Ashley Jones 00:54
I'm Ashley, your producer. And today I'm joined by a returning co-host, Bob Wheeler. Welcome back to the studio, Bob.
Bob Wheeler 01:01
Hey, Ashley. I'm so excited to be here. And I'm also pumped because we've got a great guest today. We've got a 20-year Air Force veteran, and even better, also a guy named Bob. All the cool guys are named Bob. We just happen to be two. This Bob is a CEO of Innovative Solutions. So welcome, Bob.
Robert Heriford 01:17
Thank you, Bob. I appreciate that very much. And I appreciate Ashley and her tenacity.
Ashley Jones 01:21
Oh, well, thank you, Bob. And I'm happy to be here with both of these wonderful Bob's today. So on to our first question for you, Bob. I know that you're a veteran, you have retired several times, and then you founded Innovative Solutions, which is what we're really excited to talk about today. So what keeps you engaged and interested?
Robert Heriford 01:40
I thought, you know, if I'm going to have a company, we're going to do things differently. Sure, we'll do some of the traditional technologies. But other than the ones that I really, really like, I like PeopleSoft. I mean, that is such a nice system. But we go out into the marketplace and we look, can we find a truly innovative type solution? And if we can, we partner with them. And if we cannot, we create it.
Bob Wheeler 02:09
Awesome. Well, Innovative Solutions, I know you've got a lot of commercial contracts, but you're also doing some work in the security cleared community. Can you tell us a bit more about the security clearance stuff specifically? What kind of stuff is going on there?
Robert Heriford 02:19
Sure. We've done a lot of cyber work inside of the federal government, DHS, TSA, and several others. We've done cyber work and that is one of the biggest areas where we do need cleared resources at. But I also have a relationship with a retired Army general officer who runs his own company. And all he does is work in the federal space. So there's a lot of opportunity for people with clearances. And we just picked up a retired Army lieutenant colonel who has a TS/SCI, which is what I got out of the Air Force with, but that's been a day or two. And it's a lot of fun so far. I told my wife, the day it's not fun is the day I'm done.
Bob Wheeler 03:06
There you go. I like it.
Ashley Jones 03:07
Yeah. Sounds like a great plan. So Bob, your cleared work is done through a partnership that you have as part of the SBA's mentor protege program. Do you want to explain how that works for our cleared listeners?
Robert Heriford 03:19
So we had some difficulty breaking into the federal space, not about the products that we bring, but just past performance. And so I started to try to find somebody that I could work with, and that could work with me. And I found this retired general who has a company here in Colorado Springs, and we've done some marvelous things together over the last year. And then he asked me, "Bob, how about you get your mentor protege and get your HUBZone?" And I'm like, "Okay, what do we have to do?" Because honestly, I had heard of HUBZone, but I had never heard of the MPA program before. So we put the forms together. We submitted it to the SBA, and voila, we have a mentor protege agreement. And so what that does is, that gives us a very close relationship. He has graciously given me an office. And we've done a lot of really cool things together. And I'm looking forward to that relationship growing and fulfilling the vision that I have. And that's buying a 10,000 square foot house on the beach in Santa Barbara, California.
Bob Wheeler 04:31
All right, well, everybody wants to have a nice place at the beach. Especially, when you're stuck in Colorado in the middle of wintertime. But when we talk about Innovative Solutions, you mentioned briefly that you guys do some cyber stuff and things like that, but even a little bit more specifically, what kind of cleared positions or skill sets do you have positions for? What kind of people would you be looking to talk to in the future?
Robert Heriford 04:50
We have such a diverse platform of things that we do all the way from a fully managed HR solution to deep expertise in PeopleSoft -- and a lot of that comes from my 18 and a half years at Oracle. We are working on our CMMC. And we have a solution for that as well, which can get you your policies and procedures, and your security documents in about a day and a half. And at a price of about seven grand, which you think about it, I've had companies that have paid 50, 60, 70 grand just to get that far and didn't get hardly anything for it. We have an analytic solution that is honestly, it's just mind blowing. When you come from looking at what the big guys offer like IBM, for example, and Oracle, we're just killing them, as far as on the analytic side. Our solution is, for those of you out there that are technical in nature and understand a traditional data warehouse, ours has no ETL tools, no data modelling, provides 100% access to 100% of your data as built in artificial intelligence and machine learning from the patchy foundation and has a very elegant visualization tool built on the end. But we can certainly connect that to Power BI, MicroStrategy, Tableau, whatever you want to connect it to, as long as it's got a Postgres connection, we can connect it. The other thing that we've just recently kind of exploring how we get this relationship even farther and farther along is we have a business relationship with a company called TD SYNNEX. TD SYNNEX is this very small $60 billion a year company. And that put us on the map as far as Google Cloud Platform, which we've done a couple of implementations for. We can sell anything, Microsoft, anything AWS, and anything Oracle -- I do believe in the database. I will tell you, I like the Oracle database. I think that there's not anything better on the market. Currently, I like PeopleSoft a lot. And there's good reasons for that. And for smaller companies that need an ERP system, but they're not ready for a behemoth like PeopleSoft, we've done a lot of NetSuite implementations as well.
