Satcom Direct (SD) has completed upgrades to its Network Operations Center (NOC) at its headquarters in Melbourne, Florida, with the aim of enhancing customer and product support. As well as increasing the site’s footprint, newly installed technologies include a 72 x 10ft (22 x 3m) digital wall that will be used to display global customer connectivity activity in real time.
The evolution of the operations centre was driven by the need to aggregate, collate and analyse an increasing amount of data generated by business aircraft activity. SD says information collected from the SD Xperience nose-to-tail portfolio of hardware, software and infrastructure solutions gives the NOC full awareness of the network status for each customer’s aircraft globally.
Using a combination of AI and machine learning, data is aggregated and displayed on the enlarged screen. The NOC optimises visibility into the overall health of each aircraft and combines it with intelligent data analysis to identify connectivity outages, degradation or systemic issues. This initiates the implementation of corrective action, often during flight. Predictive alerting is also triggered by the service intelligence platform, enabling remedial action ahead of potential issues.
The continuous monitoring of aircraft status underpins the SD support motto, “We know before you know”. The upgraded facility delivers improved situational awareness to the global support team through the automated analysis of data trends and patterns. SD says an enhanced average response time of below five minutes, and 24/7/365 support, ensures customer issues are handled as efficiently and effectively as possible. Cyber security management has also been enhanced so abnormal patterns of data behaviour are highlighted to stimulate immediate mitigative action. In addition to technical corrective action, SD alerts crew who can then advise passengers of any necessary action needed to prevent potential cyber events.
The NOC enhancements are also intended to bolster SD’s partner relationships further. The company says the upgraded technology can identify systemic issues across partner satellite networks to support implementation of remedial measures, ensuring clients experience limited downtime if an issue occurs.
“Aircraft generate large volumes of multifaceted data that provides clear insight into aircraft connectivity,” said Jim Jensen, founder and CEO of SD. “If the data is behaving differently than expected we will often be aware of it before either our customer, the end user or our partners, which means we can begin to fix issues more quickly. The investment we’ve made ensures we can extract meaningful information about usage and/or degradation, enabling us to be even more proactive in issue resolution. It puts our support team ahead of the aircraft for years to come.”
