Visionary leadership: ST Engineering iDirect leads the way to satellite interoperability

The satcom industry is experiencing a dramatic evolution. While a number of long-term players have been struggling to find a profitable trajectory, ST Engineering iDirect has rewritten the playbook. We sat down with Don Claussen, the company’s CEO, to discover the secret to ST Engineering iDirect’s success.

Crispin Littlehales, Executive Editor, Satellite Evolution Group

Question: It’s been a fast and furious almost three years since you took the helm at ST Engineering iDirect. What would you say are your greatest accomplishments thus far?

Don Claussen: As the market has experienced increased disruption, customers need trusted partners. Dealing directly with our customers, understanding their needs and how they’re going to progress their businesses forward has become more important than ever. We have aligned our focus on long-term activities and goals that our customers pursue, including the direction of our next generation products and technology.

As you know, we’ve been highly siloed in this industry for decades. With the new entrants in the market and the requirement to progress technology faster, it’s really important that we work together, and all agree on a standards-based ecosystem. ST Engineering iDirect has a long history of standards-based leadership and championing interoperability and collaboration across the ecosystem. In the last three years, we’ve made standards absolutely central to our DNA.

Don Claussen, CEO

With that comes driving innovation. While the pace at which we develop technology is faster than it’s ever been, we still need to push the limits of what the satellite communications industry can do. When we launched Intuition, which is our next-generation satellite ground system, it was not only to address what was needed now but also what would be necessary in the next 3, 5, and 10 years.

Part of that technology innovation also circles back to how we address the market, our customers, and our partners. ST Engineering iDirect has always had a customer centric approach, but we’ve doubled down on that to make sure that we position the company as the leader in cost efficient, consumption-based offerings where we can reduce the upfront investment and accelerate deployments. We call this Intuition Unbound. We ran a proof-of-concept on that for a few years and then we productized that concept at Satellite 2025. Unbound enables operators and service providers with usage-based service options to make our advanced technology more accessible and flexible to different business models.

In short, we’ve changed the way we develop technology; we’ve changed the technology itself; and we’ve changed the way we address the market. Those are the things that I think are the biggest accomplishments in the last three years.

Question: ST Engineering iDirect has a long and successful legacy in the industry but in these times of disruption and geopolitical turmoil business is not “as usual”. How is the company managing to stay relevant?

Don Claussen: When I hear the term, “legacy company”, I think back to business school and one of the first case studies was about Kodak’s reaction to the digital camera. Although they were the first to produce a digital camera, they held back on marketing it because they feared it would harm their legacy business, so they doubled down on chemicals and film instead. Don’t be like Kodak!

We’ve transformed not only how we are viewed, but how we operate. Understanding the nature of disruption and the importance of interoperability has been key.

We have substantial expertise in satcom. We needed to augment our talent with people who had different ideas and had been through the kind of migration we are facing. We specifically recruited from adjacent industries like telco. For example, our CTO is not a 25-year satcom veteran, he comes from the telco space. Our new COO comes from telco as well and they have attracted others from that segment.

We’ve also collaborated with our partners and our customers. In the past, a system would go on orbit and a spacecraft and ground system would be purchased. They would sit in place for roughly 15 to 20 years. Instead of being an afterthought, we now work with our customers to co-develop scalable, interoperable solutions that address not just what’s happening now but also what will be required in the future.

We are embracing flexible, service-based business models. We are innovating in 5G, 3GPP, AI and cloud technologies. Those are the next generation technologies for the satellite industry. Not too long from now we’ll be releasing more information regarding real world proof of concepts that we’ve done around AI and how that’s enabling smarter networks.

It starts with talent and working more closely with partners and customers. It then continues with technology and not doing the same things that we’ve done in the past but, rather, developing for the future with that total telco view in mind.

Question: What about the rapid rise of NGSO constellations? We’ve got Starlink dominating with their vertical integration strategy and Kuiper is gaining momentum along with others. What do you see as the key opportunities and challenges associated with integrating GEO, LEO, MEO, and HEO satellites into cohesive systems?

Don Claussen: I’ll start with the challenges because from those come opportunities. As far as technical complexity goes, we’ve had to switch between spacecraft and beams, but not disparate systems, some vertically integrated and some not. That requires advanced systems that can seamlessly provide those handoffs and manage real time switching. More than that, these systems need a sophisticated back end that has the ability to bill for those separate services. That complexity solved creates opportunities.

When it comes to interoperability, I look at the mobile wireless carriers because they’ve figured this out. Shared infrastructure, seamless roaming, having minimum standards for security and so forth have opened up their ability to drive revenue and make the customer experience better than when they were siloed. We need to follow suit and solve our operational constraints.

One of the advantages that the new entrants have is that they don’t have legacy customers. Traditional players in this market have tens of thousands of people that are already using their systems. One key challenge for legacy companies is setting all the existing customers up with new systems. Once GEO, LEO, MEO, and HEO are integrated, the user experience will be better and there will be more options.

Instead of remaining in our legacy mindset we’ve pivoted. We are now focused on two things. The first is optimized resources which include intelligent routing of the traffic and the second is making sure that performance is not lost by ensuring that our partners can operate those networks, whether they’re vertically integrated, horizontally integrated, or diagonally integrated. With that comes scalability because we now have more users in the network who are roaming across different vendor solutions, different orbits, and different frequencies. We must manage all that.

Question: Where is ST Engineering iDirect with that trajectory and what more needs to be accomplished to make secure multi-orbit interconnectivity a reality?

