In September 2019, Latin America-based Axesat and Germany-based CETel, two leading companies in the provision of satellite communications solutions, announced a merger to form AXESS Networks. Supported by Aksiom Group Limited, a specialist in the development of high growth technical services companies, the new company has a substantial presence in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
The combination of the two companies brings a lot of synergy, with each company contributing unique strengths and attributes that makes AXESS Networks the new leading global player in the enterprise satellite communication services market.
The new company has a unique global infrastructure, recognized by the World Teleport Association (WTA). AXESS operates three main teleports located in Germany, Mexico and Colombia, and alternative teleports in Dubai, UAE and Peru. The company provides global coverage to a diverse base of industrial, energy, oil and gas, telecom, infrastructure, mining, maritime and government/NGO customers, all who have critical operations in difficult to serve regions where reliability and security of service is of paramount importance. Current operations cover more than 50 countries on four continents. 
Combining the highly successful commercial strategy of Axesat and its leading presence in the Latin American market with CETel’s experience in providing German-engineered, customer-specific solutions to the EMEA market has been the key driver for the merger. “Axesat had a very strong organic growth in the last few years. They also have a strong presence in the Latin American market as well as global contracts with oil and gas, mining, telecommunications and other verticals. CETel, on the other hand has accumulated experience in teleport operations and strategic acquisitions. The merger of Axesat and CETel is a significant milestone in our global growth and diversification strategy,” said Guido Neumann, Co-Founder and CEO of CETel, and now the Chief Development Officer and President EMEA of AXESS Networks.
Neumann has a very interesting background which served him well and CETel, the company he co-founded with a partner in 2004. After serving in the German Armed Forces and NATO as an officer in Command, Control, Communications and Information Systems, he moved to a then IT consulting firm, IABG in 1997. At IABG, he started a new Teleport division in 1999 to serve the newly launched LMI-1 satellite.
After accumulating valuable experience with customers around the world as Chief Commercial Officer for IABG’s teleport business, he saw an opportunity to provide more flexibility and value-added services. Neumann and his colleague, Martin Terlunen decided to start their own business and founded CETel in 2004. He helped build CETel from a two-person company operating from their home to a global player with extensive infrastructure and market presence that it is today.
The merger with AXESS Networks is a culmination of a series of strategic acquisitions by CETel over the years. These acquisitions include companies such as Plenexis Services, ND Satcom’s Managed Services business, Geolink (formerly SeaMobile Europe), Onlime Managed Satellite Services and Cobbett Hill Earth Station.
For his efforts, Guido Neumann was named “Teleport Executive of the Year” by the WTA in 2019. This year, the WTA has announced that AXESS Networks’ CEO Mauricio Segovia, the former CEO of Axesat will be awarded the same honor as his predecessor, Neumann as Teleport Executive of the Year--the first time that two executives from the same company have won the award two years in a row.
With the merged companies’ focus on growth, we might not see the last of mergers and acquisitions activities from AXESS Networks. Segovia said that “we have relatively aggressive growth targets in the next three to five years and will continue to leverage each companies’ relationships with key customers to grow them in other regions.”
Case Study: Custom Solutions for a Mining Company
AXESS’ customer operates in different African countries and is supplied with a one-stop fully seamless communications solution that caters exactly their demand. AXESS delivers an advanced solution for a mining company that includes:
- Managed end-to-end communications over Internet and network connectivity to overcome the geographical challenges presented by the landlocked region of Africa.
- Satellite- and fiber-based connectivity that improves productivity by encompassing all applications used by miners, including administrative, operational and welfare applications.
- Tailored approach that integrates with multiple locations, including European corporate network and exploration sites.
The multi-orbit solution comprising of low-latency O3b Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation, Geostationary (GEO) wide-beam and GEO HTS (High Throughput Satellites), allows AXESS’ customers expanded access with tailored, managed data services capable of transcending remote locations. This means they can bring together data across the entire mining value chain in order to improve planning, control, and decision-making, as well as increase safety in even their most hard-to-reach operations. The O3b solution allows end users to benefit from top cloud services like IBM, Google, Microsoft Azure and AWS.The solutions were tailored to the customers’ unique requirements. This meant adding five large trunks to their operational areas, based on the geostationary capacity. The capacity of the fully managed service, based on ‘carrier-in-carrier’ technology with compression appliances, leads to a 250Mbps-integrated connection to their European headquarters. In addition to the GEO-based solutions, they added a MEO solution to several mining operations in Africa. Each site is capable of transmitting and receiving of up to 100Mbps. The deployed SD-WAN chooses the available and adequate transmission channel, dependent on what the application requires. This was an ideal utilization of GEO, MEO, and fiber.
This network implementation depict that a consortium of partners can excel together and satisfy its customers, by offering a one-stop solution. Thanks, to AXESS’ long-term and fruitful partnerships with operators, suppliers and service providers, the company can make anything happen their our customers.
AXESS deployed a true hybrid network that serves their client’s mining operations efficiently and effectively, increasing their productivity and ability to grow: a seamless, fully-managed connectivity service! And even more important, AXESS demonstrated that it could convince their customer to utilize satellite where initially fiber should have been applied.
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Virgil Labrador is the Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles, California-based Satellite Markets and Research which publishes a web portal on the satellite industry www.satellitemarkets.com, the monthly Satellite Executive Briefing magazine and occasional industry reports called MarketBriefs. Virgil is one of the few trade journalists who has a proven track record working in the commercial satellite industry. He worked as a senior executive for a teleport in Singapore, the Asia Broadcast Center, then-owned by the US broadcasting company CBS. He has co-authored two books on the history of satellite communications and satellite technology. He holds a Master’s in Communications Management from the University of Southern California (USC). He can be reached at virgil@satellitemarkets.com
