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Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the FirstWave Cloud Technology Limited Quarterly Investor Update Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Neil Pollock, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Amanda. Hello. Good morning, and welcome to FirstWave Cloud Technology's Q1 FY '21 Market Update. My name is Neil Pollock. And as Amanda said, I'm the Chief Executive Officer of FirstWave. Joining me today, on Slide 2 of our presentation, you will see our Executive Chairman, John Grant; and our adviser to the FirstWave Technology and Markets Committee, Kevin Bloch. I'd like to thank Kevin for taking time today to join us for this update. As I am sure you will have a number of questions for him. So let's get going. Slide 3 of the presentation is our standard disclaimer. I'm going to kick things off on Slide 4, the agenda slide. Our objective today is to report FirstWave's unaudited Q1 FY '21 results and outline for you the company's outlook for the first half and the rest of the financial year. The presentation you're about to see has been lodged on the ASX portal and emailed to the address provided with your registration. During the presentation, we will refer to the slide number we're talking to. For reference, I'm now on Slide 4. The presentation will commence with an update from John. I'll then follow with a refresher of the FY '21 plan we put to you in July. This will be followed by an update on the Q1 results. I will then provide an outlook for the rest of the first half and update you on prevailing market conditions and projects underway to deliver our full year results. I'm then going to invite Kevin to update you on his initial insights on FirstWave's Cloud Content Security Platform before I return to close the presentation and ask for your questions. At this point, we'll then open the lines for Q&A. Before we get into it, I want to draw your attention, please, to the appendix at the end of the presentation pack. There is a lot of additional content and detail, which expands on the main presentation, including a description of our technology and an investor's guide to our many, many acronyms. Some of you may be new to FirstWave, and this may be your first shareholder update. So I invite you to review the entire slide deck at your leisure and then raise any questions with us directly either today. And I know that you may not have had a chance to have a look through it, given the timing of the send out, or you can raise questions with us via email. Okay. Let's move to the next slide, Slide 5. Good morning, John. Over to you, please.
Thanks, Neil, and good morning to everyone on the call. Since joining FirstWave 16 months ago, it seems like longer than that, but there you go, we've put increasing asset into clearly and simply articulating the rationale for shareholders to invest in FirstWave. Core to this, of course, is articulating also clearly and simply, why FirstWave's technology is a global game changer, the problems it solves and for whom, the size of the addressable market and how we get to these markets. All with the fundamental belief that if shareholders understand this, then they will see the value in their investment. We've had some success in doing this, but in my view, we've not yet quite cracked the nut. So please indulge me once again, while I have another crack at it. Let's move to Slide 6. Lots of words here but working from the top. FirstWave's technology appeals to end users who do not want to own and operate their own perimeter security infrastructure. This condition opens multiple markets, given, firstly, the enterprise-grade quality of the current suite of perimeter core technologies. And I say current, because we'll continue to bring the latest technology advances onto the platform as they become available. But today, they are email and web from Cisco, firewall from Palo Alto and Fortinet, end point from Cisco and Trend Micro, and multifactor authentication from Duo, all technology providers who are leaders in the enterprise security market. Secondly, the fact that CCSP virtualizes in the cloud, multi-tenants and manages these core technologies by a single pane of glass, all of which are gold for both service provider and the end user. And thirdly, the fact that the multi-tenanting capability of CCSP delivered these enterprise grade technology at a very significant discount to enterprise pricing. Of these markets, the SMB and Small and Home Office is clearly a huge global market and a significant beneficiary of CCP (sic) [ CCSP ], given they can't afford enterprise pricing, significantly impacted in a threat-filled environment, have little in-house expertise and need a managed perimeter solution at an SMB price. But equally, CCSP appears to be enterprise end user and by enterprise, I mean large private and public organizations, which need enterprise-grade solutions, want to use their in-house expertise on core business rather than on security infrastructure and are