Nadir Ali
Analyst · Riedel Research
Thank you, Scott and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2015 earnings call and thank you for joining us. I am joined today by Wendy Loundermon, our Interim CFO. And I have also invited Bret Osborn, President of Sales, to join us for today’s call, to talk about our recent acquisition of the LightMiner data-analytics software and its impact on our big data analytics strategy. As many of you may know Sysorex has experienced a significant transformation over the past few years with several acquisitions and IPOs, and an uplisting to NASDAQ. This transformation continues in 2015 as we further integrate the existing products and services from each acquisition target and add new products and capabilities as well as new partners and customers. On the last earnings call, we discussed how we believe that our strategy has positioned us well for addressing few key interests of CIOs today, security and big data, and how we believe that our combined products provide an unique solution for the Internet of Things or IoT market. By this, I refer to how the combination of our AirPatrol, and data analytics products and services help our customers blend real-world data and digital data, that in turn may provide them with new and valuable insights. Today, it is phones and tablets, but tomorrow as more and more devices become connected, we can capture data from any of these devices and ingest them into our data analytics platform using our new LightMiner product, which we’ll talk about more shortly. And then provide actual insights like security alerts, marketing campaigns, loyalty programs, et cetera in real-time. By doing so, we have created a fast, secure and scalable solution that we believe allows customers to answer their most complex business questions today. I’ve touched on examples of how our solution addresses business problems in various industries in the past. But let’s take a recent issue that made headlines this week. The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight resulted Periscope, Twitter’s live-streaming app, being declared the real winner. Much to the dismay of copyright owners, broadcasters, et cetera, live streaming during the Price-Fight [ph] and other events like this happens all the time. What if the venue and broadcasters have the ability to use Sysorex’s AirPatrol technology to detect devices that were violating the live-streaming policies and disabled that feature? Customers would have been able to continue to use their Twitter accounts, but not be allowed to live-stream. Of course, this former device management would require consumer consent to be specified terms and conditions when connecting to the venue’s Wi-Fi, but it could provide a mechanism to protect copyright content. We believe that Sysorex’s AirPatrol technology, which can detect and manage mobile devices, along with our LightMiner data analytics platform, which can provide real-time analytics, could be a solution to this issue. On today’s call, I’d like to focus on three key areas. Our integration efforts in the new operating segments you see in the financial results beginning this quarter. Our recent government contract awards, the NASA SEWP and NIH CIO-CS contracts, and what that means for us in our recent acquisition of the LightMiner product and its role in our big data analytics business. As I mentioned at the beginning, we have made and continue to make significant progress on integrating the companies we have acquired. Part of this integration effort has led to the reclassification of our operating segments in our financial reporting. We have shifted from IT commercial, IT government, location-based technologies that need solutions, which were essentially tied to the entities we acquired. The new segments more clearly represent our products and services regardless of which entity or division may have made the sale. As we integrate the companies and cross-selling between entities expand, we believe this approach will provide more accurate information to our shareholders and the public. For example, with the SEWP or CIO-CS contracts third-party products, Sysorex products and all services sold to government customers, would have been in the IT government operating segment and would blend the revenues and margins. We would not declare to our management team or shareholders which piece was contributing what. In the new segments government becomes a vertical, just like life-sciences, high-tech, retail, et cetera. And we all can clearly see revenues and margins by products and service categories. This is how we look at the integrated business and we felt it was important to share that with you. In our in Q1 results we announced the Storage and Computing, which represents hardware, software and maintenance on products we resold from third-party vendors. This is our largest top line segment with margins on average of 20%. We expect this segment to grow especially with our recent SEWP and CIO-CS’ contract awards. The next segment is Sysorex’s Mobile, IoT and Data Analytics products. Included in this you will find our AirPatrol line and new versions of these products that we are positioning for