currently happens is the tow trucks are used for four or five operations, they run out of fuel, you then throw away the tow truck and build a brand new one. You run out of fuel, throw away your tow truck and buy a completely new one and launch it. 

 In the space industry, despite how inefficient something is we still do it. Because there’s so much value to having that vantage point in space. 

 Once we’d realised that our market was the tow trucks and satellite servicing companies our probability of winning as a company is predicated on the satellite servicing industry. 3 years ago there were eight companies in this industry, today more than 60 companies are working on satellite servicing a 600% increase. 

‘today more than 60 companies are working on satellite servicing a 600% increase’. 

 The perception in the industry is that satellite servicing is inevitable. So it’s been a huge change in a brand new industry.”

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

How can the Broadcast Media Industry have a positive impact on the Environment?

Posted on by John Clifton

Joining us on episode 48 of The Tech That Connects Us was Darren Long Group Operations Transformation Design CT&I for Sky. Darren has been working for Sky for the past 32 years across News, Sports Entertainment and Production, as a director in a range of different capacities, such as Group Content Processing, Production and Services and Operations.

Darren joined Tegan Valeny and Henry Johnson where they discussed diversity, inspiring a healthy culture, the future of content creation and the importance of owning a dog.

One question Tegan and Henry put to Darren was ‘How can the broadcast media industry have a positive impact on the environment?’ Here’s what he had to say.

“At Sky, we’re now committed to becoming carbon neutral. Last weekend we did our first carbon-neutral football match in conjunction with Tottenham and the supporting staff and infrastructure. 

If we look at these opportunities, we’ve got an important role to play. We are a broadcaster, and all broadcasters need to ensure that we lead by example. That’s something that Sky has always wanted to do and we’re very lucky because we own the whole supply chain, everything from the customer buying the equipment through to making and distributing the programmes. This gives us a unique opportunity to own that whole customer journey from an environmentally friendly perspective. So we can ensure that from a carbon-neutral point of view we tick every single box along the journey. 

We took a really strong lead on this and Jeremy Darroch was instrumental in ensuring that everything we do going forward is “do we reduce our carbon footprint?”. From the packaging, we use to the way we recycle our equipment. Traditionally people would hold on to the equipment and never give it back, so of course, it went to landfills and various other things. Now, technically, you never own that equipment personally, it’s owned by Sky so that means once your contract finishes and you no longer want it then we take that back and recycle. 

 Everything we do going forward will be about actually how can we minimise the environmental impact. All the Sports we’re at, we ensure that the people who are working on the sports are doing so in a way that’s very economical and reducing the carbon footprint. From how they get to the venues, all the way through to the distribution platform minimising the power that we’re using. 

The key thing we can do is sending the message around why this is important and making sure that message is strong. So every single day we have a climate report which is on Sky News. It’s about educating people, not just preaching, but trying to give people an understanding of why we’re doing this. We believe in this wholeheartedly, and from an industry point of view if you look at all these productions now that whether they be for Sky or other companies they are trying to measure every single part of the impact of those productions. Traditionally you’d build sets and then destroy them, you’d use plastic cups and all those things. So whilst some of these things are very small, you know what? From small things grow large trees. 

 Sky is not just doing this as a tick box exercise, we really do believe in what we’re doing 100% and everything we do going forward around the way that we deliver our services and the way we recycle our services is going to be measured. That in itself is important, people should hold us accountable for our actions. It’s important that when products arrive that customers know that packaging isn’t just thrown in the bin but can be brought back to Sky, recycled and used again. 

 From an industry point of view, it’s time for us to lead the charge. There are lots of good broadcasters, filmmakers, and TV production crews who are doing this now. So we have a responsibility to keep doing this, keep improving and keep supporting companies and industries that bring innovation in this area as well.” 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Is the Cyber Security industry getting cloud security wrong?

Posted on by John Clifton

Joining us on episode 47 of The Tech That Connects Us was Trish Cagliostro Head of Worldwide Alliances at Wiz. Trish joined Laurie Scott and Andrew Ball. They only scratched the surface in a conversation that spanned Cloud Security, threat intelligence, the partner landscape, Cyber’s diversity challenge, the joys of softball and much more!

Trish is a thought leader in the cyber security industry, so whilst we had her on the podcast we needed to find out if the industry was getting cloud security wrong as is mentioned by commentators in the industry. Here’s what Trish had to say. 

“Cloud security is hard. It’s hard and it’s a little bit different from what the rest of the industry says. Cloud security isn’t so much of a problem for the born in the cloud companies, such as Netflix, they’re fine. Where this does become an issue is when a traditional enterprise goes to the cloud. Organisations go to the cloud for innovation, the costs savings are nice, but it’s the elasticity and the ability to endlessly expand and instantly expand globally that is powerful. 

