Podcasts

NeoSystems and TIP Technologies join forces and create a partnership that is sure to deliver unique value to both of their customer sets. Join us as we discuss this partnership with NeoSystems’ SVP of Sales and Marketing, Matt Fogo and TIP Technologies’ President, Ron Dolan.

Transcript

Erin Keating:
Hello everybody and welcome to another podcast episode of NeoCast. We are here today to announce an exciting partnership between TIP Technologies and NeoSystems. We’re going to go into detail about why they’ve decided to partner and what that means for the industry and clients. And to give you a little bit background, let me just let our audience know what was announced. So NeoSystems, as our audience knows is a managed, strategic back office services provider and TIP Technologies is a leader in quality compliance and shop floor execution software. And as they saw demand in SAS solutions being needed for industry clients, they decided to partner to help manage and deliver those technologies as well as resell those technologies.

So what I want to dig in with you guys today if you’ll allow me, is to find out a little bit more about what is NeoSystems bringing to the table here and why is it so important, what is TIP Technologies getting through this partnership and delivering via NeoSystems to its end clients and why should everyone be so excited about this. Because I know we are.

So to introduce our guests for today, we have Matt Fogo. He is with NeoSystems. He is our senior vice president of sales and marketing, and we have Ron Dolan, the president of TIP Technologies. Welcome both.

Ron Dolan:
Thank you.

Matt Fogo:
Yeah. Thanks very much.

Erin Keating:
Absolutely. Glad to have you guys here. So Matt, we’re going to start with you. This is the NeoCast, so we’ll start with NeoSystems. I’d love for you to tell people a little bit more about NeoSystems cloud. We know that NeoSystems is a services provider, but specifically the product of NeoSystems cloud is what’s really interesting here too and what I understand is we all know, listening to NeoCast, I own the resident Luddite so I get to ask the silly ABC questions. NeoSystems cloud is the platform that you will be delivering TIP Technologies through, if I’m right. Could you talk a little bit to the audience about the value added through NeoSystems cloud?

Matt Fogo:
Yeah. I’m happy to do that. And thank you. And thanks to Ron and for the strategic partnership. We’re quite excited about it as we believe it drives just a lot of value into the industry and to our mutual client base. Keeping in mind, NeoSystems is a systems integrator, and our cloud is just one line of business out of four lines of business. I’m certainly happy to cover off those other three, but I’ll stay very myopic to the question here. Is that NEO cloud, resident in four data centers, one in Chicago, two the nondescript buildings out in Ashburn, Virginia and a fail over or get disaster recovery site down in Orlando, Florida. It’s of tremendous value. Not only in this case, does it provide a SAS or a cloud option to technology, but it’s an incredibly secure cloud. Keeping in mind that about 95% of our client base are businesses that contract with the federal government and obviously they’re the most audited and regulatory posed type companies in the industry.

And so with that, we pride ourselves that our cloud brings, controls and parameters around such things as authentication, information integrity, risk assessment, incident response. And that’s all really programmed around things such as SOC 1, SOC 2, ITAR components, and the very rigid standard around FedRAMP. And in this case, we are FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent. And in fact, if you go to the GSA site, you will see NeoSystems and our cloud registered and certified on the GSA site.

So in that, there’s nothing probably any more secure from a cloud perspective to meet those rigid requirements, a FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent. And again, SOC 1, SOC 2, and ITAR. So the value that this brings is just security, whether that be security from a cyber threat, data protection any other functional areas that I’ve mentioned. But in addition to that, just the value around response time, our service levels agreements, SLA that are backed by financial penalty, but most again, and most of all, are security.

Erin Keating:
Great. Well, and you did mention there are three other areas that you would touch on, please do for our listeners because not everyone is guaranteed to have checked out NeoSystems prior to, so it would be good to give a full picture of NeoSystems as a whole, just as a brief topic.

Matt Fogo:
Yeah. I’m happy to do that and in fact, it’s quite related to our cloud. They go hand in hand with each other. I should have said that there’s almost 500 unique clients in the NeoSystems cloud. Not only do we already have TIP Technology clients in our cloud, but we serve really the who’s who from the pedigree perspective. If you look at the logos, you would find, Fortune 1000 companies, many of the wash tech top 100 federal contractors in our cloud, and again about 500 unique clients taking advantage of our cloud infrastructure.

The other line that’s lines of business, one of which is us, just as a systems integrator, that means we work with a very select and purposeful set of partners, such as TIP Technologies to bring best in class functionality to the market. Typically, those applications that are used by project-oriented businesses, particularly the ones doing business with the federal government.

So we partner with back office ERP, partners in applications, financial planning and analysis partners, travel and expense partners, business or workflow automation partners, HR partners. And we have resell rights within a lot of those partnerships, but by and large, we have a very deep services bench, both functionally, and technically that go out and implement and stand up those technology solutions.

