Nadir Ali
Analyst · B. Riley. Please go ahead
Thanks, Scott and good afternoon, everyone. Welcomes to our third quarter 2016 earnings call and corporate update, and thank you for joining us. I'm joined on the call today by Kevin Harris, our CFO, who will be discussing our financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2016 after my opening remarks. And I will return to conclude our prepared remarks and fill your questions. Sysorex empowers data driven customers with an innovative approach to data analytics, security and Internet of Things. Sysorex products helps client improve security, better manage assets, and discover fresh opportunities by combining data from both, the physical and digital world. We help clients derive real-time value by giving them 100% of their data analyzed up to 1000 times faster. Our portfolio of products and services deliver innovative technologies solutions tailored specifically for a number of industries and applications, from corporate security to real-time customer analytics and shopping centers; Sysorex solutions are helping customers worldwide improve decision making, increase productivity, and fuel discoveries of tomorrow. Now as many of you know, we didn't start with these solutions I just described. We have been building these over the past couple of years and is certainly the key to the future success of our company. However, a majority of our revenue today continues to be from our VAR business which is reported in our numbers, primarily in the storage and computing segment. The VAR industry has been undergoing changes, John Donnelly of the VAR Guide talks about certain core products of VARs are more vulnerable than others. Storage, for example, represents a significant piece of revenue for VARs. A quick look at AWS's revenue numbers and the momentum shows that the storage business will be hit harder in the next few years as companies like NetApp and AMC struggle to keep their data center business. The trickledown effect on VARs will be felt. In addition, the recent evolution of SaaS subscription pricing models has significantly changed and challenged the VAR channel as it currently stands. Donnelly points out that SaaS companies have yet to crack the code on integrating with channel partners. These friends are also impacting our VAR business and contributed to the softening of revenues and margins in our storage and computing segment in the third quarter. However, I agree with Donnelly that there are ways to weather this storm and come out stronger. Some VARs or resellers are working on building and branding their cloud reselling strategy. This approach works for better for much larger VARs but it is a low margin business. We at Sysorex have chosen two distinct but complementary strategies to address these challenges. The first strategy is to acquire proprietary technology such as AirPatrol and like minor to truly transform the company from VAR to a technology company. This is the key long-term success factor for the company and gives us the opportunity for higher growth and margin profile. This approach also leverages our VAR customer base and allows us to provide a higher value proposition into those customers. I will come back later in this discussion to discuss the progress we are making on this front. Our second strategy was to expand our VAR business into the public sector to offset the declines we see with customers in the private sector. I have talked about this approach on many calls in the past and that's why we started bidding on government contracts like SOP [ph] and CIOCS over the past couple of years. Expansion into the government space doesn't happen overnight because the government has lengthy retirement cycles, it takes time to getting past performance qualifications and you need to hire a dedicated sales reps to build customer relationships. However, in the long run the government continues to buy significant volumes of products and services from VARs and this approach balances our mix of government and commercial customers, and allows us to invest in our propitiatory technologies which is the ultimate goal. To expedite the progress on this second strategy in a public sector, we recently moved on an opportunistic acquisition that was presented to us. As you saw with the announcement this afternoon, Sysorex has signed a definitive agreement to acquire certain aspects and liabilities of Integrio Technologies and expects to close on the acquisition shortly. Integrio Technologies is a 20 plus year old company having reported in Virginia with approximately 40 employees, roughly half of which are engineers build to project, a dozen or so folks in sales and project management and the balance in administration overhead. Integrio is an IT integration and engineering company that provides cutting edge solutions for network performance, secure wireless infrastructure, software application lifecycle support, and physical cyber security. Let me touch upon why this pending transaction makes so much sense for Sysorex going onward. Taking our storage and computing and our professional services segments into the government sector has been underway as we see the need to increase our government customer base to offset the decline we are seeing in commercial verticals. The Integrio acquisition helps us address this problem more aggressively, although we are adding in lower margin VAR revenue to the mix, Integrio does provide Sysorex with contracts and relationships with strategic customers such as the FBI, Department of Justice, U.S. Army, the Bureau of Prisons, and others which are prime targets for our AirPatrol and LightMiner products. It also gives us past performance qualifications allowing us to bid on many more task orders than we could before. It gives us significant portfolio of contracts that capture a high volume of task orders and provides us with additional sales engineers and consultants with extensive telecom and networking experience that we can train on AirPatrol and LightMiner. Integrio has generated revenues over $40 million per year in the past few years according to their records. We expect this acquisition will enable us to increase and help smooth our revenue and cash flows going forward. I think it is important to frame our developments in the context of our overall strategic vision to derive real-time value for our customers with the combination of physical