Vega Group plc

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Vega Group PLC

Type	Public
Founded	1978
Headquarters	Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK
Key people	Martin Blomley, COO Ken Blyth, CFO
Industry	Aerospace, Defence and Government
Products	Consulting, Technology & Managed Solutions
Revenue	▲ GB £64.1 million (2007)^[1]
Employees	▲ 630 ^[1]
Website	www.vega-group.com

Vega Group plc is part of the Finmeccanica Italian group. It is specialised in professional services providing consulting, technology and managed solutions.

Vega is named after the star Vega in the Lyra constellation, the star by which the brightness of other stars is measured.

1 History
2 Locations
3 Market Sectors
4 Activities
5 Accreditations
6 References
7 External links

[edit] History

Vega was founded in 1978 by a small group of engineers based at the European Space Operations Centre ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany. They bid for and won a contract to provide satellite operations support to European Space Agency ESA missions, and Vega was formed.

Today, Vega still holds that original contract, which has been re-bid and re-won on a number of occasions. The company now has around 800 staff worldwide, with more than 300 working specifically in scientific, military and commercial Aerospace.

As Vega has grown, and its range of specialist consulting and technology services increased, it has found new opportunities where organisations face technologically sophisticated, people dependent, business-critical challenges, and so the company has diversified successfully into both the Defence and Government markets.

Vega floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1992 and was listed on the FTSE Fledgling Index (Software and Computer Services classification) and the FTSE techMark Index. Following floatation VEGA grew both organically and by acquisition. The most recent acquisitions include Anite Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG (2007) Anite Systems GmbH, a subsidiary of Anite Group plc (2004), and IT consultancy, Crew Services Ltd (1999).

In February 2008, Vega was delisted from the London Stock Exchange, following the acquisition of VEGA by Finmeccanica - Societa Per Azioni ("Finmeccanica").

[edit] Locations

Welwyn Garden City (Headquarters)
Bristol

Germany

Darmstadt

France

Toulouse

[edit] Market Sectors

Vega operates across three main sectors:

Aerospace
Defence
Government

Information of Note:
In 2006 Vega was awarded a GB £19m contract by Thales UK to deliver the through-life training solution for the UK Ministry of Defence (UK MoD)'s £800m watchkeeper Unmanned Air Vehicle (“UAV”) system. ^[2]

Vega remains to be actively involved with the European Space Agency (ESA) and has supported the majority of the agency's successful launches since 1978. This includes the recent launches of ESA's Venus Express and MetOp satellites. The company has also recently signed €7m contract with ESA's Directorate of Science Programmes (D/SCI) based at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC).

In 2006 the group was awarded a GB £4.6m contract from the UK MoD to provide ongoing architectural modelling capability. Architectural modelling is gaining significant momentum within the MoD, as it plays a vital role in the implementation of Network Enabled Capability (NEC) and the introduction of the MoD Architecture Framework (MODAF).

Framework Agreements
Vega is qualified under a variety of framework agreements, enabling agreements and Service Catalogues. The most significant of these are the Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) Information and Communications Services (ICS) Catalogue and the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) buyingsolutions' frameworks catalogue, Catalist.

[edit] Activities

Vega's capabilities are aggregated into six key service lines, which run horizontally throughout the above market sectors. They are:

Capability Acquisition
Human Performance Improvement
Information Security
Simulation and Technology Solutions
Technology Support Services
Science and Technology Research

[edit] Accreditations

Quality Assurance
Vega is certified to the internationally recognised Quality Management Standard, BS EN ISO 9001:2000. In addition to this certification, Vega has adopted the software sector TickIT registration scheme.

Information Assurance

Vega is also certified (with SAI Gobal as the certification body) to the internationally recognised standard for Information Security ISO/IEC 27001:2005. This certification was obtained in December 2006, with Vega being one of a small number of UK companies to certify against the new 27000 series of the standard.

CHECK

Vega is a CESG CHECK 'green light' company listed on CESG's website, accredited to provide penetration testing services to UK government. Vega CHECK was jointly established by Kevin Sheldrake and James Wootton, both CHECK Team Leaders, who went on to launch the highly successful, specialist information security consultancy, Electric Cat in 2004.

Environmental Management

Additionally, Vega is certifed to ISO 14000, environmental management.