prepared to outsource. It also applies to those enterprise end users who provide security services to their own owned entities from a central IT function and are prepared to own and operate private infrastructure to do so. FirstWave accesses these end user customers through multiple and different channels. The SMB/SOHO sector via the telco, for example Telstra and Vodafone Idea, the enterprise end user prepared to outsource via the Managed Security Services Provider, for example, SHELT or NTT Data, and the internal enterprise IT provider via the enterprise reseller or technology partner, for example, Cisco. Our focus to date has clearly been primarily on the telco at our technology partner, Cisco, but there's much more that over time we can do. Distilling all of this to the simplest of messaging, we are referring to this on Slide 7. Please turn to Slide 7. We are referring to this as democratizing enterprise grade cybersecurity-as-a-service, where on Slide 8, turning now to Slide 8, please, the Free Dictionary by Farlex defines democratizing as to make of or for the people. So the company you have or are considering making an investment in is making enterprise grade cybersecurity-as-a-service available to all organizations around the world who don't want or can't afford to own and operate their own security infrastructure in-house and want to subscribe to manage perimeter security as a service from the cloud. This continues to be, in our view, proving to be a game changer. Moving now to Slide 9. In the FY '20 annual report, we set this proposition out in detail. We explained the problem for the service provider and for the end user. We explained CCSP, the solution. And given we use a lot of what many shareholders would see as technical terms, acronyms, we also explained in some detail each of these and why they are important. And finally, we explained our partner model, under which we source enterprise grade technologies, and deliver them as managed cybersecurity-as-a-service to end users. I've been told by one of our significant shareholders that despite his being involved with the company since listing in 2016, this explanation is the clearest he has yet seen. We suggest that every shareholder should read it and they too will be imbued with the same enthusiasm and belief that he is, and that's a very strong recommendation. So we recommend it to you also. Take a look, and please, let us know what you think. Thanks for your indulgence on this. Moving now to Slide 10 and our Q1 update. So Neil is going to elaborate on all of what I'm about to say but in summary: COVID-19 continues to impact our partners and end customers with a degree varying between and within regions. As you'll recall, our FY '20 plan assumed return to pre-COVID conditions by the end of Q1. But this isn't -- we're not using this as an excuse, as you'll see from the presentation, but it is the reality, and we do have to deal with it. But as I've said repeatedly to you before, this is a numbers game, and we have many irons in the fire around the world. In terms of performance, Q1 closed above our FY '21 plan on all key metrics. Again, they will take you through all this. And our outlook for Q2 is tracking to plan. But the key to the full year is the second half, as you'll see, where planned revenue accelerates. And were those key opportunities amongst the many irons in the fire we have right now can provide the bridge we need for the second half. Please turn to Slide 11, and I'll hand you over to Neil in Sydney, who will add more color to all of this. Over to you, Neil.
Thanks very much, John. I'm now going to move to Slide 12. Slide 12 is a refresher of our FY '21 plan. You may recall I said in July that our FY '21 plan is focused on doing only those things that will drive revenue and diligently managing expenses to meet our cash flow objectives. I said, assuming a return to pre-COVID-19 business activity levels from October this year, we would deliver. Total revenue growth of 38% to $11.3 million. In-year total recurring revenue of $10.5 million, up 43% from FY '20 and international annualized recurring revenue of $9.5 million, up from $448,000 in FY '20. Further, expenses were projected to be in line with FY '20 at $18.8 million, and the closing cash balance was projected to be $4.8 million from an opening balance of $15.4 million. Product-wise, we committed to launch an Advanced Detection and Response capability, branded CyberCision, to enhance our email, web and firewall offerings progressively over the year, and we committed to launch a new multi-tenant web security appliance. We projected billing partners would increase from 26 to 40, and we said we would build out another 4 platforms on top of the 11, we've already got deployed. So let me now move to the Q1 results on Slide 13. Moving to Slide 14. The company started FY '21 on a positive footing as Q1 closed above plan across all key metrics, despite the continuing impact of COVID-19 on business. As the Chairman said, at the end of Q1, we have many more