Nadir Ali
Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, Scott and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our 2014 earnings call and thank you for joining us. I am joined today by Wendy Loundermon, our Interim CFO. Wendy has been a strong member of the Sysorex management team since 2002 and has proven herself to be an excellent financial manager for our Company through all of our phases of growth. We are pleased to have Wendy’s experience, professionalism and continuity as we continue to execute on our strategy. As many of you may know Sysorex has experienced a major transformation over the past three years with some significant changes occurring in 2014. I want to use this time today to reflect on some key highlights from 2014, but also to provide some insights into the interesting opportunities we believe we are positioned for in 2015. I am proud of our team and our achievements in 2014. Our revenues increased from 51 million in 2013 to 63 million in 2014. We uplifted to NASDAQ and acquired AirPatrol Corporation. We were awarded two patents for the AirPatrol technology in 2014 and have more pending. We have made tremendous progress in integrating the culture, system and management structure of four separate companies into one. In addition we’ve been able to integrate and combine our product and services offerings to bring more value to our customers and differentiate us in the market. We accomplished things together that no one thought we could when we started this journey and we believe we have positioned ourselves to be a leader in the data analytics and location-based mobile solutions. In fact our strategy has positioned us well for the top-two interests of CIOs today, security and big data. We also believe that our unique products provide a perfect solution for the Internet of Things of IoT market. Simply put our combination of data analytics and location-based mobile products and services help our customers blend real world data and digital data to discover their valuable new insights. Our analytic solutions allow customers to uncover these insights hidden deep in the ever growing mountains of big data. We have developed a big data analytics platform that blends data from traditional software and network systems with the growing universe of mobile and Internet connected devices or things. In doing so we’ve created a fast, secure and scalable solution that we believe allows customers to answer their most complex business questions today and profit from the undiscovered business opportunities of tomorrow. Over the course of this call I’ll give some specific examples of how we are delivering this value to customers and how it is driving our growth and increasing our margins. As I mentioned on our last call Sysorex’s strategy focuses on four primary areas; growing revenue organically and through acquisitions; transitioning from the low margin to high margin products and service offerings; integrating our acquired companies; and executing on our technology roadmap. We continue to make excellent progress on these fronts. Let’s start with the revenues. Our revenues increased from 51 million in 2013 to 63 million in 2014 or approximately 25% over this period. This increase primarily driven by acquisitions but organic growth as well occurred despite trends in our business along with many other companies to shift to the software -as-a-service or SaaS model where we do not capture as much immediate upfront revenue but rather build a book of recurring revenue business. As I have indicated in the past, we intend to continue to look for acquisitions as well on the analytic side of our business that not only help us grow our revenues but deliver valuable IP to our products. Our gross margins also demonstrate that this team is executing on the strategy we have adopted. The increase in gross margins from 24% in 2013 to 30% in 2014, we believe validates our efforts. Our sales mix is shifting to higher margin products from recent acquisitions but also from our increased focus on Analytics and Managed Services business. Annual revenues for this services business have increased 67% in 2014 over 2013 and this business is contributing 40% to 50% gross margins to the IT Commercial Operating segment, which traditionally has gross margins of 17% to 20%. Let’s just think about that for a moment. This reoccurring high margin business along with the AirPatrol product is a fast and growing-pieces of our business as a percentage. You can think about companies like Hortonworks and others were getting multiples of 20 times revenue for similar revenue streams you can see the impact that we believe this could have on Sysorex. We believe these results provide yet another validation of our strategy. Now an update on our integration efforts, I am pleased to report that we have made significant progress on integration not only in terms of systems and infrastructure, but also in our management structure and our branding and positioning. In the latter part of 2014 the Company moved from managing our businesses as independently operated subsidiaries to a functional structure across the various businesses. Now all of our engineers report to a single CTO and all marketing staff reports to a single Chief Marketing Officer and so forth. This allows for better collaboration and coordination amongst our employees and also creates efficiencies in our operating model. This integrated structure also allows us to participate in a wider range of more sophisticated and profitable projects. One example of how our location-based technology and data analytics teams have been able to provide high-value services together for customers is the Carlsbad street-fair project we announced last quarter. On the surface it sounds like a simple project providing headcount at a fair, but the value of this project becomes dramatically more evident once you understand the multi-dimensional analytics that we provided to the various stakeholders including the city, the police department and the event organizers. Yes we provided real-time footfall analytics for America’s largest one day street-fair, but so much more than that as well. For the first time in the 20 plus year history of the event, event planners and city of -- Chamber of Commerce were able to get an accurate count of attendance, as well as average length of stay and foot traffic travel patterns. Our ability to analyze the data in real-time help deliver insights that were valuable to the wide range of stakeholders, the analysis allowed city planners and low enforcement to understand where people who are part accounting that they use public transportation, or a public safety risks or created by congestion, unsafe intersections and crowd overflow. It helped event organizers to understand where people were going and how long they were staying at various attractions, allowing them to know which parts of the event were most popular and successful. It was the combination of the location-based products with the powerful real-time analytics again blending that real world and digital world to help our customers. This is not the only customer or vertical that has this challenge of collecting and analyzing all of this data accurately and quickly. Whether it’s malls, casinos or agricultural companies we can get all of this data collected and analyzed in real-time. Our new management structure is also leading to collaborative discussions amongst our team that are resulting in new products and services based on their combined solutions. Let me give you an example of how that’s impacting our technology roadmap. Our location-based products are being integrated with our e-solutions product to offer new location-based advertising service that allows print advertisers to fully understand the impact of their ad spend, this new product called InPlace allows newspaper advertisers to track ad conversions from print and digital newspapers to actual in-store visits. E-solutions will use our location sensors and beacon technology to capture information when readers who view and/or scan an ad with their smartphone and then visit that advertiser’s location. Our extensive newspaper network and data avocation tools will collect consumer behavior data so advertisers can measure the effectiveness of their ads and the newspapers can provide real world metrics on click to brick conversions as well as provide highly targeted demographic profiling of its readers. InPlace would be announced at the Newspaper Association of the Americas National Conference this month and will be available later this year. While we are talking about new products let’s provide an update on some of the other products. Last quarter I talked about Big Data analytics as a service platform. If you recall this platform will provide various offerings that are derived from unique data generated by our products, including our mobile locationing detection products and combined with third-party data-streams in the form of SaaS and PaaS applications, this platform combined with our locationing product line delivers on our vision of helping our customers lend the real world data and digital data to discover these valuable insights. I am encouraged by the traction with customers that are interested in using our big data platform in the Sysorex cloud. In addition we will be delivering new versions of our location-based AirPatrol products that allow us to capture data from more types of devices, think wearables, sensors, machines, cars, et cetera, especially as the IoT market matures. With that I will now turn the call over to Wendy to discuss our financial results for the fiscal year ended 2014 and then I will come back on to provide some closing comments. Wendy?