Together with partners in the T-Systems International consortium, Sinergise has signed a contract with the European Space Agency and the European Commission to set up a Copernicus Space Component Data Access (CDAS) system worth a total of €150 million. On Friday, December 16, the new CDAS Service kicked-off, taking the European Union Copernicus program to the next level and ensuring the data to make the greatest possible impact to institutional users, the research community, the commercial sector as well as to every citizen of our planet.

With the development of the online platform Sentinel Hub, we first impressed representatives of European Space Agency (ESA) and European Commission (EC) in 2016 when we received the highest possible award in the field of remote sensing in Europe, the Copernicus Masters Award. Since then, we have been a key player in the development of interface systems for users of satellite data. In the same year, the Republic of Slovenia also signed an associate membership agreement with ESA, which enables companies like ours to participate in the tenders of this international agency.

On December 2, together with our partners in the T-Systems International consortium, we signed a six-year contract with ESA and EC to set up a system for storing, processing and distributing data from the Copernicus system (CDAS) worth a total of €150 million (our share, together with a subsidiary, Sentinel Hub GmbH in Austria, amounts to more than €20 million). In the group, we are responsible for data processing and distribution, with our high-tech product Sentinel Hub playing a key role.

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About the CDAS Project

The European Union Copernicus program is the biggest provider of Earth Observation (EO) data in the world and its launch was almost certainly one of the most important events in the remote sensing community over the past decade. Our platform will enable hundreds of thousands of users from all over the world to access data produced by the satellites of the European Union's Copernicus programme.

Grega Milčinski, the company's director, says: "The revenues from the project represent only part of the opportunities that are opening up - the CDAS system will also be available to commercial users, whose revenues are expected to exceed several millions annually".

The project is important both for the European Union and for the world. Namely, it will create a system for the efficient processing of satellite EO data. These are crucial for monitoring climate change, its impact on our habitat and the human activities that cause global warming. CDAS represents a central point for the entire archive of collected data and thus a system that will be used by research institutions, companies and also public institutions for the development of applications that use satellite data.

CDAS places Sinergise in a central position in the development of services to monitor activity on the Earth's surface. An example of such a service is the SOPOTNIK system developed for the Slovenian Agency for Agricultural Markets and Rural Development.

As Prof. Krištof Oštir said, the CDAS system will completely change the way remote sensing data is processed. It will provide the opportunity to develop many new applications, both by established players and those who are just learning about the technology. Sinergise's important role in CDAS will have a positive impact on the entire field in Slovenia and the region.

In Slovenia, there is already a broad and diverse ecosystem of companies and institutions developing products based on satellite data. These include ZRC SAZU, the Centre of Excellence Space- SI, SkyLabs, the universities of Ljubljana, Maribor and Nova Gorica, the Geodetic Institute of Slovenia and many others.

Over the past six years, we have received generous support from ESA and the Slovenian delegation at the ESA, which is under the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology.

For more information about the project itself, we invite you to read our blog post published in the Sentinel Hub publication.

Public Announcement

In cooperation with the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology, we organised a press conference on December 20, where Tanja Permozer, Head of the Slovenian delegation at the ESA, of the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology, Grega Milčinski, Director and co-founder of Sinergise, and Krištof Oštir, Professor at the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering and Delegate to the Technical Committee for EO at ESA, presented the importance of space technology for the Slovenian economy and society and the Ministry's plans in this field. The speakers talked about the Sentinel Hub services, their usefulness for journalism and their role in climate change detection, as well as the opportunities that CDAS offers for Sinergise, for Slovenia and for the whole world.

Press release is available at the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology web page (in Slovene).

About Sinergise

Sinergise was founded in 2008 as a spin-off from another Slovenian high-tech company - Cosylab. The first solutions were developed for the Slovenian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food and the Surveying and Mapping Authority. These applications were then transferred to several countries in the European Union and the Western Balkans, all the way to Mauritius in Africa. Between 2010 and 2013, they learned about space as part of the Centre of Excellence Space- SI. In 2015, they started working on the Sentinel Hub product, which now has more than 400,000 users per month, making more than half a billion requests to more than 50 PB-sized databases of satellite data. Together with its Austrian subsidiary, Sinergise employs over 80 highly skilled people. In the last three years, the company has generated an average turnover of €9.3 million and a profit of €2.8 million, and the value added per employee is over €100,000.

About the Consortium

The future of European user data processing and distribution is driven by experienced players — T-Systems International (Germany) and CloudFerro (Poland) with their well-used cloud infrastructure, Sinergise (Slovenia) and VITO (Belgium) with Sentinel Hub and openEO data discovery and processing tools, and DLR (Germany), ACRI-ST (France) and RHEA (Italy) taking care of on-demand processing and Copernicus Contributing Missions.