irons in the fire to deliver the plan. Q1 total revenue was 16% ahead of plan at $2.05 million. And Q1 closing cash balance was 10% ahead of plan at $12.27 million. In addition to the solid Q1 revenue and cash flow results, our product developments continued, and we signed new Level 1 partners, most recently, Vodafone Idea and Tata TeleServices in India, confirming the world-class capability of our platform. Just let me talk a little bit about Level 1 partners again. Our Level 1 partners are critical to us. They enable an entirely new channel ecosystem to market. A Level 1 partner sells to Level 2 partners who sell to many more end customers. So the more Level 1 partners we have, the more revenue opportunities we open up. The detail of our partner ecosystem is covered in one of the appendix slides. We also continued to convert contracted partners to billing partners. We now have 37 billing partners up from 26 in June. Our billing partners are also a key indicator in our channel partner ecosystem as they deliver actual compounding annuity revenue growth. Our billing partners remain committed at this time even though they are being impacted to varying degrees, by COVID-19, and I will deal with this a little bit later in the presentation. Lastly, we closed Q1 in the final stages of the deployment phase of our first on-premise private platform outside Australia, and we are now supporting revenue-generating partners across 5 continents. Let's move to the next slide, please. Slide 15. Slide 15 shows a graphical representation of our Q1 revenue results against plan. As I've just said, total revenue was 16% ahead of plan at $2.052 million versus $1.766 million plan. In-quarter international recurring revenue was at $180,000 versus $173,000 planned. Importantly though, our Q1 international monthly recurring revenue grew 82% to $68,000 a month, delivering an increase in our international annualized recurring revenue from $448,000 in June to $816,000 in September. Now the international revenue numbers are still small. I know that. But we are within striking distance now of hitting $1 million of international annualized recurring revenue and momentum is positive. On Slide 16, we see that the closing cash balance in September, as I said, was 10% ahead of plan at $12.267 million. The next slide, is Slide 17, and it shows the quarter 1 cash flow summary. The detailed Appendix 4C Quarter 1 Cash Flow Report has been lodged with the ASX this morning, and it shows we are well ahead of plan for the quarter and in good shape over the course of the financial year, so I don't intend to dwell on this. Let's move to the next slide, please, Slide 18. I'll now provide an outlook for the rest of the first half and the bridge to H2. I'm now on Slide 19. Our total revenue outlook remains positive to the half, and our H1 international annualized recurring revenue is projected to hit $1.4 million in December, which is up 220% on June. Our in-quarter international recurring revenue is forecast slightly behind plan at the moment, but we are also seeing good momentum. On Slide 20, you'll see that we -- the positive outlook is maintained. The H1 cash balance also remains ahead of plan with a projected cash balance of $9.4 million in December. This is attributable principally to the early receipt of the R&D claim in Q2 rather than Q3. Now please move to the next slide, Slide 21. The next 4 slides are an expansion of a single slide in our FY '21 plan presentation from July. Slide 21 talks to conditions and progress in the EMEA region. That's Europe, U.K., Middle East and Africa. Our VP Business Development and Sales, Sundar Bharadwaj, who is based out of the United Kingdom, leads this region where conditions have recently changed significantly, which I'm sure you're aware. The U.K. and Europe are now entering a second wave of COVID-19. Business activity, after emerging positively in Q1, has once again been restricted and effectively returned to the conditions we saw in the second half of last financial year. This has resulted in a slowdown in momentum in this region, reflected in the delayed turn on of an expected European Tier 1 telco through our partner, NTT Data U.K. In Africa and the Middle East, however, we're seeing signs of recovery. Our on-premise deployment in the Middle East is on track, our Cisco OEM revenue is growing, and we are in beta trials with one customer on our CyberCision, Advanced Detection and Response platform. We've also seen new developments with 2 new geographies now billing in Africa. It's small revenue to start as expected, but now partners in Kenya and Liberia are billing. We've also only this week launched our end point protection offering on a major telco's marketplace in Nigeria. Billing is expected to commence as soon as November. These results have come through the efforts of an additional sales specialists we put on the ground in Africa in Q1. Moving to Slide 22, APAC and India. APAC and India are covered by both Sundar and your other VP Business Development and Sales, Shekila