Jack Blount
Analyst · Wellington Shields. Your line is open sir
Thank you, Joe. I think Joe has done a great job of trying to give you an overview. Just a couple of things I'd like to add and then I'd really like to be able to answer your questions. First of all, I'd like to tell you, I went out and spent a week in Washington D.C. about three weeks ago. And I went up there to meet with our sales reps. I went up there to meet with some of our customers who were willing to come in and meet with me. And to really find out what was going on in D.C. because I was tired of reading the newspapers and listening to the television. I was actually shocked to find out Washington D.C. is much more shut down than I ever imagined. That to share with you just a brief view of that. I stayed in the Marriott Hotel Downtown that I've stayed in almost every time I go to D.C. for the last eight years. It has 1,500 rooms, and it's normally sold out unless you booked three weeks in advance. I booked three days in advance. I got there and found out there was only six rooms occupied in the entire hotel. Six rooms, Downtown Marriott normally sold out. I rarely saw a person on the street. I rarely pass the moving car on the street. I did have very successful meetings. I met, for example, with executives in USDA, that I used to work with and know personally. And we were in 1 million square foot, six storey facility in downtown Washington D.C., normally occupied by thousands of USD federal employees. And I found out there was four people in the building. There was a security guard that led us in through one door out of 12 doors to the building. And it was a two people I met with and myself. The building was empty. No other week, two months into this COVID crisis. I think that reflects for you what we're dealing with, with our customers. Now, I did meet with a couple of our customers. Again, we don't talk about them personally, but they're all DoD side of the house customers. They were very gracious to meet with me. I spent an entire half a day with one of the customers with a roomful of very senior people in the agency. They love our company. They love the reports, we get them. They were devastated by the shutdown that they're dealing with. They ensured me that the build-up of demand for reports has not diminished and that they expect to give us in later third quarter and fourth quarter the quantity of reports they have planned in their original budget for all of 2020. So we will be extremely overworked the rest of the year if that business comes through as they assured me it would. That was pretty generally the report I’ve got from every customer I met with. It was great to meet them in person. It was great to see their long-term admiration for this company and the work that we've done for them over the years, and their strong interest in our long-term relationship continuing. So I feel really good about that side of the business. Even though Q1 and Q2 have been extremely painful, they've actually been a lot more painful for other businesses in this industry as you're aware. The number of business bankruptcies are way up. The number of business suicides are way up. We are living through a time that America has never envisioned before. I remain extremely optimistic. I remain extremely positive about everything we see. One of the reasons I'm so positive is, while I hate to say it this way, cybercrime has also grown 28% according to the statistics in the last six months, grown. That's because of COVID. Almost every newspaper out there has ran an article on their front page about how cybercrime has gone up in the last six months. They are capitalizing on the fact that America is disorganized, is off balance and working remotely. The fact that cybercrime continues to grow ensures me that the market for our products, demand, grows as well. Shield will be the first product I'm aware of introduced to the market that is a plug and play product. I've been selling IT technology literally for 40 years. I started out at IBM. I can tell you there are two major complaints about every IT product I've ever been associated with, including the ones I’ve bought, while I was the CIO in the federal government. Problem number one, they're way too expensive. Problem number two, they're way too complicated to install and operate. If you talk to any IT professional, they'll tell you, whatever IT products you're buying that cost you X, let's say it's $1 million, because a lot of the products I’ve bought as a CIO were $1 million. They say, you'll spend $4 million over the next two years, installing, configuring and maintaining that product. So your $1 million purchase is actually a $5 million commitment. That's typical of IT products and why the market is so frustrated. Shield will not fall into that category. We have designed and implemented Shield to be low cost so that every business, large or small, can afford Shield without having to think twice about it. $2,000 up to 100 users and $20 a seat beyond a 100 users. Very, very affordable for a product that can literally save you bankruptcy, millions of dollars, et cetera. So I think it's revolutionary in that regard. I also think it’s revolutionary in the fact that it's plug and play. It's the only IT product I'm aware of that you can take out of the box, plug it into your network without reconfiguring your network, without talking to your CIO, without getting 17 other IT professionals to come in and work on it, you simply turn it on and it starts protecting you one minute later. So I think we've overcome the two major obstacles of all IT products. It's now affordable and it's now installable. So I am