Cassidian Communications changes company name to Airbus DS Communications

If you go looking for Cassidian Communications’ booth at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) conference today, you’ll have trouble finding it. That’s because Cassidian Communications changed its name Friday to Airbus DS Communications, and the company’s booth is completely decked out with its new name.

An e-mail was sent out to its customers – who number about 26,000 – on Friday informing them of the move.

“It’s just a name change only. Our ownership is still the same,” Flynn Nogueria, marketing director for Airbus DS Communications, said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

Airbus Defense and Space Holdings, based in Herndon, Va., owns the company. The parent company previously was known as EADS but renamed itself last year and consolidated its defense and space businesses into a division called Communications, Intelligence and Security. Cassidian Communications was part of that consolidation, and company CEO Bob Freinberg discussed name-change plans in June with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

With the name change comes an entire rebranding of the division’s products, which will now all fall under the VESTA brand. The renaming was intended to simplify the names, which include products like VESTA 911 system for call processing and VESTA SMS for text-to-911 service.

“I would say that public safety is at such an incredibly important point in time, in terms of next-generation technology taking off and also on the land-mobile-radio side—the P25 standards really being recognized, and customers understanding why competitive procurement and why open standards compliance are so important,” Nogueria said.

“It’s like perfect timing—a new beginning,” she said, referring to the name change.