Ramalingam, who is based out of Malaysia. The market conditions in this region also vary. There are clear signs of getting on with business in India despite very high cases of COVID-19, while Asia is seen as emerging cautiously as borders open progressively. Despite all this, we've signed 2 new Level 1 partners, launched a new next-generation firewall solution with Vodafone Idea and Tata TeleServices with initial orders that already received. And our second CyberCision beta customer is in this region. Restrictions in Malaysia have resulted in delayed revenue turn on from one of our Level 2 partners. But in new developments, a new Level 1 channel partner signing is imminent in a new geography for us, Indonesia. A new presales specialist has also joined us to support our growth effort in India. Moving to Slide 23. Slide 23 looks at the Americas where our entire effort is under our OEM agreement with Cisco Systems and where business is still essentially in lockdown. It appears the trigger to return to some form of new normalcy or normalty (sic) [ normality ] could be the arrival of an effective vaccine in the Americas. Greg Maren, our Director of Global Alliances and I, jointly managed the relationship with Cisco with the support of our presales engineering team. The good news is revenue under the OEM agreement in the Americas has commenced. Again, it's small, and a new web security appliance is about to be beta tested. This is exciting for us because it makes the platform even more compelling. We are also interviewing at the moment for an additional presales specialist to support our BD and sales efforts in this region. I'm now on Slide 24. Moving to Slide 24. This covers our ANZ region, led by Shekila and managed on the ground by Greg and the Australian-based business development and channel sales team. This very clearly heightened awareness and publicity about cybersecurity in this region, and although business is not yet back to pre-COVID-19 levels of activity, we are seeing positive momentum in the market, backed up by the RBA comment that it appears that the September quarter shows coming out of recession in Australia. Importantly, the Q1 result and Q2 outlook are indicative. The churn in our #1 partner, Telstra, has stabilized. The replacement web security solution we talked about in July is in the market and a new cybersecurity-in-a-box offering is under development. A positive momentum. Disappointingly, the initial excitement that we had around the Telstra business cybersecurity solution, the TBCSS for SOHO has not resulted in revenue growth yet due to the reallocation of teams working on this product inside Telstra to essential COVID-19-related operations. We've also added an additional sale channel specialist resource, which -- who's recently joined the team, and he is in discussion with potential additional partners in ANZ, and we'll progress those discussions. Please move to Slide 25. That concludes my regional review. In summary, the outlook for the first half has us tracking towards plan across the key metrics. We expect COVID-19 to continue to impact operations, and it could change at any time, but we have many irons in the fire, as the Chairman has said, to provide a bridge from the first half to the second half when we expect accelerated revenue growth. Still, we're also expecting total revenue to remain above plan. We're expecting international annualized recurring revenue to reach $1.4 million in December, which is a 220% increase from June. We expect the half 1 cash balance to be ahead of plan at $9.43 million. We expect a successful start to the new web security appliance beta testing. Our billing partner growth is expected to exceed our FY '21 plan of 40 billing partners, that's in the first half, up from 26 at the end of FY '20. We expect to have 7 Level 1 partners billing to provide a critical bridge to that accelerated growth -- revenue growth profile in the second half, and we expect to have 12 platforms built and carrying operational traffic across 5 continents. Please move to Slide 26. That's it for me for now. I'll be back shortly, but I'm pleased today to introduce Kevin Bloch. Kevin joined FirstWave on the 30th of July this year as our first external adviser. He brings almost 40 years of local technology experience to FirstWave and in the time since he joined, I can confirm that the value he brings through his insights, his experience and direct approach has been clearly evident. Prior to joining us, and I'm sure that many of you know this, from 2008 to 2020, Kevin was the CTO-ANZ at Cisco, where he led strategy, innovation and engineering, after 9 years in other leadership roles across the organization. He is widely regarded as one of Australia's leading technology minds and through his company, Bloch Advisory, he is helping organizations like FirstWave to make strategic investments in innovation, commercialize their technology and export it to the world, which is a perfect fit for us. Kevin, very good morning to you, and welcome. Over to you, please.
