Leaf Space and LEOcloud Collaborate To Deliver Space Edge Cloud Services

 March 30th 2021

Leaf Space and LEOcloud have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop a go to market and services integration strategy that will enable end users to connect to satellite data suppliers and operate in a seamless hybrid cloud environment at the Space Edge.

Since Leaf Space's inception in 2014, the company has focused on developing robust ground station services and technology with the goal of creating the most efficient and valuable ground segment as-a-service (GSaaS) solutions available on the modern space market. The company has achieved great success working in partnership with over 15 customers including Astrocast, D-Orbit, and the European Space Agency (ESA) to increase performance and availability of crucial data while simultaneously lowering costs and decreasing latency.

LEOcloud’s Space Edge mission and strategy is to bring hybrid cloud edge computing services as close as possible to the satellite-sourced data, or data collected from remote regions of the world. End users can then operate their business or mission critical services or applications in a seamless hybrid cloud environment, and realize the lowest latency possible for conversion from raw to monetized or actionable data. LEOcloud’s point and click approach for the end user will enable the reservation of dynamic and scalable virtual Space Edge computing resources, cloud services, and satellite data sources.

To deliver a seamless Space Edge hybrid cloud environment, LEOcloud will deploy Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, that’s purpose-built for the age of hybrid innovation and delivers a consistent experience across all environments, including Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Red Hat OpenShift is optimized for developer productivity and innovation.

With Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation, users will be able to run LEOcloud services across the entirety of the hybrid cloud, including at the edge, unlocking more speed, agility and flexibility.

The integration of Leaf Space and LEOcloud services will provide a seamless hybrid cloud environment where organizations can gain a competitive or operational advantage by reducing the latency for intelligent insight, decisions, and transactions with the highest assurance of security and availability for global commercial, government, and military customers.

“Through our collaboration with Leaf Space we can address a strong growth market for satellite sourced data that is intersecting with the promise of edge computing,” said Dennis R. Gatens, CEO and president of LEOcloud. “While LEOcloud’s focus today is on the Space Edge, our vision is to ultimately push the edge into space.”

“Having access to data from space assets quickly and reliably is absolutely critical to the success of space missions,” said Jonata Puglia, co-founder and CEO of Leaf Space group.“This new integration with LEOcloud further enhances Leaf Space’s ability to support satellite and launch operators with our industry leading GSaaS solutions. We are thrilled to be partnering with such a forward-thinking company like LEOcloud, that is truly on the bleeding edge of innovation in space.”

According to NSR’s recent report “The Global Space Economy”, report author and NSR Principal Analyst Brad Grady said, “The commercial space economy is predicted to be over $1 Trillion in cumulative revenues between 2019 to 2029. Ranging from business models looking to commercialize crew and cargo missions to near-earth orbits, to emerging Earth Observation[1]based Data Analytics opportunities the ‘as-a-Service’ business models have arrived for within the Space and Satellite Markets.”