So that makes us a fairly traditional systems integrator, but again, serving a very unique market known as the government contracting market. Secondly, we have other managed services such as full-blown outsourced and as accounting services, managed the IT services and managed HR services. So by and large, for small medium businesses, we take the heavy lift off their shoulders and basically run their business for them from an administrative perspective. For instance, in a managed accounting services, the client look to us to run their accounting shop, anywhere from the accounts payable clerk, all the way up to their virtual CFO, that’s unique and that not only do we provide the service and the people, we provide the tool sets.

So those tool sets that we partnered with under our systems integration line of business, we’ve bundled packaged together, and now stand you up and run your accounting shop on those very good best-in-class tool sets all in this cloud that I’ve talked about that is highly secure. So think of us as a systems integrator, think of us as a managed security services provider. The other service we provide, which is purely related to our FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent cloud, is that a managed security services. So anything we do with endpoint detection, boundary detection, keeping your data secure and safe, and then giving good counsel and getting into a managed services contract with your organizations to really act as your security guidance, your virtual CSO, et cetera. So again, systems integrator and managed services, then the security services and the cloud that we’ve just talked about. So those are our four main lines of business.

Erin Keating:
That is a soup to nuts list there, Matt. So I’m impressed and I’ve certainly gotten to enjoy learning a lot about them. So Ron, let’s switch over to TIP Technologies. Being a leader in quality compliance and shop floor execution software, how did you see NeoSystems as really unique partner and the value that your products are bringing to the NeoSystems cloud and their services?

Ron Dolan:
Thank you for the opportunity to be on this podcast with you, Matt. And we’re excited about the opportunity as well. Now TIP Technology has been in business for more than 30 years, and we’re known as having the who’s who in the defense and the supply chain. So when you think about aerospace, both in the commercial, the defense markets, you think about the drones and the things that are coming in advanced transportation. And then also the things that we do that are land-based vehicles, et cetera, that are associated with the military.

They all have a very common element, which is that they’re discreet manufacturing that are typically program-based. So when you look at how we provide our products to our customers, they look at what the total cost of ownership is. And as we know over a period of time, the cost of providing a remote supported, highly secure platform, which is what NeoSystems provides, whether it be in both FedRAMP and ITAR Compliance, our customers are demanding that kind of a service and that kind of an environment.

So it became a very natural event for us to look at as to how to expand the relationship that we have with NeoSystems. We’ve had a number of customers prior to this announcement, but since the announcement, we’ve seen over 200% increase of interest within our customers and within new opportunities. So why would somebody want to look at our product or be involved in the cloud with NeoSystems? I think at the end of the day, it really is to manage two things. One is audit to make sure that they have what I call audit assurance. And then the other piece that says managed the elements of risk mitigation, whether it’s new product introduction or deploying new application at another location, or within another business unit, they’re looking for a partner that’s been tried to improving. And the good news for us is that we’ve had a number of customers in common over the years, and the opportunity that’s in front of us provides the ability to expand that.

Erin Keating:
That’s great. And you mentioned cost being one of the drivers when different clients are looking to save, I’m assuming, is this what’s behind the demand increase in software as a solution?

Ron Dolan:
Well, I think there’s two pieces to it. One is the total cost of ownership. If you have an organization such as NeoSystems that has years of experience in deploying and maintaining applications, it’s guaranteed uptime to service values. People feel comfortable in moving in that direction because it actually takes a directed costs out of their organization. So if you might imagine having somebody that’s going to be dedicated to managing this computer environment or this system environment versus having somebody that’s doing it, if you will, on a percentage basis of time, there’s an immediate cost savings associated with that.

The other piece that I think it also provides around the cost of ownership is that it has the ability to sustain audit. And audit is a very, very big part of what goes on in our industry because so many things are defense-related and government contract-based. So they’re always looking to make sure that either from a cost standpoint or from a delivery of the product being and meeting all of the criteria, the dimensions, all of the performance requirements, all the other things that go into that is a huge investment on their part. So they want to make sure that they have the right people, the right team, the right tools to mitigate those exposures. And I think NeoSystems and TIP, and their combined partnership do that very well.

Erin Keating:
Matt, could you add anything to that as far as why we’ve seen such an increase in demand for a software solutions?

Matt Fogo:
So, Ron really summarized that well, but just to maybe put some fine points on it, for us, as a systems integrator, not only with TIP Technologies, but the other best in class tool sets we work with. It’s the way that folks go to market today from a software perspective. But by and large, I think it boils down to some of the points Ron talked about in terms of one, affordability, two, scalability, and three, Ron talked about risk mitigation. So it’s all about security, why not take off the burden off of your shoulders in that risk and give it to folks that do this every single day for a living and they have put in place years of hard work and lots of money to offer in this case, like a FedRAMP cloud, knowing that, that’s a really safe environment from a staff perspective. And you know what? The difference between what small companies could afford and what big companies could afford many years ago, is distinctly different while today, just clicking on URL, small companies get the same access as big companies.

