ArchTIS wins defence industry contract with Northrop Grumman

Canberra-based technology firm archTIS (ASX: AR9) has signed a contract for the supply of its Kojensi Software-as-a-Service platform to American global aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman.

The contract comprises the sale of 50 Kojensi licences with an initial annual recurring revenue of $35,455.

The licences will be used by Northrop’s Australian and US business development teams for secure and seamless collaboration on confidential defence tender submissions.

ArchTIS chief executive officer Daniel Lai said the contract illustrates the demand for secure information cloud platforms and continues the strong path to Kojensi’s commercialisation.

“This agreement demonstrates the broad demand for Kojensi outside the government sector and reinforces our recent efforts to pivot the platform to service a larger number of corporate customers,” he said.

“With global defence sector spending at a 10-year high, there is an international need to share sensitive and classified information securely and efficiently across the defence supply chain [and we believe] Kojensi is a simple answer to address this.”

The Northrop win is archTIS’ first defence industry commercial agreement with a global military system integrator.

Northrop has worked with Australia’s defence force for more than 20 years, supporting a variety of defence and civil programs.

Curtin University contract

The Northrop contract follows a win last month in the education and space sector with Curtin University, whereby archTIS was contracted to apply differential access controls for an Australian datalake for space situational awareness (SSA).

The datalake is a centralised repository which allows Curtin to store structured and unstructured data at any scale.

It will integrate Kojensi Enterprise with an ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control) policy engine developed by Swedish dynamic authorisation company Axiomatics to manage access to content and data at a granular level.

Under the terms of the contract, archTIS will help stakeholders and organisations to access information, collaborate and query information from Curtin’s datalake at varied levels of sensitivity.

Mr Lai said Curtin chose archTIS after identifying that Kojensi could assist in building cyber resilience for educational institutions through protecting sensitive systems, intellectual property and research.

“The datalake prototype will leverage our cloud platform and be our first integration with Axiomatics, paving the way for Kojensi to enter the big data analytics market,” he said.

“The challenge of granular access control to big data analytics between government, industry and the education sector securely is a global problem.”

Capital raising

Last week, archTIS announced it had raised $590,750 before costs from a share purchase plan following a $1.65 million placement in May.

The company will issue 10.7 million new shares at $0.055 per share by mid-June, with funds used to drive pipeline growth and accelerate Kojensi’s commercialisation.

Mr Lai said the capital raising would provide a “strong cash position” moving forward and allow archTIS to focus on executing its business strategy