Thank you, Neil, and good morning, everyone. Look, what I'm going to cover very quickly is how and why I got here. Secondly, some of my thoughts about FirstWave, initial impressions, and then we'll go back to questions. So why did I join? What -- how do I get here? First of all, you probably know I have had about 40 years' experience in corporate and enough is enough, I wanted to do my own thing. Funny enough, what I'm doing is very much what I was doing at Cisco covering the technology sectors, covering the service provider sector, telecommunications, and then covering enterprise and government. And it's interesting to note that since I did leave Cisco, I've been approached by, say, 1 or 2 dozen technology companies, and more than half of them are in cyber. So interesting reflection on how hot the cyber industry is right now. And look, my filter and qualification in terms of the clients that I'm working with or for is really in 3 parts: number one, the people; number two, the direction in which the company is going; and number three, which is a question to myself, can I genuinely add value? And clearly, in the case of the FirstWave, it was a yes, yes and yes. Let me explain. In terms of FirstWave, the people, I can genuinely hand on heart say that they have been exceptional from the Chairman, John; the CEO, Neil; Simon, CTO; Roger, Head of Product, and just so many others, these are seasoned veterans with lots of depth. I believe they're up there with the best in the world and very impressive. Secondly, the technology. The technology has got significant potential. And let me explain why. If you take a step back and just look at the dynamics in the market today, I mean the digitization of the world has just had some fuel injected in it in 2020 through COVID. But what's enabling that rapid uptake and deployment of digitization is cloud, mobile and AI. But with that comes this cybersecurity threat. So it doesn't matter. Most companies in the cyber business have really seen significant increase in their business. The problem with all of this is complexity and cost. And if you're a large organization, maybe you can afford it, your own people and your own infrastructure. But as you move down into SMB, it's impossible. And if you look at CCSP, which is the acronym for FirstWave's platform, let's break that down into what I've just said and marry it with the market. First of all, it's cloud-based. That's absolutely the #1 direction that everyone's moving in. Secondly, it provides security services, which is in absolutely hockey stick demand at the moment. It's white hot. Thirdly, it's a platform. Now what do I mean by that? We talk in service provider terms here, multi-tenant. That means we can take each client and keep them completely separate, but run on a single operation. So huge cost savings for service providers. That same platform provides provisioning across multiple customers and services. And thirdly, it's integrated, we can talk about that a little bit later. The fourth point is it's enterprise grade. If you're going to provide security services, and we're not just talking about 2 SMBs. This can and is being provided to the top end of town, too, it's got to be enterprise grade. Certainly, it's got to have SME potential. And look, as we've seen by the example of cloud in the past decade, even the top end of town, doesn't really want to own their own infrastructure and hence, a rapid incline in terms of cloud adoption. And finally, vendor independence, so important. So John already explained that -- names -- he gave names like Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet. The ability for a single platform to be able to integrate the security services from not just one vendor is incredibly important. And I'll leave you with an example that I personally was involved with at Cisco. In 2014, Cisco bought this company, this European company called Tail-f and it provided -- and, in fact, Cisco renamed it NSO, Network Service Orchestration (sic) [ Network Services Orchestrator ]. And there are very strong similarities between NSO and CCSP. The difference being that in the case of FirstWave, we're talking about security service orchestration. So I'll leave you with that. But if you look deeper into that and ask why did Cisco pay what it did for Tail-f. It was a service platform for network services. It provided provisioning. It provided billing capability, all of that wrapped up in exactly what FirstWave is doing. So let me stop there. Neil, I'm going to hand back to you, and we can take questions later on.
Thanks very much, Kevin. It is really great to have you on board. Okay. I'm now moving to Slide 28, which I'm sure is something that everyone's been waiting for. And we'll now -- Amanda, please open the lines to take any questions.
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Nick Harris from Morgans.
Kevin, great to hear why you joined FirstWave on the advisory side. Just a couple of questions from me. Just on the billing partners, that was a pretty big step-up in the first quarter. I think you added 9 billing partners, just interested to understand, are they paying you to test the product internally or are they actually selling to end customers? And then my second question was just with Vodafone India (sic) [ Vodafone Idea ] and Tata, they seem like really significant deals. So well done, maybe you could just talk a little bit more about what's happening there?
Yes. Thanks, Nick. Good to hear from you. Neil is in a position to answer that. Over to you, Neil.
