TORONTO, Aug. 04, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Patriot One Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: PAT) (OTCQX: PTOTF) (FRANKFURT: 0PL) (“Patriot One” or the “Company”), is pleased to issue the following letter from Patriot One CEO, Peter Evans.
Dear Shareholders,
This letter is a bit later than I would have preferred, having just completed a productive and successful week at the ISC West, Vegas trade show last week, and finishing off a very busy fiscal year end.
It has been a very compelling and busy quarter. The acceleration is palpable. The first three months of the year were about refreshing our sales and marketing activities, getting very focused on specific customer segments, and getting out and building pipeline as the world started to re-open from COVID-19. In these past 90 days, it’s been about customer engagement, showcasing our products, and selling. There is an old saying: “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.” Ninety days ago, we “wished” to engage with our key marketing segments, connecting and introducing Patriot One to key security decision makers in casinos, live entertainment providers and other organizations in our target markets. Today, we are in weekly (or even daily) conversations with those organizations, working with them to prepare for deployments and supporting them with security operations design.
I am very pleased with the business progress, and we have line of sight on a robust pipeline of sales opportunities that we are working to close this quarter, or shortly thereafter.
ISC West Conference
Last week we executed on a successful trade show in Las Vegas for the International Security Conference & Exposition – also known as ISC West. This event was timely, because it represented a strong culmination of our efforts to execute on the sales and marketing strategy we put in place six months ago, ensuring complete alignment and validation of our technology, our sales engagement strategy, and our market positioning. We had a great show with outstanding performance of the solution and some “Wow” moments with key customers, partners, and analysts.
We executed a different approach for the ISC show this year, intentionally staying away from the exhibit floor and the distraction of the “Trick-or-Treaters,” and instead creating a demonstration space where we could have focused, quality conversations with key customers, industry leaders and prospects. With the significant reduction in traffic and exhibitors at the show due to the pandemic, this strategy worked well for us.
Along with demonstrations at the ISC venue, we also hosted customers at one of our casino customer locations. This proved invaluable to progressing our sales initiatives. By witnessing the solution operating effectively in a live environment and allowing a constant fast and frictionless entry by casino patrons, these customers were able to have an “Aha” moment and understand the steps they needed to take to implement our solution correctly. It was also pleasing to hear one member of the security staff say, “Prior to this solution, it was a mess. We were wanding everyone, and the line was 50 yards long down the hallway, which frustrated customers, vendors and our employees. This solution has been a lifesaver. Everyone just walks in, the customers are happier, the vendors are happier, and we are happier.”
I am extremely pleased with how our products measured up against the competition and am proud of how our engineering group has delivered a threat-detection solution that independent third-party testing shows detects items that the competitors cannot, and that traditional walk-through-metal detectors often miss.
Quarterly Observations – Creating Customer Alignment
Since my last letter, we have continued to aggressively focus on customer engagements. With a clear understanding of customer needs from the prior quarter, we have been refining and further enhancing the solution, and working with customers to ensure that we have the end-to-end security operations correct.
As previously stated, the process to close these sales opportunities is complex. There are risks and liabilities to organizations that are adopting new technologies and they are being prudent in deployment, particularly larger organizations, teams, and leagues. A typical engagement will progress through site-surveys, trials and pilots (sometimes in multiple locations), a redesign of the customer’s security operations, IT integration, proposal negotiation and contracting, and budgeting. It’s a complex sales cycle. In all cases, we are working with our customers on pragmatic and phased deployments in alignment with their business needs. Many of these large opportunities have requested specific features and functionality which, when developed, should open the gateway to broader deployments.
In the last newsletter, we highlighted a demo-day completed in Vegas with positive results. The work and strategic discussions in this past quarter have resulted in demonstration days for three major sports leagues, which will occur in August during highly attended events. These opportunities will allow us to showcase our solution under the right conditions with the right audience. We expect these league showcase events to be attended by most of the teams in those leagues.
Further, I am very pleased that we have been selected out of a group of competitors to deploy our solution for evaluation and then later implementation into the headquarters of a U.S. Federal organization. Like all Federal activities, I expect this to be a longer process that will have solid growth over time.
In summary, this quarter has been an amazing learning opportunity for us to better position our products to meet the needs of our customers and for our customers to better understand the capabilities of our core solution. More importantly, we have laid the groundwork for meaningful and productive customer partnerships in the future.
Focus on Products and Technology
Our Multi-Sensor Gateway (MSG) and Video Recognition Software (VRS) solutions are working extremely well in our target markets. In the past quarter, we were participants in three independent technology reviews (or “bake-offs”) to assess the technical efficacy of our products. I am pleased to share that we were successful in winning all three of these bake-offs and securing one small initial order from one of those organizations.
Further repeating my comments from the last newsletter, after meeting with many organizations in multiple industries, it’s clear that the right solution for our customers is not a simple matter of selling a pair of MSG towers. There is a complex equation to work through to balance the detection rate, the alert rate, the costs, the security operations model, spectator throughput, and environmental conditions. These organizations do not take lightly a shift from prior technologies to new untested technologies, and are taking us through a series of progressively complex tests to evaluate the solution before deploying more broadly.
We continue to enhance the efficacy of the solution, focusing on the detection of all threats required to meet the safety standards published by the DHS, the sports leagues and others. These same pro sports groups I mentioned earlier have also partnered with us to identify future feature requirements to help them improve their patron experience. We will continue to collaborate with these groups to develop features and functionality to further align our technology roadmap.
One example of how this type of collaboration manifests itself came this quarter, when we announced the release of our enhanced Alert Center capabilities that provides increased operational flexibility to security operations. Alert Center gives customers the ability to orchestrate alerts, so they go to the right people or groups of people. More importantly, they enable staff to receive alerts and get situational intelligence through a mobile phone app, so they can respond more quickly and efficiently to developing security and patron-experience-compromising events. This is just one of the ways in which Patriot One is digitally transforming the security business – instead of standing around looking at people and monitors, guards can be out on the floor responding to actual alerts in real time.
In Conclusion
ISC was a quality opportunity for everything to “Come Together” in a very integrated manner. We have a high performing solution - driven by continuous enhancements to our AI engine - that outperforms the currently deployed walk-through-metal-detection technology and security standards, and significantly outperforms the competition. We have increased our visibility and awareness in our target markets both through our sales and marketing efforts, and through specific steps we’ve taken to align ourselves with critical organizations within those markets.
By addressing and surpassing these hurdles, we are now being invited to showcase the technology in broader forums, leagues, and venues where multiple organizations, teams, law enforcement organizations, and others will witness our capabilities.
The next communications will be an investor Q&A webinar, scheduled for early September. By then, I hope to be able to announce specific agreements. We welcome all questions from our investors on that call and will also focus on addressing the evolving vision and market opportunities for the Company, and key customers who are adopting our vision and solutions to fundamentally change their business models.
Finally, the best way that we can drive shareholder value and stock price is to deliver revenue. This is our priority and why the whole team is focused on customer engagement.
Best regards,
Peter