WHO OWNS THE CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE?
Your satellite. Their customer. Whose insights?
Satellite operators spend millions designing, building, launching and operating some of the most sophisticated technology on Earth.
Then they hand the customer journey to somebody else's website.
There are good reasons for that. Buying satellite imagery has never been particularly straightforward. Search, licensing, pricing, tasking, payments and fulfilment often require far more manual coordination than they should.
Digital marketplaces have made it easier for customers to find and buy imagery. That's progress.
But making imagery easier to purchase isn't the same as giving an operator a sustainable commercial capability.
And the most important thing an operator may be handing over isn't the transaction. It's the intelligence behind it.
Who actually knows what the market wants?
Every imagery search, area of interest, tasking request, quotation and abandoned purchase generates valuable commercial information.
Where is demand increasing? Which regions are customers monitoring? What resolutions and revisit frequencies are they requesting? Which searches go nowhere because of availability, price or collection constraints?
Those aren't simply sales metrics.
They can shape constellation planning, sensor development, geographic priorities, pricing, capacity allocation and future investment.
When these interactions happen through a third-party platform, the operator may see the orders that convert without seeing the full pattern of demand behind them.
The intermediary can develop a much broader view of what customers are trying to buy, including the requests that never become sales. Exactly what each platform can collect, use or share depends on its contracts and controls. The strategic question remains.
The operator owns the satellite. The intermediary may have a better understanding of where it should be looking next.
A distribution channel is not a commercial strategy
I'm not arguing that satellite imagery marketplaces shouldn't exist.
They can bring operators customers they would never reach independently. They also reduce friction for buyers who don't want to negotiate separately with every supplier.
But there's a difference between using a channel and depending on it.
Who controls the customer relationship? Who determines how the operator's capabilities are presented? Who sees unmet demand? Who gets the opportunity to build recurring business?
In an aggregated catalogue, competing constellations can end up compared largely on coverage, resolution, availability and price. The operator's wider capabilities become harder to distinguish.
And when somebody else controls the buying experience, it can be that intermediary the customer remembers.
We haven't necessarily eliminated the middleman. We've made the middleman digital.
Who owns the insights?
Imagine an operator knows which scenes it sold last month, but not which areas were searched thousands of times without a purchase.
It sees completed tasking orders, but not locations where customers repeatedly requested collections that couldn't be fulfilled.
That missing information matters. It could reveal a new market, an underserved geography, an opportunity for a different sensor or demand that should influence the next satellite's schedule.
If the data about customer demand sits somewhere else, the operator makes those decisions with an incomplete picture.
Your satellites are collecting intelligence about the Earth. Who's collecting intelligence about your customers?
Infrastructure should connect demand to operations
This is where Earth Observation Data Infrastructure (EODI) matters.
EODI isn't another imagery storefront. It's the operating layer connecting customer requirements, discovery, acquisition, constellation orchestration, processing, governance and delivery.
When those functions operate as disconnected products, commercial signals rarely make it back into operational decisions.
When they are connected, unmet demand can be identified rather than lost. Requests can inform collection priorities. Operators can understand which capabilities customers value, while buyers maintain control over their mission requirements, access policies and downstream workflows.
The distinction matters. An operator should be able to control its direct commercial relationships, and an EO buyer should be able to control its own infrastructure. Neither should have to surrender operational visibility simply because an intermediary handles a transaction.
Access to demand data, permissions and rights of use still need to be defined explicitly. Putting everything in one system doesn't magically transfer ownership. Good infrastructure makes the boundaries clear and enforceable.
The result should be a seller-neutral operating layer for buyers and a viable direct commercial capability for providers, with third-party channels connected where they add value.
Commercial independence shouldn't require building everything yourself
Satellite operators are in the business of operating satellites, not maintaining e-commerce systems, integrations and customer portals.
Fair enough.
But the alternative to developing all that software internally doesn't have to be building your entire business around somebody else's storefront.
Operators should be able to use reusable infrastructure for their own branded ordering, pricing, tasking and fulfilment workflows, while continuing to distribute through partners and marketplaces.
The channel can remain optional. The customer relationship, and the intelligence needed to make commercial decisions, should not be an afterthought.
The next competitive advantage in Earth Observation won't come exclusively from who collects the best imagery. It will also come from who understands demand, controls the infrastructure and turns that intelligence into better decisions.
We've spent billions improving what satellites can see.
Maybe it's time we paid more attention to who gets to see what customers actually want.