However, the way these traditional organisations go to the cloud typically looks like this. They look at their applications on-premise, they go with what’s easy and upload some VMs into the cloud and expect to take their on-premise security structure with them. 6 months then go by, and the customer is thinking that they can’t innovate and they aren’t saving much money. So they want to look at what they can do differently from here. They’ll then start to refactor some of their applications, containerise, embrace some more modern application architecture, replatform and kick the Oracle legacy databases to the curb. 

Now the organisation will have a stopping point on their cloud adoption, they have their legacy on-premise tools supporting the legacy workloads. So now they need to go out and use some cloud-native services as all the cloud providers have cloud-native services. But they’ll have some very different types of computing that are very different in the cloud than they are on-premise. Then there’s the idea of a managed service which comes with the complication of the shared responsibility model. So at this point, the company will be looking at different tools from different vendors for niche cloud security. This is where the breach happens, all of a sudden, there are three separate data silos, the traditional on-premise tools, the cloud-native services from the cloud providers and the new types of security tools that were brought in to deal with the new types of cloud computing. 

So now these organisations still can’t innovate, they’re probably spending just as much money as they were in the first place, Then the cloud provider comes in and says ‘let me tell you about serverless’. The whole model is then broken. So in this instance, I don’t think it’s fair to blame the cyber security industry. It’s a shared responsibility between the industry and the customers as well, to think differently about security in the cloud. 

I meet with partners all the time, and they’ll say to me ‘Okay got it, it’s the same way we dealt with data centre security. But you can’t think that way. You have to think of a customer and the entire cloud journey they’re going on, and then understand how to build a security strategy that supports them across that. 

The other part of this is beyond just helping them with the security strategy and explaining that the customer will need to have an unusually long term vision with this and that we need to be transparent, understanding and really dig into what we’re doing in the cloud. A lot of time to the customers it’s not obvious, they’re normally using a managed service and think they’re good. You need to have a clear understanding of what your responsibilities are as a vendor, then make sure you have the controls and mitigation in place to account for what’s really important.  

I really do think that when we think about this we can’t just think about it in phases, we have to think about it holistically through the journey. 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What’s the current state of the new space market right now?

Posted on by John Clifton

Joining us on episode 46 of The Tech That Connects Us was Sascha Deri CEO at bluShift Aerospace. Sascha joined Laurie Scott and Andrew Ball.

bluShift Aerospace, are an exciting New Space company aiming to not only drastically reduce the cost of space flight but also offer a much more environmentally friendly solution than any other launch provider out there at the moment.  

So what is the state of the New Space marketing currently? What’s happening and what’s coming to the market soon? Here’s what Sascha is currently seeing. 

“The market is taking off, there was some suppression of the market last year thanks to COVID, but that was for everybody. So with the nano and small sat launches that are occurring now they’re being owned by Space X, the majority of the small sats that are out there are theirs. But they are out there making it happen – so kudos to them. 

But there are also rocket companies left and right, in addition to launch specifics services like our own. But now those companies are looking at the possibility of also providing some payloads of their own because you’re sending stuff all that way, it isn’t a stretch to provide some of your services or at least some of your technologies. 

The market certainly didn’t grow as much as we wanted it to in the last year from what I saw. But Frost and Sullivan came up with a market report which said the market is looking strong and aiming to do 38 billion in just launches for small satellites to space by 2030. So that will remain a very strong industry. 

For us, the opportunities is not only that, but the population and corporations are looking to do things in a more earth responsible way. There’s a lot of focus on carbon footprints, there’s a lot of focus around transportation and electric vehicles and space transport is one of the last industries which hasn’t been touched by the ‘we should do things in a little more environmentally responsible way’. So what was cool for us as a small company launched in the United States was when we first launched a rocket using bio drive fuel we’d then see articles pop up in spacenews.com and other places then the dialogue started to change to ‘Hey space companies, you should be doing something that’s a little bit more earth-friendly.’ 

So our next launch will be off the coast of Maine, and we’ll be launching over the ocean, and in Maine, there’s a very strong fishing industry. So if your rocket has highly refined kerosene in it, or a nasty oxidizer what’s that going to do to the fisheries below? What is it doing to the ecosystem below? So even if we ignore the climate change aspects, if that rocket is plunging to the ocean and it’s not always being retrieved or it’s leaking a bit what’s that going to do to the fisheries? With ours, we can safely say other than the kinetics we will not contaminate the ecosystem below. Of course with our orbital launches and first stages of our rocket engines we plan to fully recover them and then next year we’ll be doing the same with civil, academic and commercial rockets. But you know in the bad case that one does plummet into the ocean we feel very confident that it won’t affect the ecosystem below us, and we won’t have our local fisherman being mad at us. 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What can the satellite industry take from the mobile device space?

Posted on by John Clifton

Joining us on episode 45 of The Tech That Connects Us is John Kinney VP of Quality Assurance with Intelsat. John joined Laurie Scott and Tom Wilding to talk about all thing’s connectivity, aircraft connectivity, business optimisation, quality and customer service. 

