The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is working on a commercial buying guide for intelligence, defense and federal civilian agencies as NGA shifts to commercial imagery analysis and GEOINT capability sources, Federal News Network reported Friday.
Dave Gauthier, director of commercial and business operations at NGA, said the “commercial supplier matrix” will help NGA gain access to information on commercial capabilities to better match platforms from industry suppliers to the needs and requirements of users.
“With so many different types of suppliers, and so many opportunities to pull in these services, we really have to provide a catalog of capabilities to our user community,” Gauthier added.
He noted that NGA is making a “fundamental shift” toward commercial analytic services.
“It’s this idea that companies themselves, either the imagery providers or in partnership with analytics companies, will work to extract information from imagery, and provide us what I like to call the box scores instead of the game tape,” Gauthier added.
He said the supplier matrix platform is still in the testing phase and that some parts of it could be made available to the public.
“It’s still being built in [and] populated today,” Gauthier said of the platform. “We do have a community of beta testers to help us understand and make sure we’re answering the questions and can anticipate the questions that those users would have when they want to research this information for their own decision making.”
