“We're somewhere between the bleeding edge and the cutting edge,” said founder and president Alex Philp, who moved his company from his home basement in Missoula to the Montana Technology Enterprise Center less than three years ago.
The 12-employee company occupies several offices inside the building, and inside one of those offices is a shelf brimming with awards from industry giants both public and private, including the U.S. Geological Survey and ESRI Inc., a California-based geographic information systems company that employs more than 4,000 people.
“It's a pretty rare collection we have there on our shelves,” said Mike Beltz, the company's director of sales and marketing.
It's not easy for a tiny tech company like GCS to pick up these awards, Philp explained. But these awards and associations are important because they help position the company to compete on a global scale.
“We're going toe to toe with people all over the world,” he said.
GCS has already completed projects for NASA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a number of private companies that don't necessarily want their competitors to know where they get the innovative technology they're using.
“We specialize in geospatial intelligence,” Philp explained. “Our goal is to take a lot of complicated stuff and make it easier for people to use.”
GCS Research competes within the geographic information systems, or GIS, industry, finding new ways to organize and use data from satellites. Five years ago, hardly anybody knew what GIS meant, he said. Now, it's increasingly a part of everyday life as individuals, government agencies and private businesses adopt this technology to create maps of noxious weeds, study development and growth patterns, find weak points in security systems and much, much more.
“At the end of the day,” Philp said, “there isn't an industry, government or private, that doesn't use geographic information systems technology.”
With so much going on at once, the industry is experiencing a period of extreme disruption, he said, adding that “in that disruption is opportunity for companies like GCS Research.”
For example, one of the biggest problems facing governments and private companies right now is that they are spending billions of dollars on information they then lose because there's no efficient means of tracking it.
Philp's company created a software product, called GeoMarc, that allows data users to embed important information in every pixel of an image. The digital “watermark” that's created is invisible to the naked eye, but provides a way to call up that image and track its use. In fact, users can include whatever information they deem appropriate, and can even use it to send messages to one another.
“We have built and are selling the world's first geospatial digital watermarking software application,” Philp said. “We think that will have a significant impact on how people utilize, work with and understand geospatial information.”
Indeed, for the past year, GCS Research has been working on a special project using this technology for the U.S. Army. It involves watermarking digital video from unmanned vehicles.
“None of that's classified - but it's really, really close,” Philp said. “We do some work with the U.S. intelligence community that we definitely can't talk about.”
Philp's company is now starting its second year of work on the contract, and the Army has become its biggest customer.
All along, the company has made its way by impressing the biggest customers in the business.
Philp moved to Missoula in 1997, when he came to the University of Montana's School of Forestry to earn a doctorate degree. He landed in the Earth Observing System Education Project, funded by NASA, where he helped sift through information beamed down by satellites.
For the next three years, he watched innovation after innovation flow through the program, and thought up a few good ideas of his own. Eager to see his ideas transformed into reality, he rounded up “micro-dollars” by taking out a second mortgage on his house and started his own company.
He received no grants, and no interest from local investors. He funded the company, he said, by winning customers and recycling any revenues back into the company to position it for the next leap in technology.
Slowly but surely, the company grew. Philp eventually found partners willing to invest in the business, and added five employees shortly after moving into the space at MonTEC.
“They're a great example of a small entrepreneurial company that really carved out their niche,” said Dick King, president and CEO of the Missoula Area Economic Development Corporation, the organization that oversees MonTEC.
MonTEC's mission, King explained, is to help local tech companies find ways to grow. The glaring lack of investment capital for tech companies is an issue across the nation, he pointed out, but it's an especially difficult hurdle in Montana.
For the most part, Montana does not have much in the way of an established investment environment - but as more companies like GCS survive and thrive, their success will help western Montana attract more investment capital, King said.
MonTEC helps by providing a place for these companies to do business and access to administrative tools, King said.
Philp said the technology center has helped GCS increase its visibility and professional image, and encourages his customers to think about Missoula and western Montana as a hidden treasure for new technology.
“Most people see Montana as a place for a retirement home, a vacation home, a place to play,” he said. “It's not seen as a thriving place for technology innovation.”
The best way to dispel that myth, he said, is to continue pushing the envelope in the international race to eclipse the competition.
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