 John has an impressive background with over 20 years at Motorola and beyond, having worked at Rockwell Automation and Blackberry, so we wanted to find out what can the satellite industry learn from the mobile device space? Here’s what John has to say. 

“There are certainly some parallels between the two industries. They’re very similar actually, we’re just sending bits and bytes over different media. 

The main thing we can learn from the cellular industry is to focus on the customer experience. Everything starts with the customer. 

How does the customer want to use it? 

What issues does the customer currently have? 

Once we know what the customer wants and what issues we’re trying to solve for them we can work our way back through the network and supply chain, but we need to stay focused on the customer experience. 

As you know I worked for Motorola for a long time, and then went on to Blackberry and so I had a front-row seat watching Apple evolve. I remember the launch of the original iPhone in 2007. They came out with it and when it first launched the iPhone wasn’t very reliable, in fact, it was the worst-performing phone from a reliability perspective. The phone itself was fantastic from an applications point of view and it was neat and the industry was of course very curious, but it just wasn’t reliable. 

This is where Apple changed the rules to the game, this is where their focus went to customer experience. They knew when it launched that it wasn’t going to be the best, but the end isn’t the beginning. We need to remember the end, and Apple and the iPhone went from the worst to the best in two years from a reliability perspective. How did they do that? By focusing on customer experience, they did it by just learning, learning and learning some more. 

This is where they changed the rules in the industry. It was always the case that the network carrier would own the customer experience, so if you had a problem with your phone, you’d have to take it back to AT&T, Sprint or Verizon who would then send it back to the OEM. You’d have a middle person, within the loop. But Apple said no, we don’t want that middle person, everything went directly back to Apple, they bypassed AT&T who had an exclusive deal on the original iPhone. They did that intentionally, they wanted to learn and they didn’t want that learning to be filtered through the carrier, and they wanted to figure out what was going on fast and fix it fast. Which is what they did. 

 So, I learnt a lot from Apple just dominating from a customer experience point of view, they were a formidable opponent. 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What can the connectivity industry and everything associated with being connected learn from its past?

Posted on by John Clifton

Episode 44 of The Tech That Connects us saw Omae Qaise the Founder and CEO of OQ Technology join Laurie Scott and Tom Wilding to cover 5G, IoT, the evolution of M2M, Albert Einstein & Elon Musk. 

In a moment of reflection, Omar was asked what can the connectivity industry and everything associated with being connected learn from its past? Here’s what he had to say. 

 “One of the biggest lessons learnt is that the model of developing your technology, your hardware and your own ecosystem from scratch which has often been the way with traditional satellite and communication business isn’t the right approach. 

 The problem is, there are still many new space companies and startups going in the same direction. This is a major difference when you look at the mobile telecommunication industry, they’ve been through that phase and nowadays there are standards, you have GSM, LTE or 5G and there are multiple operators, chip vendors, and hardware manufacturers who all follow a standard. You can connect sensors to phones, and phones to operators just by changing a sim card. Could you imagine if all operators used different sized and shaped sim cards? 

 That’s why the satellite industry is expensive. Connectivity specifically is down to the hardware. If we want to change this then we need to tap into the existing ecosystem that everyone understands and uses from North pole to South, from Australia to America to India. That is the mobile technology that our satellites can be used for as cell towers in the sky. Users can connect seamlessly, and they won’t know if they’re connected to a terrestrial network or a facility network. This is a first in the world because mobile chips they’re very cheap, and the connectivity is cheap and that’s because millions of engineering hours have been put into scaling that technology. There is already an ecosystem, with lots of participants and players. 

 If you compare a 4 or 5 dollar cellular chip with a satellite alternative, firstly each satellite operator have their own chips, which start at a few 100 dollars, not including a device! Now imagine if the 5 dollar cellular chip could do the same job as the satellite chip and the terrestrial chip, it’s not something that’s unheard of but it’s yet to be scaled. 

 This is really going to open up a lot of opportunities, allowing access for a lot of users and enable mobility between terrestrial and satellite technologies. That will then funnel into big data of massive machine communication, which is one of the biggest aspects of the 5G revolution.” 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Is diversity and inclusion at the top of your agenda?

Posted on by John Clifton

Diversity and inclusion is one of the most important ethical and strategic priorities for businesses in 2021, but is it top of your agenda?

Over the last month we’ve been busy collating some of the best answers from our amazing guests on The Tech That Connects Us podcast. Every week we ask the big question on diversity and inclusion and get insight into what they’re doing to make that positive difference.

In this white paper we’ve compiled 10 fantastic insights and tips business leaders need to think about if they want to begin the process of building a truly diverse organisation, filled with talented individuals from different backgrounds.

This white paper will provide you with some tangible actions, that will build momentum and have a positive impact on diversity within your business.

If you’d like to talk to us about what we have learnt or the experiences of others in your industry please get in touch.

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.