Three weeks before the Army’s largest annual conference, Amanda Rudolph found herself deep in the Utah wilderness, staring down a deadline that couldn’t move.
Two years into her tenure at Ultra I&C, she was preparing to roll out a full refresh on one of the industry’s biggest stages. The work was still unfolding in real time. An editor sat on a pile of rocks, cutting video as it was being shot. Crews worked late into the night. There was no studio, no safety net and no room for delay.
The urgency was intentional. As chief communications officer, Rudolph was leading an effort to close a widening gap between how Ultra I&C operates internally and how it showed up externally.
“Our government customers and the Pentagon are looking for technology partners who move at the speed of relevance, so our external presence needed to match the company our customers were already experiencing and who we know we are at our core,” she said.
With AUSA as the immovable deadline, her team went into overdrive to fix that mismatch. It rebuilt the brand to match reality, focusing on clarity, speed and proof, and grounding every element in real environments and real work. The compressed timeline shaped every decision.
“There wasn’t an option to fail,” Rudolph said. “It was going to happen and we were going to roll out at AUSA.”
A Legacy Brand, A Modern Pace
Rudolph approached the brand the way she approaches any complex system: without sentimentality. After two decades in defense tech, mostly inside large primes, she knew what “good” looked like and she could see the mismatch.
Ultra I&C traces its roots back over a century to Guglielmo Marconi, whose early work in wireless communications helped lay the foundation for modern radio and signal transmission. Today the company has a very intentional mission of powering decision speed across the multidomain battlespace — securing, moving, and making sense of data to give clarity to operators at the edge. The company moves fast, iterates quickly and operates across domains, and that tension between heritage and velocity wasn’t coming through externally.
“Trust’s earned through proof,” Rudolph said. “Our products are real and proven — they’re not vaporware.”
She started by pulling the brand apart from the outside in. She studied how customers experienced the company through its digital footprint and its website, how easily they could find what they needed and where they dropped off. The data made the case for change.
Speed became the defining constraint. The effort unfolded over roughly six months, driven by a lean internal team of five balancing day-to-day work with a full rebuild of messaging, visuals and digital presence.
“This wasn’t something where you had a year to design and another year to roll it out,” Rudolph said. “We needed to change this yesterday.”
That urgency shaped the creative approach. The team rejected stock imagery and abstract concepts in favor of showing Ultra I&C’s technology where it’s actually used. Crews moved across Utah and Arizona, filming in deserts, mountains and airfields, sometimes changing locations multiple times a day.
In one case, satellite communications equipment went from a dusty mining town to a bright airfield the next morning, still coated in grit from the day before. Team members wiped it down between takes, knowing the same hardware had to ship to AUSA weeks later.
Every photo, video and brand asset the company owned was replaced. None of it came from a studio or artificial backdrops. The result was a library of thousands of in-field assets that now support not just marketing, but mission credibility.
“When we say our technology’s battle-tested, we can show it,” Rudolph said.
Early Signals
One night, near the top of a mountain with no service and with AUSA just weeks away, the team relied on portable lights and camera playback to review footage. Watching it come together marked a turning point.
“That’s when you know you’re representing the company at its core,” Rudolph said. “This is the good stuff. It was really this rallying moment that we’re on the right track and this is exactly what we need to be doing.”
Launch day at AUSA came fast. The new brand kicked off at the company’s most important U.S. industry event and the response was immediate. Attendees stopped at the booth to ask who Ultra I&C was and what it did, and stayed longer in conversations than before.
The shift showed up beyond the show floor. The team started seeing higher-quality inbound interest, more engaged partner conversations and stronger recognition at industry events.
Online, the changes have been visible in the data. Visitors are spending more time on the website, which now opens with full-screen footage of operators in real mission environments. Instead of bouncing after one page, users are digging deeper into technical content and exploring capabilities.
“They’re staying, they’re digging and they’re learning,” Rudolph said.
Internally, adoption has become an early signal. From new templates and assets to how teams talked about the company, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
“People see themselves in it,” she said. “They feel pride in how we’re showing up.”
Just as important, Ultra I&C is now being pulled into conversations earlier, not as a traditional contractor, but as a technology partner.
“That’s when you know the market’s finally seeing the company that we’ve always been,” Rudolph said.
Built to Keep Moving
None of this moved as fast as it did without leadership support. CEO Jon Rucker backed the rebrand fully, trusted the vision and gave Rudolph the room to move.
“Not every head of communications has that true partnership and buy-in from the most senior leadership,” Rudolph said.
That support made it possible to overhaul everything at once, from messaging and digital presence to voice, tone and how the company shows up at trade shows, conferences and leadership forums.
But the work didn’t end with launch.
The brand now has to move at the same pace as the business, grounded in reality and built to operate under pressure. As Ultra I&C expands across domains, from soldier systems to space and maritime, the focus is on staying ahead of what the company will need to show and explain next, even before products are fully brought to market.
“At this point, it’s all about anticipation so we’re always a step ahead,” Rudolph said.