And so you’re going to buy what you use. And so that’s why I talk about not just affordability, but scalability. Again, buying what you’re using and ability to scale up as you need it, or scale down as it may be. So for all those reasons, affordability, scalability, security, and there’s hundreds of other reasons, but those rise to the top in terms of what we’re seeing from a demand perspective,

Erin Keating:
Right. And I imagine it really just opens up for innovation and competition amongst the providers, especially within the government industry, because to your point, so many restrictions can be placed on individuals that are working with the government. So the idea that it can be somewhat democratized, the opportunity via systems like this, via services like yours. I would imagine it opens up to competitive landscape a lot more. So Matt, you know that we’ve done a lot of work within NeoSystems discussing the CMMC, the cyber security maturity model certification that’s going online. And both of you have mentioned clients that are in common in the government work, but also clients that you may have separately that maybe perhaps this partnership would bring together for you. Have you all seen any specific uptake or benefit and advantage to partnering in this particular climate with CMMC looming?

Matt Fogo:
We have, and here the government has issued yet another must-have, this is not a nice to have. And this affects every DOD contractor and soon enough, likely every commercial contractor, whether they have to attest the fact they’ll get to level one all the way up to level five. So this is something that’s big in the market today. And if you think about the triangulation of what Ron and team offer versus what the security of the cloud we’ve just discussed, as well as in this case, Neo’s other offerings like manage information, technology services, your virtual assistance. It all triangulate really well together. And so, yes, the way that you think about a cloud thesis and the security posture that it brings triangulates again, very nicely to the cybersecurity maturity model certification. And so it’s just sort of one melded conversation at this point.

So yes, absolutely, when folks from Ron’s client base or prospect base look for cloud, I’m going to guess if they’re a government contractor, they have inherently CMMC concerns in the back of their mind and love to know that they’re going to be in a cloud that actually addresses the fine points from a regulatory perspective that CMMC addresses, but I’d love to hear Ron’s thoughts on that as well.

Ron Dolan:
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. As a matter of fact, this morning, I spent about an hour and a half on a meeting with one of our customers that has been building out a spreadsheet to identify all of the elements of being a level three certified CMMC supplier under government contracts. Can you just imagine the amount of time that’s being taken by that team? And there were nine people on the other side of that meeting with us, as they’re putting together all of their requirements and all of the things that they have to do, wouldn’t it be great if they just had to sign a contract that has the level three CMC already as a standard part of their offering?

So the relationship that we have with NeoSystems not only gives us the ability to say, you don’t have to worry about that stuff, but it also makes some compliant the minute that they go onto the environment. So there’ll still be things that they have to do internally, but the heavy lifting that they have to do today is mitigated by selecting the SAS solution that is on a very mature platform as well integrated and identified as FedRAMP and GSA approved.

Erin Keating:
Exactly. Again, I think just opening up the innovation and competitive nature of being able to do business, because as we’ve talked about on several other episodes, when we’re talking about CMMC, the idea that small to midsize companies may be at a disadvantage when something this large comes on top of them, of what they need to be complying with, being able to team up with both of you and know that they’re taking care of moving into the system, being certified, moving into the pool of eligibility for RFP response in government work has got to be a stellar component for you guys to be able to advertise through both of your channels. So I think it’s exciting.

I know that we plan to have a few other characters here from TIP Technologies, as well as NeoSystems. And if you follow on episodes to talk through hosting and SAS opportunities and reselling opportunities and consulting services, I look forward to covering off on those topics and future episodes, but for now, Matt and Ron, thank you so much for joining us. Any final parting thoughts either of you would like to leave our audience with?

Matt Fogo:
Thank you. And thank you, Ron. Again, tremendous partnership we’re already off and running. This does bring combination of value between our two firms. And let me reiterate again, not just serving the large enterprise companies, but also small companies. As Ron talk about the heavy lift can often seem burdensome for small companies, particularly around issues like CMMC. But again, with partnerships like this in place, that minutiae, that heavy burden is often lifted by just simply… Like I said, a URL and a link to the right website and supported by the right technology. So again, a lot of good value here that are driven to market.

Ron Dolan:
Yeah. And just the kind of a final comment from my side is, when you think of the Lockheeds, the Northrop Grumman, do you think of a general dynamics? Those companies didn’t start out at that size. They started out much smaller and they got the opportunity to continue to grow because they got to practice on what they knew best. And what they know best is how to build a plane or to build a sub or to build some component.

What we know how to do best is to provide an infrastructure and the architecture for the application so that they don’t have to worry about that part of their business. So we help support them in the life cycle of the development of their product, and then the reporting on the genealogy of their product. And in doing it in this environment, it gives them the ability as I say, to go and sleep at night and not have to worry about the technology aspect of it. All they have to worry about is getting product to market and doing it with high quality.

Erin Keating:
That’s a great point. Absolutely great point. Well, thank you gentlemen, both for being with us today. Again, we look forward to exploring the partnership even more in future episodes, but we appreciate you sharing some of the high level details of this partnership today, and we wish you both the best success with this partnerships. And thank you.

Ron Dolan:
Thank you, Erin.