Skye Perry, SSP Innovations
Dustin Sutton and Tom Counts, 3-GIS
SSP Innovations, along with our financial partner, Warren Equity, has been active in the M&A space over the last several years focused on adding competency to our company around our key utility and telecom verticals. This trend has continued into 2020 and we are truly excited to announce that on December 23rd, 2020, SSP Innovations closed a deal to fully acquire 3-GIS thus adding the company’s industry-leading telecom products, people, and customers to SSP’s portfolio.
DIVERSIFIED OFFERINGS
While SSP has grown to be the leading Esri partner in the utility space, our telecom offerings have also historically been focused on the telecom requirements of utilities with minimal work being performed in the private telecom space. 3-GIS, by comparison, is the leading Esri partner in the telecom industry and offers a suite of products that allows their customers to plan, design, construct, and manage their telecom networks. While their products can absolutely be used by utility customers, they have historically focused on private telecom.
By joining forces with SSP, 3-GIS will continue to focus on the private telecom market while strategically and intentionally expanding further into the utility space. Their products, including 3-GIS Web, Mobile, Prospector, and Network Express, are not built using Esri’s legacy geometric network or ArcMap product stack and were instead architected to work on top of Esri’s web GIS and specifically ArcGIS Enterprise.
For the last several years, SSP has been focused on leading the charge forward with utility customers by migrating them from ArcMap and the geometric network to ArcGIS Pro and the new utility network. The one gap we have repeatedly encountered is the lack of a fully-fledged telecom solution on the utility network. It is on Esri’s roadmap and they have been making regular progress toward it, but we have a large number of customers who desire to move off the geometric network completely today. 3-GIS’s products are ideal for these customers because they will support all of their outside plant (OSP) and circuit/signal path modeling requirements today, while adding significant additional functionality not available in the current legacy environment.
Further, as the leading utility network product and implementation partner, SSP will ensure that the 3-GIS products are continually aligned with Esri’s utility network as the core technology continues to evolve. Our joint goal is to offer the 3-GIS products as the leading choice for a utility network-aligned telecom solution throughout both the telecom and utility markets.
Beyond these strategic investments, SSP will continue to support the constant innovation and improvement to the 3-GIS products that their telecom customers have come to know and love. To be very clear, SSP is fully committed to supporting 3-GIS’s existing and new customers throughout the world. The amazing products and people you work with today will still be serving the market tomorrow.
EXPANDING THE TEAM
3-GIS’s and SSP’s core values are well aligned and we come from very similar backgrounds with a key focus on relationship with our employees, customers, and partners. We are excited for our teams to get to know one another in the coming months and believe the combination of our talented teams will truly be one of the most tangible benefits of the acquisition.
3-GIS has been led for the last several years by president, Dustin Sutton, along with the company’s founders, CEO – Tom Counts, CTO – Tommy Siniard, and COO – Jerry Golden. Dustin will continue in his current position leading the telecom business line within SSP Innovations while the founders will provide strategic guidance around continued market evolution as well as integration into the SSP family.
In the near term, 3-GIS will continue to operate as a subsidiary of SSP Innovations. While we will be exploring a number of process, technical, and market synergies made available via the acquisition, SSP will maintain dedicated focus on both the utility and telecom markets to maintain our leadership in both spaces. This further aligns well with Esri which manages the utility and telecom verticals via a single industry-aligned team.
IN SUMMARY
SSP had been pursuing a 3-GIS partnership for a number of years looking to add their telecom product offerings to SSP’s utility offerings and this acquisition will prove to be instantly accretive by realizing that goal immediately.
While the larger utility and telecom market remains fragmented across a diverse partner landscape, SSP continues to align the industry leaders like 3-GIS through consolidation under our brand. The end goal is to best serve both our existing and future customers across both the utility and telecom industries by bringing a proven combination of market leading geospatial products, services, consulting, and data management practices. All while keeping our focus on relationship, quality, and longevity.
3-GIS is a great example of the best of the best within the Esri partner ecosystem and we are extremely honored to have them join the SSP team! The next decade promises to be very exciting.
