What’s in a name? Plenty, according to the new Cassidian
Last week, the former Plant CML changed its name to Cassidian Communications in order to better align itself with Cassidian, one of the four major anchors — Airbus, Astrium and Eurocopter are the others — of the EADS global portfolio. A few days after the announcement, I spoke with Tami Tamperio, vice president of marketing for Cassidian Communications, who told me that the shift provides “a very powerful leverage point” for her company. “This is going to allow us to take our solutions internationally,” she said.
According to Tamperio, the former Plant CML will dovetail nicely with the “complete security portfolio” that Cassidian offers, which includes military surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles, border security and complete country-wide notification. She added that Cassidian’s global perspective, expertise and reputation will be quite valuable on complete border-control and emergency-management projects that her company currently is bidding on in Europe and the Middle East, a business environment that is very different than the North American market.
“It’s very interesting when you’re moving into those arenas, because they’re whole countries that are similar to our whole states,” Tamperio said. “They have significantly more interesting challenges in some facets than we do and they have different needs.”
I’m in favor of anything that would make Tamperio’s company more competitive. The two-way radio business in North America too long has been dominated by a behemoth or too, and greater competition would be a good thing for those who purchase systems and equipment. That said, a strategy that the former Plant CML embraced a while ago likely will have as much or greater impact than a stronger alignment with Cassidian. The company actively has embraced strategic partnerships that will serve it well as the industry moves towards a best-in-class system approach that the Project 25 standard finally appears on the cusp of enabling.
According to Michael Doerk, a Cassidian Communications marketing manager, the growing complexity of the technology had made it unrealistic that a single vendor will provide the best solutions across all aspects of an entities communications system, whether it’s the radio network, the subscriber units or the dispatch console.
“If you’re truly going to have a best-in-class solution, someone is going to have to bring together products from multiple vendors,” Doerk said.
Truer words never were spoken.
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