 Howdy and welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios. I'm Andrew, the security guy. Got another exciting episode of security matters for you today on your Cinco de Mayo. I hope you're having a great day out there. Nigel Waterton is with us today from Arculis. He is the chief revenue officer over there. And we're gonna check in with him and his coronation. We're gonna talk a little bit about the status of the industry. And we're definitely gonna talk a little bit about Arculis today. So stay with us. Nigel, thanks so much for joining me today, man. How you doing over there? Doing fantastic, Andrew. We're having a great day. It's a beautiful sunny day in the Northwest. Can't complain. Can you see the mountain? I can see the mountain over my shoulder. Showed the mountain over my shoulder. I know it. But not from my house. When it's clear, when it's clear up there and you can see we're near, it's just gorgeous. I love that town on a sunny day. You don't get very many though. I know nobody will admit it, but you don't get that many. It's gonna be 80 degrees on Saturday. Wow, that's awesome. Right on, it's springtime. Well, you're well known in the industry, Nigel, but go ahead and for any of our viewers who may not know you and know your history. Why don't you share what you've been through, your industry story, if you will, bring us up to current times? Came to America 23 years ago after being in the military in the UK. I was in the Royal Navy. I started off in contract manpower, not too long after I actually got married. And I worked for Wells Fargo and burn security. And did that for about three years as a regional branch manager, ran accounts like warehouser, a lot of fun. And then a good friend of mine, a guy by the name of Brian Lund, who works as the, I think he was the general manager, RFI, called me up and he said, hey, you should come and work from us. And I said, okay. He said, yeah, because you could talk the ass off of the donkey and I was like, okay. So I got dragged into sales and progressively through work to RFI became was a general manager at Protection One for four years. Then really my true career started after learning a lot of different things at ASG where I spent probably 10, nearly 11 years of my life there, phenomenal group of people. Right up until we were acquired by ADT two and a half years ago. And six months ago, I joined Achilles as the chief revenue officer. And I just thought this was my opportunity to give back to an industry that'd been really good to me. I've learned a lot, I've done a lot of things wrong. And that's how you learn. But it was my opportunity to give back and help a young, aggressive startup company with a really innovative technology. So that's what led me to where I am today. And of course along the road, I met people like yourself and Christine and Christine, your wife who just got warded the woman of the year for the state of Hawaii. So congratulations. Is that something else from the SBA? That's amazing. Thank you, thanks for that. Yeah, so much. I mean, we met I think when you were at ASG so much there with Phil and the whole gang. I mean, what a phenomenal company that was. Amazing company. Great people, great culture. Loved every minute of it. Yeah. So we're definitely gonna get into Arkely's too in a bit. So let's talk about this enforced coronacation, man. I mean, what a change, you know? Like we all were ready to go, ready to go to the shows for the year, ready to get our products out there, ready to swap spit as it were. And man, what a shift. How are you doing? Well, I tell you now, our business is actually flourishing because a lot of people are seeing the changes from project-based work to RMR-based models. We have been always fairly dynamic and being able to run our business anywhere. You know, that's the essence of a cloud-based product. So we've enjoyed the coronacation, the enforced vacation probably a little differently than most because we're not installing and I think we're ideating, we're creating, you know, we're working with our end users, we're talking to them on a regular basis about how to address the risks in their business. It has been fun, although this is the longest period of time I've had in the last 10, 11 years to actually be at home without traveling somewhere. So yeah, it's been kind of nice. So are you gonna have another month in Washington state or what's the status? Yeah, the governor is opening up a four-phase approach. I think that's what a lot of states are doing. May 31st should be the kind of final stay home order in effect, but I think, you know, Washington State, everybody's been pretty smart about this. We kind of jumped on things early and kind of shut down, you know, the spread pretty quick. We've, I think we definitely beat the curve and flattened it very early on, but it's not a question of what we can do here. It's a question of everywhere else. So I think we're all in this new normal together. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, I'm very fearful for our tourism industry, obviously you guys have a strong tourism industry there as well. Carnival and Holland America have both basically said they won't get cruises out of Seattle to Alaska this year. And that's a, I think that they said on the news that it was probably about an $80 million impact to local economy. Local economy is pretty significant. Wow, that's something else. How's the culture around, well, how's the culture around the house? Let's talk about that a little bit. The coronacation culture I call it, the homebound culture. Who goes out for the shopping? I think we all do. I think it's like, I think we're all kind of tag teaming out to go and get out of the house. My wife has put me on a restriction zone around Home Depot now, because I've been getting and doing all of the DIY projects that I've put off for the last couple of years. But I think the general way of things is that I'm lucky I've got two grown children, both are in college. They're both doing their online classes. My wife is still working for the Port of Seattle in a self, a health and safety risk management role there. So we're still doing, we're still business as usual, kind of come together