My consolidated notes from today’s meeting. Thanks @Strawman for hosting and organsing!

Problem solved:

Ensuring data can be shared with only the right people at the right time. ArchTIS seeks to secure user data via attribute-based access control (ABAC) security. @Strawman can view file X or Y based on a defined list of attributes; the device being used, the type of network access, his internal security settings etc. These attributes also move with the file. Send/move the data to another user, same attributes check applies. This way if the network boundary is comprised, the damage remains limited to the user access utilised. It operates in the background – a user never sees the policy implementation occurring.

Industry drivers:

Geo-politics and military strategy and policy. This looks like western military and government alliances driving uplift of security spending globally. Daniel also gave a kill chain example of joint force integration; Where if I understood it, an ADF sensor, passes data to a US command system, who then uses a third nations military platform to shoot at the target – the data centric security across that must be complex!

Growth reasons:

Most organisations have a low level of maturity in this space.

Some governments have mandated moves to data centric architectures by 2027.

Daniel spoke to the network effect. Noting they are B2B (not B2C), and that they have customer credibility now to grow (US DoD, Australian DoD, and some NATO stuff and JSDF stuff?) This will lead into the Defence Industry as well as these nations grow their defence capabilities. ‘Social proof’ as @Strawman put it nicely.

Three (four?) products:

Trusted Data Integration (TDI) – I missed what this does.

NC Protect – used for M$ applications and cloud things.

Kojensi – is middleware that sits on any platform and can achieve attribute-based security.

He spoke to a recent acquisition Direktiv – this also enhanced their backward compatibility of the diverse data environments that are seen in large government departments (such as a DoD). He gave examples of a mix - windows 11, windows 10, cobolt, c++ etc.

Overall – I got the sense they can integrate any existing data set and so the customer can choose to avoid additional upgrades if they wanted to.

Threats/Competitors:

Daniel mentioned examples; PaloAlto, Microsoft, VMWare, etc, and said yes, everyone is into data centric security – but they are often network or application bound. And if they aren’t, not many other companies go to level to make commercially applicable software for military use and standards. He said some of them even come to ArchTIS to do the last mile for their software?

He also seemed comfortable with having competitors, as it creates a market and proves the requirement for ArchTIS existence. Makes sense that a CEO would say this.

AI implementation:

Daniel gave a round-about answer. More of a question to the question. He spoke broadly to a ViaSat data spill where a user uploaded data to a LLM AI. He spoke to the complexity of securing AI in a container/classified environment but not impact its productivity. At least he didn’t try and sell AI!!

2024 Revenue split:

I asked about ~50/50 revenue split of integration/consulting and licences in FY24. Daniel said that won’t be here this year. The consulting was the positioning/credibility/convincing phase last year, and expects that to be significantly lower compared to licences revenue, and whilst consulting it will stay, won’t be the driving revenue generator. Integration will stay (installing their platform).

Company goal:

Daniel spoke to targeting 100mil then 150mil revenue and then ‘seeing where they go form there’. He spoke to shifting into other verticals (banking, etc). It gave me the impression he is targeted and focused on the Defence vertical. It would an orange flag if ArchTIS started drifting or chasing other verticals too soon. I also wouldn’t be surprised if ArchTIS was bought-out by another player – not sure who would though (I haven’t done research) – it just felt like his answer was ‘grow because that’s what you do’.

TAM/User licences:

Daniel artfully dodged my question about TAM and licences. Or perhaps I didn’t ask it clearly. It relates to not everyone in an organisation having/needing a licence. I’m told not everyone in the ADF has secret and top-secret clearances, which means there won’t be 57k user licences to sell to the ADF (which has a workforce of 57k people).

Another example is the US agency that Daniel said has 1000x licences with ArchTIS. That agency has 450k employees. He did and did not say that there would or would not be a licence for each person, and spoke broadly to enterprise licencing.

My concern remains that calculating estimates off department total staffing appears to be inaccurate in the military context – which is their primary vertical. This makes it hard to estimate growth.