and digital data which is not changed. The Integrio purchase is demonstrative of our approach to solving a problem in the VAR industry trend by showing up our storage and computing business with new support. This pending acquisition addresses a challenge in this business segment allows us to grow the top line and contributes to our EBITDA, providing us additional runway as we see AirPatrol and LightMiner take hold. I would now like to shift our focus to developments in our AirPatrol and LightMiner business. I think it is fair to say that there our announcement in the third quarter was strong AirPatrol contract with a top mall operator was received but not necessarily fully understood. So I want to spend a few minutes clarifying the implications of this superb win for Sysorex and frame it in context. On September 8, we announced that we have secured an AirPatrol for retail properties managed services contract with a top mall operator. As a reminder, Sysorex AirPatrol for retail properties products will soon be live in a marque shopping center providing detailed visitor analytics, including foot counts, visitor journey, length of stay and other location based information with a marque shopping center. Do you think a global real estate of Icon is going to put our sensors inside myriad walls all over the world without first realizing that what we have is unique and it works? The diligence that Sysorex went through in this client evaluation lasted for over a year and a half. We competed with startups to multi-billion dollar organizations to win this business. We are truly delivering something that has never been down before. The confidential nature of this announcement was strategic and intentional from a competitive positioning perspective, so I want our investors to understand that we -- our client and Sysorex intentionally have not named the client nor to divulge detail of this engagement that would compromise our future potential deployments together. While somewhat frustrating, and yes, I share this frustration as my desire is to profusely transparent, in this case our relationship with the client demands confidentiality for the benefit of their retaining competitive advantage and for the sake of our future potential solution deployments. That confidentiality and of itself speaks bonds about the nature of our ongoing opportunity and I hope that by clarifying this point that you are able to discern some further context about this relationship and what it potentially represents for Sysorex and our AirPatrol LightMiner retail offering. I'd also like to give you a quick reminder of what we are doing for these mall operators in case some of you are wondering. If you are a large retailer today, you have no idea about the flow of people throughout your stores; what people do before they come to you stores etcetera. Today there is video, beacons but they still don't solve the problem. Think about it, retailers know infinitely more about their online customers and they are trying to replicate that into physical record [ph]. They need to understand real-time information and trends that can help them optimize staffing and improve security, provide way finding, offer customized service and improve margin campaigns. To do this they need indoor location and the data that goes with it. Why? Because we spend most of our time indoors working, shopping, eating, etcetera. GPS and maps don't work indoors they need line of sight to the sky. Wifi and Bluetooth solutions help solve part of the problem but they don't have people that capture all of their devices and Wifi location is not very precise. No one else that we've seen does what Sysorex can do with its AirPatrol product, and that's because we have cellular Wifi and Bluetooth, all in one. That's what gets precision versus proximity and we capture practically 100% of the devices unless they are turned off. Indoor location is becoming a currency and we are in the best position to provide that best locationing and increase the value of that currency. Like most technology solutions today, AirPatrol has typically purchased on a SaaS basis, mostly by non-government customers and therefore, you don't see the top line impact immediately. However, similar to other SaaS companies this will lead to reoccurring revenue streams with a more direct impact on our bottom line. For example, a monthly fee for a mall can range from $30,000 per month to $100,000 per month depending on the size of the mall. These customers will be typically signing and two to three-year renewable contract. Other customers in government or international space, we've seen purchasing upfront silencing with annual maintenance fees. Now I'd like to just say a few things of a more personal nature before I turn the call over to Kevin. Unlike a lot of micro caps you may invest in, insiders and affiliates own approximately 30% of this company, so there is no one more unhappy with the stock performance than us. I take responsibly for perhaps not communicating the vision and model as I could at times but let me say we are confident in the vision but we also know the finical results needs to improve. And given the margins in AirPatrol LightMiner, we can get there; we shouldn't discount the importance of that business segment because despite the comparatively small revenue numbers, this high margin business is very additive to a business that is approaching EBITDA breakeven. We also believe that as they improve, the buy side and the sell side will more than recognize the value of Sysorex. So I want to say thank you to all of you for your patience and for your shared confidence. While we do not control our stock price, we have taken substantive measures to strengthen our foundation and we are confident that our evaluation will become better aligned with our evolving reality. We fully intend to remain as a NASDAQ listed company, as well and we will take the appropriate measures at the appropriate time in order to accomplish this important requisite. Our vision for the evolution Sysorex remains steadfast and we are resolute in our determination to achieve the promise we know we can achieve. We remain opportunistic about our prospects for sale growth in our higher margin segments and in our lower margin segments to be sure. With that I will now turn the call over to Kevin to discuss our financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2016.