at the end of the day, sit down at the dinner table, talk about how the day worked. You know, it's just different. Everybody's adjusted. Sure. Are you getting any homework requests? Like about math? No, well, I'd be the last person to ask that. Anything other than plus is my subtraction and division. No, my kids would never come to me for that. Although my daughter is going through some classes at the moment for diving and would query me on questions around that every now and again. My son, no, everybody's just been keeping and doing their own stuff and still surviving and thriving. It's good. Good. You have enough bandwidth there in your house? So are you guys got Google Fiverr to the house or something? Well, I got my 21 year old is currently engaged in computer sciences and network engineering. I'm pretty, pretty much sure he's got everything overclocked in the house. Yes. But he asked last year, you know, two years ago, he said, I said, what do you want for your Christmas present? He goes, I want a rack so I can put my servers in it. Wow. Nice. Nice. Okay. That's the very, very forward technology home. So what do you think about the culture of business? You know, how's it with Arkely? You guys are, you know, they were, I've been up there, you know, it's an advanced crew. So I would expect that they kind of took to remote working pretty well or your priority did some of that. How's, what's your take on the chronication culture of your company today? The culture of our company is not altered whatsoever. I think everybody adjusted to the normalcy of working from home. And, you know, there's always a fear that, you know, when you send people to home that they, they'll kind of fall back into the position of being at home. So again, it's kind of like a vacation. But that has been quite the opposite for our team. Everybody has leaned in. In fact, I think, yeah, I don't think I'm wrong here. I think the production level has gone up. And, you know, I know I do find myself, you know, on earlier morning course, you know, 7 a.m. because I'm talking to either Japan or I'm talking to Denmark or somewhere in Europe and or working late at night because again, we're talking to Asia, you know, everybody has kind of fallen into a good rhythm here. I know everybody wants to get back into the office. You know, firstly, I think it's because the, there's a constantly supplied candy and snack drawer in the office. So, but I also think it's the dynamics of physical human contact that allows that creativity to kind of bounce off on each another as opposed to, you know, video to video, fine. But I think it's just a little different when you're, when you're face to face with somebody and you're, and you're working on a problem. And our teams, our teams thrive around collaboration. So I think that's what they're looking forward to. Yeah, that the element that's that, I don't know if it's human touch, but it's truly a more of a shared experience if you're together in the room, together over a table, together on a problem versus this virtually together. You know what I mean? I know what you're saying. So you were telling me a story about some of the, some of the, let's just say creative ways you guys have decided to stay connected as a team. Talk to us a little bit about that without no names. Yeah, no. So we do a couple of things, you know, we quickly recognize the, you know, again, the dynamics of connectivity when you're actually in an office environment is so important because you're literally there, you know, you're talking to people all the time. So we quickly realized that we needed to do very much more community action and drawing people in. And because we've got the medium of, you know, meetings, you know, whether or not it's social media, Google Zoom, whatever it is. So we do lunch and lunch. So everybody gets the opportunity to volunteer and they come forward and they do like a 20 minutes on, this is where I come from and this was my upbringing and you know, these are the things that we, you know, we kind of did as kids. That was fun. One of our employees did our whole thing. They were born in Kenya and they took us all through how they used to go to the national parks there. It was really, really interesting. You know, it's not exactly like normal for a North America to go, yeah, we used to go to this park and there was, you know, rhinos and lions and... Oh, wow. You know, and then we have a fun thing on Friday afternoons at four o'clock, trying to make it not too late for our East Coast folks. And we do like a virtual happy hour and just a little decompression. We play some games. People have done like little skits, like we did the map Foley thing from SNL, you know, living in a band down by the river. Again, people have told jokes, but not work, you know, just the group of friends coming together, you know, colleagues or otherwise, coming together at the end of a long work week and going, it's just chillax, it's just, you know, let's raise a beer or a glass of wine or whatever your, you know, your libation is and just kind of say, hey, how was your week, you know? And I think that dynamic is very important and it's definitely brought our community and our team definitely closer together, for sure. Do you think some of those sessions, if they were like recorded, that your clients might enjoy learning more about the people that, you know, that do their work? I don't think anybody would sign off on that. We've definitely encouraged, we've encouraged some of our partners who are like, hey, come and join us. I'll extend the invitation to you. Come and join us, you know, for our virtual happy hour on Friday afternoon at 4 p.m. and just relax with us. And again, I think you get to see, I think you just get to see a little bit more of a human dynamic that you wouldn't necessarily get to see if you were in just a straightforward business relationship. I mean, I can't look at and go, look, we're all very gregarious. Gregarious means that we like the company of others, you know? And so there's always a leaning in on that, right? And I know that, you know, again, our partnership again, go back over the years, you're a people person too. So I think you would enjoy the kind of like getting to know a little bit more about the people that help you versus somebody at the other end of the phone just selling you something. Sure. That's what I think partnerships are all about, you know? Yeah, I have to agree. I wonder how much or what types of these things may continue even after we don't have to do them anymore. It's, we're about halfway through. So let's, we'll jump out and pay some bills for about a minute and then we'll be right back with Nigel Waterton. Aloha, I'm Keisha King, host of Crossroads in Learning on Think Tech, Hawaii. On Crossroads in Learning, our guests and I discuss all aspects of education here in Hawaii and throughout the country. You can join us for stimulating conversations to enrich, enliven and educate. We are streamed live on Think Tech bi-weekly at 4 p.m. on Mondays. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, welcome back to Security Matters. I'm with Nigel Waterton today from Arkelyse. Nigel, you were giving us some great ideas for how to maybe innovate in this corona culture of ours. You also mentioned that you had spent some time on the phone, you know, because Arkelyse is a global company. So you guys are, you're working in Japan and Asia. What's your sense of the industry there and how they've been impacted, sort of maybe compare and contrast it with the U.S. or some further along. I know there might not be a fair question, but what's your sense of the global state of the industry? Well, I tell you, it's evolving constantly. Japan and Asia is ironically are now beginning to kind of do what America did a month ago, you know? Oh, okay. Again, they're beginning to kind of react to the situation. You know, I kind of look at like ripples in a pond, you know, this thing is kind of like, you know, spread out, but these ripples are kind of taking on momentum and hitting the shorelines in different, in a different way with a different intensity dependent upon the cultural dynamics, the geopolitical dynamics, the, you know, how the organizations or the countries communicate to their populace. So, you know, the West seems to be far more proactive than necessarily, or we believe, than the East. The trouble is the East has done a far better job in locking it down, you know? And, you know, people's discipline to agreeing that, you know, what the way to control this problem is to self-regulate without the government saying you will do this and you shouldn't do that. And everybody's looking at going, you know what, we need to stay healthy. So, we're going to, you know, act as a community to do these things. As it has affected the industry, it's odd, you know, because I spoke to some colleagues in Denmark the other day and they said, you know, it's been, they feel it's like pretty much been business as normal. And then you go to Germany and they're like, no, no, it's really been affected. Or you go to the UK and they say, eh, you know, everybody's kind of used to it now, you know, I think we're just waiting to emerge from the, from the cronication. Hmm. Is, what do you think, have you heard any rumblings from our manufacturing partners overseas or anything? Is everybody inspecting this a little bit of supply chain glitch? Cause there were many manufacturers shut down for a while, not long, I don't think, you know, four to six weeks maybe. So, maybe we'll see a late summer, a late summer glitch or something. I think you have to think about this in a very, or, you know, kind of organism, you know, everything is relied upon the other thing, right? You know, to grow collectively. So it's, you know, the toe connected to the foot bone, connected to the ankle bone, connected to the leg bone, thigh bone, et cetera. If you thought about supply chain interruption, it was like, okay, production in Asia was slowed because they shut the places down, okay? Well, the production is now started back up again. But guess what? They can't ship it because it can't arrive to the port to get offloaded from the port or on or unloaded to the ship to get offloaded at the port to then get distributed throughout the nation. So there's this kind of compounding effect. And again, you're going to go back to that ripple, you know, of one thing has to kind of, you know, burn its way out to get the other thing to kind of come back in the line. You know, in terms of supply chain demand, I think the distributors did a really good job in kind of pumping up their stocks beforehand and making sure that they had adequate in place because I think once this, once we exit out of the, you know, the coronation, I think we're going to see a pretty good ski ramp of work and I think it's going to come pretty hard and fast because everybody's going to be looking at going, okay, how do we address the problems in the marketplace with technology? Yeah, there's, this seems like there's always pent up demand and security anyway, right? Because these projects, they always happen. Maybe they get delayed a year or two, but they happen, right? So that, I call that pent up demand. It's, we saw it in 0809, we saw it in 2000. I mean, security industry, people need security to consume it. So let's get into Arkley's a little bit because an amazing offering. I mean, right at, you know, I would have called it bleeding edge a year ago or a year and a half ago or maybe two years ago when I first met Andreas and started to see what they were up to, more from their code base, more because it's just built so specifically to take advantage of what we can do with the cloud infrastructure. How are we doing with Arkley's first of all? You've been there, I know not a long time yet, but what's your, how much fun are you having first of all, let's ask that question. I'm having a lot of fun. You know, this is one of the most fun, challenging, energetic, time consuming, frustrating jobs I've ever had. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I've got a great team of people that I work with. You know, they're young, they're energetic. They create ideas literally on the fly and they turn those ideas into something practical in just as much time, you know. As I'm definitely one of the older guys in the company next I think to the CTO and a couple of others, but you know, the agility and the youth and the brainpower that the designers, the engineers, the sales team that they bring to the equation is so much fun to, and I don't believe I'm even managing it. I'm just kind of guiding and you know, caught up in the current of innovation, driving this excellent product that again, when you saw it a couple of years ago, it was definitely bleeding edge and the thing about bleeding edge is you get a lot of cuts. You get a lot of cuts along the way and we weren't ready. We really weren't ready that time ago, but we've managed in the last kind of 18 months to pick up some significant customers. You know, WeWork is one that we can talk about that has kind of grown up with us. We joined in the Petri dish together and formed up this catalyst of how to do things right and wrong. And now we're emerging from being a bleeding edge into a leading edge company. I know that sounds very cliche, but we're definitely in that leading edge now, you know, with WeWork being well over 12,000 some of cameras in 200 locations, 36 cities, 900 some odd concurrent users. I mean, couldn't get a better proof point than that. Yeah, so you can sell by my energy. I love what I'm doing at the moment. I'm really having a lot of fun working with people inside of our industry and inside of our company to drive a message of change. Thank you. I think the message is being heard around the world now. Is I was a big fan of hybrid at first when I first came across what was happening. I said, you know, to me, this is the way to sort of skip or help people get into the cloud by offering some hybrid functionality along with the VMS that they had and loved already. What's going on with development on the hybrid side and then what do we have to look forward to the next six months? Yeah, you know, so we developed the hybrid solution with obviously another Canon sister company in milestone. And, you know, we did that in a seamless fashion that the Oculus gateway can be seen and inside of the X-Protect environment. This just was, this made sense. As you said, it was that skipping stone into that first entree for customers to leverage what they had. You know, don't reinvent the wheel. You know, I kind of look to see what you've got today and make it work. And then, you know, that hybridization is obviously then taking us to then some of the next logical steps inside of our business practice by now we're to develop solutions for customers. We're never going to be 100% solve for every customer's problem. It was never designed to be that. You know, it's probably going to be about 90%. And that's when we think about our, when we think about our creation and what we're developing for the next six months, it's against that timeline and that product demand that customers are asking for. So there's an Oculus cloud managed version which basically says we can manipulate the bandwidth that is used so in low bandwidth situations where the software is going to be able to be able to managing the cameras are there. We already accept nearly 3,000 models of cameras today. Wow. Analytics being poured into the product features. We've got great analytics today but we're going to continue to invest in that. Again, we're going to do it by consultation with our customers to ask them, what is it they need and why do they need it? That's well, and the customer is the only one that we all of these cared about, right? Their use cases vary and in the different vertical markets they vary. And so that I think the cloud and to your point about analytics and development, right? It leverages all that power that's sitting there available for your development and your the ideation crew that you have there to just create a solution almost on the fly and test it. Hey, how does this work for you? How does that work for you? And it just becomes another feature set that everyone else that could use it can license. And as I think I told you before, the crazy thing is the technology is updated three times a week, three times a week. And it's like what? And it's not like breaking and fixing things. It's literally updated three times a week. So that's pretty cool. And it's done automatically. Yeah, that's unprecedented in the industry, right? I mean, as far as I know, now I don't pretend to know every product in the industry, but that development cycle is amazing. Yeah, I've never seen it. Well, we've got a few minutes left. What do you expect to roll out with Archulis over this year? If we get a chance to go out and roll it out, I don't know. It may be a virtual rollout. Yeah, no, it'll definitely be the Archulis Cloud Manage, which is the low bandwidth management. You know, as I said, with the fact that we're doing things three times a week, we're constantly rolling out, you know, a version one of a feature. And then it'll be a version 1.10, 2.0. And again, it comes from asking our customers, you know, what is it you need and why do you need it? And ranking those, those asks. Can we get some crazy ideas? And we're like, okay, that sounds really interesting. Take us through the rationale of that. And we're like, okay, then you have to kind of do a, a technical review to go, okay, how much time can this actually take me? Is it two weeks or three weeks or is it six months? So we're, again, we're constantly evolving that and something shift up and down on the scale. So there's some levers that we, as we change things, but you know, the most definitive thing is that, is that we're constantly learning from the marketplace. We're constantly learning from our clients, from our prospects, from experts like yourself and saying, hey, we should, we should kind of tweak our direction a little bit that way now, you know, or maybe you've got to come back to this way. So I love that. That has got to be a lot of fun. Nigel, I really appreciate you sharing with us today. You have a little bit of home, a little bit of office, a little bit of fun, a little bit of industry perspective. All in one guy, thank you so much again for being here. Aloha, thank you, Andrew. That was great. Aloha, brother. Love that shirt too. Take care of yourself. And everybody else out there, wash your hands. It's Cinco de Mayo. Aloha. De Mayo, baby, absolutely.