Marketing Info for SWC HighTest

Dan Halbach and Michele attended the AFCEA Intel Symposium Jan 15-16, 2008.

Our booth was well attended overall, well worth the $600 exhibit fee
that we paid. We had a mix of product companies, other small
businesses, large businesses and a few people from DoD come by the
booth and leave their cards. We received positive feedback on the idea
of HighTest, and a few callback requests which Dan and I will do over
the next 2 weeks.

Some of the acquisitions coming out in 2008 will be on AXISS, and we
are not currently partnered with anyone. (We were on L3's team and
they were not chosen in November.) I plan to contact Northrop to see
if we can get onto their team, now that we have a valued presence on
Thudbeater. We could also consider Booz  as a partner. If you have any
insights, pls let me know.

Jennifer Walsmith, Sr. Acq Executive, the person in charge of all
acquisition for NSA gave a talk titled "Agile Acquisition" .. it hit
on all the points of our poster board!! What a great synergy we had
with the group and their goals for the coming year! I plan to call the
small business outreach office to set up a meeting with Ms. Walsmith
to brief her on the idea of having a systems engineering technical
assistance (SETA) relationship with someone like us who can help the
acq side define deliverables and contracts in a way that makes the
developer accountable for process.

Gene Besel from Impact mentioned that Cecil Co is giving classes on
Federal Procurement. Dan and I plan to open discussions with them to
suggest the angle of agile acquisition with HighTest. This might help
us kickoff our training program and instill our tools and tactics as
well.

If nothing else comes of this, we at least got visibility and
recognition as a real solutions provider with this customer, as well
as with the other companies who contract with NSA, making SWC a strong
partner with value-added development approach when teaming for
opportunities together. We need a differentiator .. something that
sets us apart from all the other software development companies out
there. We are merely pointing out our strengths from the years of
experience we have all gained in knowing what works and what doesn't.

I'll let Dan give you his take on things at lunch tomorrow. I do think
we made an impression on those we had a chance to talk with .. we're
not running up against a wall this time .. the government now seems to
have opened the door and has headed in the direction we had already
started.