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Microspace Communications Eclipses 25 Years
Perspectives of the Past, Present and Future
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| Microspace Vice President & General Manager Joe Amor |
Joe Amor started his career with Microspace Communications in 1992. He then moved with his family to Raleigh to become sales manager in 1995. Six months later he took on the position of General Manager.
“I was a Microspace customer well before that first job,” says Amor, vice president and general manager. In the late 1980s, when he was with Knight-Ridder, he was responsible for due diligence on satellite companies for their 4,400 customer site network. Once hired by Microspace, Amor worked with financial information firms and helped them deliver data for business applications.
In 1995, Microspace’s then general manager decided to sail around the world with his wife. “I called it his “mid-life retirement,’” he says. “So, they went sailing and our corporation decided to give me a chance to lead Microspace’s evolution.”
It has been quite the evolution since Amor has taken the helm. “It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but in the mid-90s digital television was futuristic,” he says. That’s when Microspace created Velocity—the company’s high-speed video, data and audio broadcasting service—to expand into video delivery and to add data transmission speeds above 56 Kbps. “That was the big-time—and fast—back then,” he adds.
Velocity Satellite Services are still sold by Microspace today across a wide spread of industries—from the long-standing financial customers to almost the entire weather industry, retail stores and even Hollywood movies.
“Most people don’t realize it, but Microspace delivers content that more than 100 million people see and hear every, single day,” Amor says. “And Velocity is delivering that content in excess of 27 Mbps.” A large part of this increase comes from the changes in how individuals access content today.
People used to be tied to their desks for the phone and computer. For television it was his or her living room. Today people carry all of that in their pocket. It might be called a phone but it is a mobile computer.
“These have become indispensable devices,” Amor says. “When we damage or lose one, we can get a new one on the way home and all the data—the content—is restored and we go on our way.”
Microspace has tapped into that demand and delivers video and music to mobile devices. “A decade or so ago, that would have been pretty far-fetched,” says Amor.
“The future is not about terrestrial, cellular and satellite displacing one another. It’s about how they can all work together. Complementing one another in getting content delivered,” he added.
Microspace provides communication services on ten different satellite transponders, Internet, microwave and Wi-Fi. Microspace has the expertise to deliver almost any kind of content from its origination point to its target audiences—no matter where they are.
“The telecommunications pie is getting bigger and bigger and our slice keeps growing,” Amor says.
An undeniable strength Microspace has going into the future are its people. The average engineering tenure at Microspace is more than 14 years. “We get the best of old and new to work together. New ideas introduced to decades of working knowledge.”
“This may sound like a cliché, but it really is true; Microspace’s people and culture are our strengths,” he says. “Sure we know satellites. Sure we know telecommunications. And sure, we know how to take care of business customers, but it is the people we work with everyday that make this company strong.”
Looking forward, the intriguing part of the future is less about the hardware and technology and more about what people will do with it. “It’s exciting to be in a field that is constantly expanding our imaginations and making figments into reality,” Amor says.
“That’s what Microspace does.”
Thanks to MCC’s Carla Torrence for this capcom story & photo.
