NGA awards economic-related GEOINT contract

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) awarded a new flexible contract that is designed to enable best of class analytic solutions for economic related GEOINT challenges, NGA announced September 29.

The five-year operational contract awarded at $29 million will compete delivery orders across the five selected vendors: BAE, Ball Aerospace, BlackSky, Continental Mapping Consultants, and Royce Geospatial Consultants Inc. These vendors were competitively selected among a diverse pool of companies.

“Understanding economic activity and trends around the world is critically important to our policymakers,” said Dave Gauthier, director, Source Commercial Business and Operations Group at NGA. “I am excited to see innovative commercial solutions and geospatial analytic services that may provide new insights into the flows of raw materials, agricultural products, equipment, fuels, vehicles, waste products and other goods.”

The analytic services acquired through this contract will be used to monitor activity to understand the economic impact and trade trends that affect financial markets, other studies of scarcity and military capabilities worldwide. The data and information will be integrated into the existing GEOINT workflow and tools, to enable prompt analytic use and maximize access.

Consistent with the NGA’s strategic intent, the intention of this acquisition is to incorporate innovative capabilities that include artificial intelligence, machine learning, non-traditional GEOINT sources and diverse analytic methods.

NGA’s ability to tailor delivery orders on this contract to any geographical area of interest and to a variety of mission areas helps the agency be contractually responsive at the rate the mission requires it.

“This contract represents a transition from government imagery analysts exploiting raw imagery to integrating commercial analytic services that can quickly provide answers,” Gauthier said.

Source: NGA

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