Vanguard Magazine

gaMe CHangeR 42 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2020 www.vanguardcanada.com See the full interview online Q How did you start out in this industry, and how has it brought you to where you are today? While working on airborne connectivity systems, it became clear to us that cy- bersecurity presented a significant risk – one that required a more comprehen- sive solution than just adding a firewall to the aircraft network, or trying to fit a terrestrial cybersecurity solution onto an aircraft. Q What is your role at your organization today? While CCX Technologies has grown exponentially in the last two years, our team is a relatively small number of avia- tion & defence professionals. As presi- dent, I'm responsible for day-to-day op- erations, sales, marketing and business development. Pretty much anything that is not engineering related. Q What was your most challenging moment? Every day has its challenging moments, and with a startup company, my next challenge is the most challenging. We are in the position of having an abun- dance of work with a small engineering team. As a startup company in a complex ecosystem, you have high hurdles to jump. You get told "no" or "you're too small" every day. Despite the challenges, we have customers, who are leaders in their fields, who trust us. Q What was your "aha" moment or epiphany that you think will resonate most with our reader? Tell us that story. We had this idea, which as far as we could tell did not exist for aviation and defence industry. We wanted to build cybersecu- rity systems to actively monitor onboard networks and databuses right on vehicles involved in air, land and sea activities. Our "aha" moment was when a cus- tomer, a heavyweight in the aviation in- dustry, validated our idea by giving us a contract. This large company recognized the need for cybersecurity, but couldn't execute. But now, the largest companies in defence and aviation are coming to us. Q What is the one thing that has you most fired up today? Growing a small cybersecurity technol- ogy company in Canada that competes in a very complex global market segment and providing leading edge cybersecuri- ty technology to the largest defence and aviation companies in the world – that gets me fired up! Q What is the best advice you received? Your customers, current and prospec- tive, are your best source of product and development funding. Small or medium-sized companies often go after major funding rounds to grow. While they're doing this, they aren't putting the same amount of effort into going af- ter customers and partnering with them, which is a great way to grow the com- pany's capabilities and revenues. Q What people or organizations do you believe best embody the innovation mindset? Innovation can mean a number of things. When a large company recognizes that CCX Technologies can provide a solu- tion, that's innovation within the context of what is a structured, organized, large company. From our perspective, that's in- novation at its best – a company or orga- nization thinking differently about how they want to acquire new solutions. Q What are some of the biggest impediments to innovation in your industry sector? A key impediment to innovation is the lack of understanding of cybersecurity threats. Particularly because aviation and defence are traditional industry sectors, change is slow because it's highly regulated with strict requirements for compliance. While important for safety reasons, regulatory requirements can naturally quash innova- tion. Q How has innovation become engrained in your organization's culture, and how is it being optimized? Essentially, we have to innovate or we will cease to exist. One of our biggest assets is our ability to consistently deliver on our innovative ideas. We challenge everyone at CCX Technologies to think differently about problem solving and we foster in- novations on how to do your job, new processes, ideas, and execution. Q What technologies, business models, and trends will drive the biggest changes in your industry over the next two years? There are many, but two that come to mind immediately are: Observing the imple- mentation of the U.S. DoD's JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) pro- gram, which will see the deployment of a "worldwide, highly available, exponentially elastic, secure, resilient cloud computing and storage environment that seamlessly extends from the homefront to the tacti- cal edge." This program opens the door for CCX and our technology, which is de- signed to fit this model. Secondly, industry and government collaboration to address the issues of cybersecurity. CADSI recently published "The Cyber Collaboration Im- perative: An Overview of Leading Industry Collaboration Models Practices in Cyber Defence" which is a proposal for change here in Canada for public-private collabo- ration on cyber defence. If the government embraced some of the recommendations in the report, it would also drive a massive change in our industry sector. Chris Bartlett President CCX TeChnologies

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