Veripos celebrates anniversary with move to new premises

Company News - April 8, 2009

Veripos, the precise satellite positioning supplier to the world offshore industry using GNSS technology, has marked its 20th anniversary with a move to new premises at Westhill, Aberdeen.

Housing the company’s global management team and support functions covering also operations management for the European, African and Middle East regions, the premises include a new state-of-the-art Network Control Centre (NCC) transferred from an existing site at Greenwell Base in Aberdeen.

The new NCC will operate in parallel with a secondary control centre in Singapore to ensure full worldwide system redundancy and continuity.

Originally founded in 1989 as a joint venture between the former Brown & Root Survey and Ormston Technology, a specialist marine electronics company based in Hull, Veripos initially provided a Differential Global Positioning Service (DGPS) for North Sea users based on HF radio transmitters and subsequently extended the partnership to include Osiris, a subsidiary of Boskalis in the Netherlands.

Five years later, in 1994, a joint alliance with Dutch and French partners under the auspices of its then parent organisation, Subsea Offshore, led to the introduction of a much broader satellite-based DGPS service which was subsequently extended over intervening years to cover the Gulf of Mexico followed by a progressive expansion of networks for Brazil, West Africa and the Caspian.

By now wholly-owned by Subsea 7 who authorised further major expansion plans at the beginning of 2005, Veripos realised full global coverage of its services a few months later and is now the world’s second largest supplier of satellite-based precise positioning facilities to the international offshore industry.

Numbering leading exploration, construction, survey and drilling organisations among its many clients, the Company is currently staffed by 75 specialist personnel based in seven regional sites around the world.

All are dedicated to the management and continued development of multiple satellite and terrestrial services for delivery of augmentation data not only for the GPS satellite constellation operated by the US Department of Defence, but also for the comparable Russian GLONASS network while also developing the technology for other planned satellite navigation systems such as the forthcoming EU Galileo system.