Why acquiring Sypes Canyon makes sense for Geoforce

As I’m sure you know by now, on September 1^st Geoforce completed the acquisition of Sypes Canyon Communications.   It’s funny that Geoforce’s first acquisition would be a satellite device company, because, for years, I swore that we would never build our own hardware. I’ve always believed that the real value delivered is not in a piece of equipment – it comes in using the data to solve business problems for our customers. So it was always our intention to rely on outside partners to make the hardware we deploy, using a “best of breed” strategy.   So what changed? Well, in the end we simply were dissatisfied with the hardware products offered in the market to serve the Oil & Gas industry. We needed something that was more rugged, more global, in fact something revolutionary. The only way to do that was to have something built just for us.

Once we decided to make our own device – it was easy to decide who to work with. It had to be the team at Sypes Canyon. No one in the satellite industry understands how to build great products more than Gary Naden. No one in the industry understands the market better than Scott Rosenzweig. So we engaged Sypes Canyon to help build our category killer device.   From that point, over the 18 month development cycle of our new GT-1 Product (which will become commercially available in Q4 2012), another thing became clear: as close as we’d become to the Sypes team – as much chemistry as we had together – it started to make more and more sense to simply join forces. The logic was clear; by acquiring Sypes, Geoforce could:

1. Gain new intellectual property – including some things which we will announce soon
2. Open new markets without diluting our focus on our core of Oil & Gas
3. Add great talent & experience to Geoforce’s team – doing it with people who share our values and vision for the business – and are “all-in” betting on Geoforce’s future
4. Structure the transaction in a way that was a financial “win-win” for both sides

So here we are. It’s an exciting time.