Thanks, John. Thanks, Nick. Look, the additional billing partners are all selling -- these are partners that are selling through to end customers. And the -- after the initial POVs and POCs, which you know we go through with our partners. They're now on selling them. And we have seen a significant uptick in the first quarter of billing partners. So that's the first thing. It's them selling through to end-user customers. The second thing is around VI, Vodafone Idea and Tata TeleServices, I'm glad you've raised it. It was difficult in the announcements to give a more detailed context. But my commentary around this is there are -- I think it's between 50 million and 60 million registered enterprises in India. And Vodafone Idea, which is a merger of 2 smaller telcos is the third largest telco in that market. And they have access to a significant proportion of that market. And like many of our partners did not have a solution that could take what we have -- that could take perimeter cybersecurity, as John has described it in his part of the presentation to the market. So the first thing is they've got access to a very large -- it's the world's second largest enterprise market. It's as blunt as that. The second thing is that what they're finding is the speed and ease with which you can provision the service and deliver protection to small to medium enterprises in that market is really enhancing their ability to get out there with the offerings that we've got in the market to sell it. And so the -- we've seen -- to be quite upfront with you, we've seen the fastest revenue turn on of any Tier -- Level 1 partner that we've seen anywhere in the world, Nick. And you would expect that given the latent demand, given the ease with which you can turn the service on and given the size of the market.
Nick, can I just jump in on the back of that. These things don't happen overnight. It's fair to say that I think FirstWave started first dealing with either Vodafone or Idea, I can't remember, but started dealing with them almost 2 years ago. And clearly, the merger between the 2 businesses has got in the way of how much stuff. But factually, it's taken a consistent effort over a very long period of time and more importantly, over the last sort of 12 months to actually get to this point. So your readiness to go to market, clearly happened during that time as well. But as we've said consistently, these are very big companies who have their own momentum, address to break in and crack this momentum takes time. But when you do and you start to hop on this flywheel, as it's been described to me in another conversation, that flywheel has enormous momentum. So that's the hope that we have for Vodafone Idea and for Tata TeleServices playing into the, as Neil said, the second biggest enterprise market in the world. And that's the opportunity. So we started -- we've got it come after a long period of working with them to get to this point. I just want to make that point. So back to you Nick.
Great answers and clearly a great outcome and well done for beating your revenue targets. I know that's something I'm definitely focused on. So it's great news. If I might ask one more question, I feel like it would be rude not to ask Kevin a question, if that's okay.
Yes. Go for it.
Kevin, great to see you involved with FirstWave. I'm just interested from your perspective, a question I get a lot is why wouldn't Cisco do what FirstWave is doing? So I wondered if maybe you could just put your Cisco hat on or your CTO spell hat on and maybe make some comments on that?
Yes. It's a good question. So thanks, Nick, why wouldn't they? It's because of a number of things. First of all, there's structure, and this is not particular to Cisco, but large companies in this sector have got a corporate structure that is divided up between enterprise and service provider. The enterprise builds products for the enterprise. And likewise, service provider and they've got sales teams. And it's interesting to see that security, all of the technology built for security was built in the enterprise division of Cisco. In other words, they build the product and they sell that product to a customer if you buy the whole product. Now service providers don't like that because they want to -- and this is where multi-tenanting and provisioning comes in. So there's this distortion in the market where enterprise-based technology vendors find it difficult to take those products and sell them into the service provider market because they need features like multi-tenanting, provisioning, billing capability that you don't need in the enterprise market. So this is where they get themselves stuck. And you can't -- you can bolt it on, but it's pretty high. And what -- so you see a lot of -- there are a few companies that have tried to do that from the bottom upwards. They haven't been very successful. What FirstWave is doing is sort of coming at it in the opposite direction, build a platform and orchestration and pick and choose: A, the security services; and B, the vendor, which is a very powerful proposition. So that's the main argument. The second argument I'd give in terms of why isn't Cisco doing it because Cisco is pretty focused on its core business, which is really switches and routers, and it's -- we're talking more than half year revenue. And they'll continue to do that. So that's -- and that's why they bought Tail-f and NSO because it actually focuses on their core switches and routers, which was in 2014. Hopefully, that answers your question.
That's a great answer. And maybe just the multi-tenant -- or multi-vendor side of things, I guess, your observations of people, enterprise and businesses generally tend to stick with one vendor? Or is it really critical to have different vendors as FirstWave has to solve different cybersecurity problems?
