WidePoint Corporation

Good afternoon. Welcome to WidePoint's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Holly and I will be your operator for today's call. Joining us for today's presentation are WidePoint's President and CEO, Jin Kang, Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Jason Holloway, and CFO, Robert George. Following their remarks, we will open up the call for questions from WidePoint's publishing analysts and major investors. If your questions were not taken today and you would like additional information, please contact WidePoint's investor relations team at wyy at gatewayir.com. Before we begin the call, I would like to provide WidePoint's safe harbor statement that includes questions regarding forward-looking statements made during this call. The matters discussed in this conference call may include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future performance of White Point Corporation that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risks and uncertainties are described in the company's Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be made available for replay via a link in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.widepoint.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to WidePoint's President and CEO, Mr. Jin Kang. Sir, please proceed.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon to everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review our financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. Our call today will be a bit shorter than normal, given that it's only been roughly a month and a half since our last earnings call. That said, it does not at all mean we haven't been busy here at YPoint. We remain committed to making strategic investments internally with the ultimate goal of executing our organic and inorganic growth strategy, which is to grow the top line and operate profitably and stably to maximize our company's potential. Before I provide you with the additional updates, I am once again obliged to share that there are still macroeconomic headwinds that are out of our control affecting our business. Whether it be COVID, supply chain disruptions, labor market shortages, or geopolitical issues, WidePoint, similar to almost every other corporation in the U.S., is impacted to some extent. Nevertheless, we continue to do what we can to implement proactive action that combat these headwinds. For example, with the respect to supply chain issues, one thing we recently started instituting was proactively looking for alternative sourcing methods within the U.S. by way of M&A or partnerships. We currently have various IT equipment, mobile devices, accessories, and other supplies that are being provided by offshore companies. To limit the number of variables within our supply chain, we are looking to secure sources here in the States. We will continue to be nimble, flexible, and resilient in combating uncontrollable macroeconomic headwinds. Next, I'd like to highlight some recent encouraging updates. As you might have seen from our latest press release, we successfully stood up the Commercial Certificate Authority infrastructure and are now able to issue the most secure, multi-factor authentication or MFA credentials to our commercial customers. We recently implemented, tested, and deployed all of the hardware and software necessary to issue these credentials for our commercial customers in the beverage industry and a large research university. We also provided the necessary training and drafted the policy documentation for our customers to ensure that the most secure MFA solution is operated in the most secure manner. Suffice it to say, our IBM solution is starting to take root in the commercial sector. Also, we continue to capture additional business on our DHS CWMS2 contract vehicle. I'm happy to report that DHS has committed a substantial amount of their contract procurement authority under our CWMS2 contract. And I am cautiously optimistic that we will successfully capture substantially all of the funding allotted for this contract. Also, there are several large opportunities we are pursuing under this contract, and once awarded, may precipitate a contract modification to increase the ceiling. I will share more details of these opportunities as they move past inception stage and move into the task order request for quote stage. Additionally, we have submitted our price adjustment request to DHS to help offset the increases in labor costs we are experiencing from the unprecedented increase in labor rates caused by labor shortages and the great resignation. We remain cautiously optimistic that we can maintain or improve upon our current financial performance through these tough times. As it relates to our ESG initiatives, we're continuing to find success in our recycling program. As we stated in our previous calls, our subsidiary, WidePoint Mobile Corporation, received the R2-V3 certification from the Sustainable Electronics International, or SERI. And we are continuing to gain traction as we build profitable revenue by responsibly recycling mobile and other smart devices, whether they be at the end of life or those that can be recycled back into inventory. We see this effort to be a win-win for our environment and win for our company as we are receiving profitable revenues from these activities and keeping these devices out of the landfill. I am optimistic that this part of our business will continue to grow as more and more mobile devices are placed into service and reach the technical refresh phase of their life cycle. As we stated in our previous call, We were in the FedRAMP ready state. I'm happy to report today that we recently received a verbal commitment from one of our customers that they will sponsor us for the full FedRAMP certification. Please stay tuned on our progress on this front. The FedRAMP certification attests that our intelligent technology management system or ITMS meets all of the cybersecurity standards as prescribed by the federal government for protecting our customer's data. Attaining this full FedRAMP certification will place us in rare company as we compete for work within the federal government. Additionally, this level of security demonstrates to our potential customers, especially those in the commercial sector and those verticals where security compliance is key, that YPOINT brings a high level of confidence when it comes to protection of their data and systems. All in all, we are still executing our strategy for profitable growth through organic and inorganic means. We remain in line with our budget expectations and are encouragingly trending towards our top-line forecast. Our team is certain that the strategic investment we are making in the company will translate to profitable revenue growth. With that overview completed, I will now turn the call over to Jason to provide you with some details on the investments we are making on the sales and marketing front. Jason?

Thank you, Jen, and good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to start by sharing some of the progress we've made as a result of our acquisition of ITA. From a high level, I am pleased to share that the onboarding process has been going as planned, and we expect to have them fully integrated on the back end sometime here in Q2. As mentioned on our prior calls, We found early success in leveraging synergies, whether that be cross-selling or upselling our services and solutions to ITA's base of customers and vice versa. We have seen these joint sales and marketing initiatives continue to expand and are in fact in line with our internal expectations for ITA revenues for the first quarter. We see no signs of slowing down and also expect to see improving results in the quarters going forward. That said, as Bob will further expand on his updates, there are some acquisition costs incurred in Q1 as we continue the integration process. This will impact our operating expenses in the short run, but I am very confident that there will be far greater returns in the long term as ITA fully becomes a part of White Point. One example of a win we previously shared was with a beverage company who has engaged us for our identity and access management as a service. This project is also important to WidePoint strategically as it introduces our new DOD-grade DKI identity and access management solution to the commercial sector. we are diligently working with them to expand our managed services to potentially add telecom lifecycle management. The second one we shared on the prior call was with a large marketing and multimedia rights holder for some of the most prestigious sports venues across the country. Due to ITA making such a good impression, we are in the latter stages of expanding our agreement. More specifically, the customer shared that they would like to use YPoint's IT as a service offering for even more of its subsidiaries throughout its organization. The third win is with the financial institution that ITA closed as a new customer in which they also added our identity and access management as a service option. Next, We continue to maintain our Microsoft CoSell certification status and have combined with ITA's Microsoft Gold Partner certification, which gives us quite an edge as we continue to push into the commercial markets. Overall, we continue to reap the benefits of our ITA acquisition and look forward to maximizing the synergies as we near the completion of the integration process and strive towards profitable growth. Furthermore, I wanted to share that our identity and access management solution is being implemented at a major research university and a District of Columbia government agency. All in all, we are seeing progress on all fronts of the sales and marketing side and are encouraged by what we've been able to accomplish and by our healthy, growing pipeline. With that, I will hand the call over to Robert.