SSN interview with Intellicene CEO Alan Stoddard

MELVILLE, N.Y. – Following Cognyte’s acquisition by Volaris Group and rebrand to Intellicene, CEO Alan Stoddard took time to speak with Security Systems News about the process and what’s next for the company.

Stoddard opened by talking about the long history of Intellicene which has its roots to a company from the 1990’s called Loronix Information Systems, an early player in the IP Video space. Through a number of twists and turns, Loronix, which Stoddard called one of the best kept secrets of the security industry, came to be acquired by Verint and eventually rebranded into Cognyte Situational Intelligence Solutions (SIS). Now they stand at the start of a new era as Intellicene.

SSN: Now that you’ve been acquired by Volaris Group can you tell me how that’s affected Intellicene and what’s next for the company?

Stoddard: The exciting thing with the acquisition here by Volaris is that they bought us because of the strategy, because of what we're doing, and so their key instruction to us has been "Do what you're doing, but do it faster," right? So, as I said we don't have to go through any of the challenging, 'integrating a product line' steps that that we would if we'd been acquired by an existing security company or integrating the sales team. It really is just kind of getting everybody moved over to the new corporation and kind of doing the administrative piece of the change and then we're off and running. They're very excited about the space that we're in, which means, let's look at how we can turbocharge our organic growth. Let's look at opportunities for inorganic growth. I think you know in the first days that I met them after the acquisition, the first topic of discussion was who else in this space makes sense for us to go look at and work with. So I think from being kind of a minor player in a much larger organization in the Cognyte world, we now are going to be an area of focus for Volaris in the security space that they want to use as the anchor point to grow and expand. So, we're excited about that.

SSN: Has the acquisition given Intellicene access to any kind of advantages or resources that Volaris Group is able to provide?

Stoddard: Certainly, the ability to really focus and tell our story is huge for us. As I said, we've kind of flown under the radar for the better part of a decade for various reasons and I can't tell you how excited the team has been to, you know, have a website and be able to go and tell our stories about our products, our solutions, and our customers. So that's one piece of it from a resource standpoint, you know it's really about focus and taking a lot of the administrative elements off our hands. Whether it's HR, IT, legal, etc., so that we can go execute on the business elements of the plan more efficiently and effectively. But the capital that they've got available to help us when we've got opportunities either organically or inorganically to reinvest, and that really was an opportunity that we had before, but now if we've got a product, investments that we want to put forth, if we've got an acquisition that makes sense as a tuck in associated with us, you know those resources certainly are available as we move forward, and that's exciting.

SSN: Can you talk a little about Intellicene’s “Age of Intelligence”?

Stoddard: I'd love to. For us we went through the process of thinking about a new name, and you know you start just saying, “Uh, you know what? What's a cool new name?” and you come up with lots of different, neat sounding names, but we really sat down as a management team and started to think through, “Who are we now? Who do we want to be?” Where do we want to focus, and how do we convey that in a name?" What we mean going forward and a lot of our messaging to the market has been around the fact that as we go through this, there's really a transition happening in the security industry and in the world at large. We went through this process. That's where we got the digital age, but everything was connected, right? You could connect everything and control everything digitally and that was great. So, what we're trying to do is help leverage intelligence, artificial intelligence, insights, machine learning, automation, and everything associated with that too. Make sense of this flood of information. And so, Intellicene for us really signifies that age of intelligence. Being the geologic epic, Anthropocene, and so forth, and intelligence.

SSN: What's the morale like at Intellicene, with the rebranding and acquisition? Is there excitement for this new direction the company is headed?

Stoddard: Oh, off the charts. Everybody is ecstatic. Yeah, I haven't seen the team this fired up and this energized since I've been here, to be honest. Our marketing team has done a wonderful job and the messaging and putting that together. Everybody, it's been just bubbling, and they've been waiting to be able to kind of unleash on the world. The solutions that we have, where the team is, I think, justifiably proud of what we're able to do, what we've done for a number of customers over the last few years, and really in looking forward to the opportunity to tell that story. To be in control of our own destiny, and in terms of making that happen, just off the charts in terms of the motivation and the excitement.

Stoddard added that Intellicene is excited as it moves forward to continue building its relationship with system integrator partners and leveraging its new brand name and messaging to create a strong presence and relationship through partner channels.

For more information you can visit intellicene.com.