I think the world has changed in 20 years to be much more open. So I think it's critical. I was in a demo with the CTO of FirstWave yesterday and he was talking to me about how they're integrating Cisco Duo, which is an identity access management system into the platform. And I said to him, what about Okta, which is a competitor to Cisco. I said, yes, we can do that as well. Now why that's important is because many of the FirstWave MSS -- service provider partners will find their customers may have already purchased Okta, which means that the FirstWave platform fits perfectly. They can now integrate Okta. They can build for Okta and that is gold for the telco for the service provider. The ability for them to support more than one, not just identity access management system, more than one firewall, more than one web service appliance, more than -- is fantastic because their customers are going to have a kaleidoscope of different things. And by the way, no one company is going to own anything. There's always innovation investments that tomorrow, somebody is going to come up with something smart and different. And the FirstWave platform allows that service provider to stay in front of innovation as well. So I think there's tremendous opportunity.
Nick, could I just add to that. The world, as Kevin said, has changed in the last 20 years, has probably been much more so in the last few. But the world in which I came when I joined the IT industry was very much aligned around the global vendors and mostly hardware manufacturers. And Cisco was preeminent amongst that group, but you -- IBM, and you can go way back, but IBM and others, et cetera, et cetera. But that whole thing has changed and the manufacturers these days because of what cloud's done has really changed the dynamic dramatically. The example that Kevin gave was NSO, and shareholders should not read anything into this at all by this example, right? But when you look to NSO, NSO/Cisco, you'll find as independent company. What they talk about is one of their biggest benefit -- of their biggest features is broad multi-vendor support. So there's been global tech who used to own the whole of the ecosystem based around their own products, their own services and their own service delivery, working with partners who they wanted to be exclusive to their products, so that they can control that ecosystem and then control the customer that has all changed dramatically. It's taken some vendors varying degrees of time to move to the new paradigm, but that's where it's all going. So the fact that we have multi-vendor support would actually allows us to bring, as we said, such a valuable asset, the best enterprise-grade products onto the platform for the benefit of the customer. That is the big shift that's occurred in the markets and in attitudes inside the big vendor companies.
So John, can I just add one thing to that?
Sure.
That's actually what we're seeing with TBCSS in Telstra and with Tata TeleServices in India, that's exactly what they are doing in the market. They are not limiting themselves to just email or just a firewall solution, they are offering whatever their end customers need.
All 3 of those seem like fantastic answers. Clearly, the multi-vendor strategy is really important in the cloud component. So I really appreciate that and wish you well in the next quarter.
[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from [ Ben Futhi ] from Juno Investments.
Thank you very much for the update. Good to see some positive momentum. The SMB market is notoriously -- it looks exciting, a huge but reaching it is slightly difficult. So I see, obviously, moving forward with your partner strategy and it makes a lot of sense. It's a little concerning to see Telstra just not gaining momentum. And the word used was that it was delayed. Can you give me a flavor for how do you engage the business like Telstra so that they care about FirstWave and actually sell into that like SMB market.
Yes. Thanks, Ben, for the question. Really good question. Of course, it's a question we've always had to answer and how do you build momentum inside big companies who try to chart their own course, and Telstra obviously the prime example. It is very -- I'll make a few observations first but Neil is in a much better position to answer the fact, sort of how we actually get engaged and what needs to happen. So the Telstra, the biggest thing that's happened in Australia is in terms of cybersecurity and around the world has been COVID-19. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying that, that's one of the biggest things that it would change the sector and the attitude that end users have to the whole digitization there. That's the first thing. And that's changed SMB attitudes. There's no question about that. But in a Telstra sense, Andy Penn sitting on the -- chairing the Advisory Group to the Prime Minister and cybersecurity, now chairing the ongoing committee has drawn attention within Telstra that cybersecurity is important. Now we've seen a pretty significant shift in activity and attitude around that, which is not yet translated on the ground. And the point that Neil was making in the presentation about the Small Office/Home Office solution that we be packaged up with Telstra, and Telstra stake in the market called TBCSS, that solution is the way it's sold, it's offer through campaigns and the sales have been closed through Telstra's telesales team, who then make the business happen. But that whole telesales team has been rediverted to what I called more pressing COVID matters. So we don't have any follow-up sales process occurring within -- from our -- from Telstra back into the market. And this is about a time thing, and that will change as Telstra takes the decision that it can actually turn its attention back to driving the business. But you can bet that the attention within Telstra around cybersecurity and the discussions that we're having with Telstra now about solutions and about the packaging of them is much more different -- much more active than it has been in the past. So we are making ground. But it is a slow process. I made my comments about Vodafone Idea before. It takes time to get to these big blocks and get attention, as you've just mentioned, but you have to do it. It's a bit like rain on the scale, you just keep hammering away. I mean you know much more about how this sort of -- how it actually works. Neil, would you mind taking it from here?