the IoT space. This segment will also include our LightMiner big data analytics product when sold on premise as an appliance. Any Sysorex owned product sales will be included in this category. This is a smaller revenue segment today, but one that we believe will have high growth and high gross margins in the future. Third, we have our Software as a Service or SaaS segment. This includes all SaaS sales which include revenues that were in our eSolutions category before, as well as our LightMiner data analytics platform when sold as a service and other SaaS services. We have a $4 million revenue stream in this category today. And we expect this category to grow as our LightMiner service roles out later this year. This is also one we expect to be a high growth segment with gross margin levels currently ranging from 70% to 80%. And finally, we have our professional services segment. This includes all other services including managed services and our government IT services. We expect our professional services will continue to grow at an attractive rate. Margins in this segment currently ranges from 40% to 50%. Further to this integration discussion, I’ll point out that you will see us phasing out the subsidiary names and moving them to the Sysorex brand. We will be launching a new website and marketing collateral accordingly. We feel this further unties our employees and signals to our customers and partners that we are one company. The AirPatrol, LightMiner and Shoom names will continue only as product line names. An example of how our integration and cross-selling efforts are beginning to pay off, are the recent contract vehicle awards of the NASA SEWP and the NIH CIO-CS contracts. These contracts that we bid on back in Q4 2013, within six months of the Lilien Systems acquisition demonstrate the integration efforts that we’ve undertaken. Let me take a couple of minutes to address some of the questions we receive from shareholders around these announcements: the SEWP and CIO-CS contracts are 10 year to 5 year a base, plus 5 option years; IDIQ, meaning Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contracts. There are approximately 200 vendors on that to SEWP and 65 vendors on CIO-CS. NASA SEWP is a GWAC meaning, Government-Wide Acquisition Contract, and NIH CIO-CS is open to many government agencies, but not a full GWAC. And they both have a $20 billion ceiling, which is basically the maximum that’s allowed over the 10 year to run through that contract before the agency has to do another contract procurement. The benefit for government agencies is to have a completed contract vehicle with negotiated prices for thousands of products that they can quickly by from. For contract holders, it provides us an opportunity to have a 10-year easy-to-use contract vehicle that we can market to government customers and provide them access to our products. Government customers need a contract vehicle to buy any sizable dollar value of products and services. As one of the contract awardees, and by the way it is very competitive and valuable to get either one of these contracts, we will receive task orders daily that we will decide to bid or no-bid based on a match to our product lines. We can’t predict today how much of these task orders Sysorex will capture, but we feel we will be able to grow our business with these contracts. Our sales team will also be marketing our products to government customers and bring them to these contracts to complete the transaction. So we are not only reacting to task orders coming through the contract vehicle, but we will also bring customers to the vehicle. Several of our employees have experience with these types of contracts. We are adding additional sales personnel and I believe that we have the right team and the processes in place to capture revenue from both SEWP and CIO-CS. Also, please keep in mind, in addition to reselling third-party products on these contracts we will be adding our AirPatrol and LightMiner product lines on to the contracts. So any government agency will have an easy-to-use contract vehicle to access the products. In fact, we have just added AirPatrol on to our SEWP and have already responded to our first task order. Speaking of LightMiner, let’s discuss this very important technology acquisition. We acquired LightMiner’s assets, a company based here in Palo Alto, for $3.2 million in stock. The number of shares will be determined one year from the acquisition date based on a 20-day volume weighted average price. In addition, we hired Chris Baskett, founder of LMS, as a VP of Engineering reporting to our CTO. Chris and his LMS team some of which will also be joining Sysorex have built an incredibly fast and scalable database product that was a perfect fit for our big data analytics platform. I’ve always talked about acquiring some of the pieces in the big data ecosystem and this is one key piece that we were fortunate to find. For LMS, Sysorex provides a faster-to-market strategy with the infrastructure already in place to reach hundreds of customers. I’ll ask Bret to jump in here now and talk more about the LMS technology and how it fits into our big data analytics platform. Bret?