Don Claussen: There is always more left to be done because we’re can no longer rely on a static system in place for 20 years as we did in the past. Development and deployment will become an iterative process of continuous innovation upgrades. We’ve established the foundations with traffic optimization. We’ve proven that we can switch between GEO and HEO orbits using our advanced algorithms in Viasat’s GX10 Arctic operation. This switching technology is integral to our multi-orbit capability.

We also have the 5G NTN blueprint which plays a key role in any multi-access network, including orbits and vendors. We’ve been demonstrating our 3GPP on the back-end capabilities where we can have non-native 3GPP endpoints and networks interact with a 3GPP enabled network. We’ve integrated non 3GPP satellite networks and the 5G Core within our Interworking Gateway Function. That’s a big step to realizing interoperable solutions and inter-provider roaming. We are going to move forward in Intuition with a full 3GPP access to the 5G core and incorporate these technologies that come from the mobile wireless community and are now being extended into the satellite communications industry.

Question: Let’s drill down on the adoption of industry standards. Are most companies embracing them? Are there hold outs and if so, is there a strategy to bring those players into the fold?

Don Claussen: It’s a mixed bag. There are companies that are vertically integrated and want to use proprietary solutions. It makes sense on their part to optimize their network, but it would be helpful if there was some entrance into the network that is standards-based because otherwise any multi-access is limited. Although I believe that the satcom industry wants to be standards-based, I don’t think that the real requirement to push those standards has been driven by our industry as a whole.

Some of the positive indicators are the advancements in 3GPP with all the new releases. We have a seat at the table now for the NTN portion of it to make sure that satellite use cases are driven into the standards. It gives us a structure to move forward but it’s going to require organizations like DIFI (Digital Intermediate Frequency Interoperability Consortium) and WAVE (Waveform Architecture for Virtualized Ecosystems Consortium) to drive collaboration between competitors and even partners in the larger ecosystem.

I think the GSOA (Global Satellite Operators Association) can play a role in this as well. We need those collaborative bodies driven by global and regional operators to demand standards. There is work still to be done but we’re in a more positive position as an industry than we’ve been in the past ten years.

I talk about mobile wireless all the time because that’s the model that I believe gets us 80 to 85 percent of the way there. We still need to figure out the other 15 or 20 percent on our own. The good news is that we don’t have to do this from the ground up. The wireless community figured they could increase their revenue potential by increasing their consumer base and having a more positive experience if they work together. We can apply lessons learned from that community and I think that’s happening now. If you look at the individuals entering the industry’s senior executive ranks, many are from telco and that mindset shift starts from the top down.

Question: Partnerships are key to moving forward and I know the company has forged some important collaborations. Can you provide one or two examples of truly transformational partnerships?

Don Claussen: Previously I touched upon the effort with Viasat on their GX platform to switch between GEO and HEO. Even though HEO is a different orbit than we normally talk about, it’s extremely important. Working on that project taught us some valuable lessons the results of which are our multi-orbit switching capability that is enabling Viasat’s new Arctic coverage.

We’ve also partnered with Airbus on the spacecraft side to leverage our respective new technologies for the betterment of the overall solution to the operators. On the data analytics area, we’ve partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft and there are some ST Engineering (parent company) platforms that we’ve been using for AI and ML capabilities.

We have some other partnerships that I’m not at liberty to divulge but we’re working with those companies on predictive analysis, anomaly detection, enhanced automation, and other things to ensure that the back end of the network is capable of being managed.

We talk about the technology on the front end because that’s where we connect users, but the real challenge is going to be operating the network on the back end. We’re becoming a core part of the network understanding that if we don’t get that back-end right-- the OSS, BSS, and the overall operations—it’s going to be unusable.

Question: It is said that technology drives the satcom industry, but people power it. What makes you most proud about your team and what does that say about the culture at ST Engineering iDirect?

Don Claussen: Whether a 40-year satcom veteran or someone coming from the telco side, we have world class talent. No one in the industry can deny that given the innovations that we’ve delivered over the last three or four decades. The first thing that I’m proud of is how quickly the team pivoted their mindset to embrace all that I asked of them when I became CEO. As we started to bring people in from telco and people who had cloud-based backgrounds and experience with AI there was none of that inertia that you might have in a legacy business. No one said, “Well, we don’t do things that way” or “That’s not what customers want.” I think it is because we are a global company with offices in many different countries. Everyone embraced change and took on the challenge.

Then, as you know, it comes down to execution. We set aggressive timelines which the team met. When I joined the company in January 2023, the team was willing and able to adapt very quickly to envision a product strategy and a go to market strategy that addresses the new satellite communications market. We were able to launch the brand at Satellite 2024 and hit the ground running. That agility and willingness to modify as the market shifts is critical.

Equally important is enhancing our customer-centric focus. We are strengthening our partnerships and keeping our customers’ priorities at the core of our innovation and of what we offer. The market disruption that we are all experiencing means that our customers need to go to market in a different way and we believe that we have created the best system to accomplish that.  

Question: Can you look into your crystal ball and tell us something that ST Engineering iDirect’s solutions will enable that feels almost impossible today?

Don Claussen: In a nutshell: seamless roaming and management across disparate systems. That is what’s needed to drive the industry to telco grade connectivity. That is what we will provide with our solutions—seamless, easy to use, on demand. And the customers’ experience needs to be excellent, or they will seek out alternatives.

We look at modernization—virtualization, multiple orbits, and standards-based solutions—as an opportunity. We will automate as much of that as we can to achieve the scalability and flexibility required in our technology as well as our business models. This is how we will ensure we deliver the best value to our customers which, in turn, will make it possible for them to bring more customers onto their networks.