Yes, I will, John. I don't really know that I have too much more to add given that explanation. But Ben, we engage with Telstra. And in fact, we engage with all of our partners, our level 1 and level 2 partners in 3 areas. The first, I'm talking Telstra now specifically. We're engaged with them from a product -- in their product team, their sales team and then we engage them through our technology partners as well. So we use all possible avenues to access or to generate enthusiasm and movement around the product and the offering. But as John has said, in this particular case, I wouldn't take this as an example of what is happening universally. It's just that in this particular instance, we actually saw a relaunch of what Telstra was calling their back-to-business promo. Their back-to-business campaign. And things started to move, but then it was very -- in fact, they told us quite categorically, but the team, as John has said, was allocated to drive TBCSS conversions. Had been reallocated onto -- to meet their service obligations to the community from -- under the COVID-19 activity that they needed to conduct. So I hope that there's not much more to add. I'm happy to take the question any further.
Neil, maybe I can just add one more thing in terms of what I think is the potential opportunity going forward because you're quite right about the difficulty in accessing a large number. So just a bit of my experience here is that if you look globally, there's a lot of potential partners providing voice services to SMBs, or cloud-based voice services, and that's all they're providing. Now as we move to 5G, what you're going to see is a lot of those are businesses. They could be small businesses, they could be large businesses and guess what they're going to need, they're going to need security services. So there's a potential untapped tap market out there, and it's a big one of service providers, providing mobile services to small businesses in the form of 4G and 5G that will require security, that is a big upsell and opportunity for those service providers as well. So there's an even larger market out there. Through the service providers providing mobile voice services that we can tap.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to Mr. Pollock for closing remarks.
Thank you very much, Amanda. Look, before I close, John, did you have any closing comments?
Yes, if I can. Thanks very much, Neil, and thanks again, everyone, for listening. And hopefully, it's tagged on what we've said and advance your thinking in terms of both the company and the opportunity. But clearly, one of the things that Kevin has brought, he's brought a status really thinking about our product strategy, which we have, and we've talked to you before about it. We have a white paper, which we made available, which slows down over the next 5 years. But what Kevin had illustrated by his last comment, which is the moment, looking for a way to get to market, which is other than through the sort of standard way and looking for the mobile operator, how can you tag it so much to a normal operator. Kevin sort of input what Kevin is giving our team is causing us just to reflect on our product strategy again. And we are -- sort of we're in that process now of actually laying it out again and enhanced these sorts of discussions with Kevin. What I'd like to aim for is to be able to talk to shareholders through this sort of media probably next time. Back to another comment that someone's made to me about the attractiveness of the platform, and that's okay. What I'd like to head for is a product strategy update towards the end of November, mid between the quarterly updates. And dive a little bit -- into a little bit of depth for those of you who are interested into that strategy and where that strategy is hitting the company and what that means in terms of the market opportunities and building out the revenue. So just watch your inboxes for that. That's something that we'll do. I can't -- I'm not going to set a date right now, but towards the end of November, I will actually talk to you in detail about the product strategy. Thank you, Neil, and back to you.
Thanks, John. All that really is left for me to do is to move to Slide 29, and thank you for your attendance and your attention this morning and to wish you a great day ahead. Thank you very much, and have a good one. Bye-bye.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thanks for participating. You may now disconnect.