increasingly intensely excited by how well the product works, by the magic it performs and about how safe it's going to make America. $3 trillion the world lost last year alone to cybercrime. That's 6 times more than all the bank robberies in the world added together in one year. And it's forecast to be $6 trillion two years from now. It's a growing massive problem. We're addressing this head on and we're addressing it with artificial intelligence. The only way that problem could be solved. Fortunately, what I found here that is the reason I'm the CEO today is when I got here and looked at this company and met with Mike and Joe, I saw TraceCop for the first time in my life. And as an IT professional, who has worked in it for 40 years, who ran one of the largest data centers in the federal government for four years, I told them I'd never seen such a rich, robust database. And I immediately thought of the endless ways to monetize it. The first way we're monetizing it is with the Shield product. The Shield product could not be launched if it wasn't using the TraceCop database. That's 25 years of research that we're leveraging in one product. The other thing I found two weeks later that blew my mind was Savant. Savant is the most sophisticated network appliance I've ever come across that real time analyzes every packet of data coming on and off of your network and stores into the database. Now, again, I saw that as an asset that the company spent 10 years developing, perfecting enriching, that could be coupled with TraceCop, that would -- could be used not as a log but as a real time defense mechanism. So what we have done is we’ve developed a layer of artificial intelligence that at the millisecond works real time, not later on logs, not weeks later finding decisions, but on the fly can make a decision about what it sees, about packets of information, determined that they're bad and block them. Number one problem with all IT cybersecurity products today is all they produce is alerts. When I was in the government, we got from 50,000 to 500,000 alerts a day. Human beings cannot process 50 to 500,000 alerts a day. It's impossible. And so most of them -- almost all of them get completely ignored and every layer you add, you know there's another product in the market today that's growing very well because it advertises that it's all AI, big differences. Number one, it costs you a whole lot of money. Number two, you have to sign a three year contract. Number three, it's only a logging product. It creates massively more alerts. I talked to a Gartner expert about it last night, who is very involved with this product, and I said, yes, but does it protect you from anything? And he says, well, if you act on all the alerts, you can make yourself safe. And I said, so how many new alerts does it produce a day? He says, well, I was at one company, and they got 10,000 a day. And I just looked at him in silence and said, who can manage 10,000 alerts a day? Shield on the flip side, would take those 10,000 alerts and block all 10,000 of them, leaving you nothing to do in IT and leaving your network safe. So we're not just another log or not another alert, or not going to create more confusion and chaos. We will block everything bad that's going on and make your network safe. And we do it in real time, at low cost. So I believe the market for this product is, every business that uses the Internet, I believe it will grow rapidly because of the fact that you buy it, you try it, you like it, you're never going to take it out. So I am more excited about this product than any technology I've worked on. I believe this is a game changer technology in this market. And as Joe mentioned, we can't talk too much about futures. But please understand, Shield is not a one off product. Shield is beginning of a family of technology that will also use TraceCop, that will also use Savant, that will also have a layer of its own specific AI that we will have another half dozen products in the family by 12 months from now. Because they're all fairly small, they're all fairly powerful, and they're all added. One of the things that I get asked by every analyst that I try and explain Shield to, says, well, what about the cloud? Everybody is going to the cloud. This is an enterprise product. And I say, how many businesses in the world have a local area network that they have to secure today? And I get answers of anywhere from 30 million to 10 million depending on who you're asking. But it's a huge number of businesses. Lands haven't gone away. People still have them. They still have equipment, they still need it secured. That's why we're addressing that market first, because it's the largest, lowest hanging fruit in the most pain. The FBI again reports 60% of businesses in America hit by ransomware in 2019 went bankrupt, went bankrupt. They didn't just lose money, they went bankrupt. So I feel a moral obligation as well as a business opportunity to attack this low end market first. But the cloud is growing. The cloud is very important. And our very next product in the family that we will be launching will be a cloud solution. It will be priced differently. It's still going to be affordable. It will be a service, it still will be plug and play. So this is a very, very important market that we're just breaking open. And we're going to continue to leverage Savant and TraceCop long into the future. I know I covered a lot and certainly want to answer your questions. But I hope that gives you a better understanding of why Shield is so significant and how desperately needed it is by the market today. Thank you for your time. Let me answer your questions.