Bob Wheeler 07:14
That's a pretty good kind of broad group there. You've got the HR solutions, the PeopleSoft type stuff. Are all these positions located in Colorado, where you're at? Are they located all over the place? What kind of locations are you looking at for these things?
Robert Heriford 07:26
They're literally all over the federal government. We've got clients from Hawaii to Alaska to DC. We have offices, of course in Colorado, where we're headquartered, but we have an office in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and in Texas.
Ashley Jones 07:44
And Bob, I hear you're a Fortinet fan, when it comes to things like endpoint security, firewalls, or intrusion detection systems. And I think you have a good analogy, you might have said before, it's like a single pane of glass. And that might be a good way to explain it for non-technical folks. Do you want to explain what you meant by that?
Robert Heriford 08:00
Sure. We have done some Cisco work. And that was kind of our first introduction to the cyber area. I brought in three Cisco Certified Experts. And we did manage to fix the issues that this client had in in their headquarters in Denver, and then five different areas. But what I saw was just this hodgepodge of cyber products. And what I learned at that first job was all of the external API's that are existent in a solution like that, let's say for example, you want a zero-trust solution. If you're on the Cisco side, you're gonna have to buy two or three other products. If you're on the Fortinet side, you buy one solution. The problem comes along with these companies that are creating great individual cyber solutions, right? But it's a niche, and then you add that to your existing solution, but those solutions don't talk to one another. So you have to create these application programming interfaces, which is the number one attack vector for cyber criminals. So it's almost like you're inviting them to come and hack you. With Fortinet, there are no external API's. They create what they call a net over your entire company, whether that is a small company like ours, I brought a Fortinet ADF firewall in our company. Or you are a mega global client, we can still put an entire net over your organization and protect you whether it's from endpoints or a sore or you need like what DHS did, they just needed to put a stop to all of the successful cyber attacks even though they had what's called a honeypot set up. And all we did was simply put a very large Fortinet firewall in place. And that was the end of them.
Bob Wheeler 10:10
So if somebody did want to work for Innovative Solutions -- you're obviously a technical guy and you know a lot about what's going on -- what can a candidate do to impress you when it gets to the interview stage? Is it just the attitude? Is it how technical they are? What is it that at the end of the interview makes you think, man, we need to hire that person?
Robert Heriford 10:31
It's all about their attitude. It's all about how they build relationships. For me, personally, I could really care less about your technical skills, unless you're coming to us with say a Fortinet NSE level six, seven, or eight. Then yeah, I'm wild about your skills. But the thing is, you want to learn cyber, we can teach that to you. Fortinet has free programs. I mean, you've got to go through a partner, but I can hook you up with free programs. One of my Cisco buddies, who's been doing Cisco for 25 years is now going through the Fortinet training. You want to learn how to do analytics and have something that you can do? We've got a vendor that does free training for that, too. You've got to go through a partner, but it's all free training. But yeah, you've got to go out and do it. And it's all about, are you trainable? Or do you come with the skill set? If you come with the skill set, wow, then I'm super impressed.
Ashley Jones 11:32
Great. Well, what else impresses you, Bob? Are there any particular characteristics you're looking for in candidates?
Robert Heriford 11:39
One of the things I learned as a First Sergeant is all of the issues that a person has when they're working with somebody fall into two buckets. It's either a will, or it's a skill. If it's a will, there's the door. But if it is a skill, I can teach you a skill. The technical skills are at the bottom of that list. Integrity, honesty, and loyalty are at the top of the list. If I get any sense that you don't have those three characteristics, I don't care how deep your expertise is, I can't trust you. I'm putting my customer in your hands. And I spent my last nine years in the Air Force as a First Sergeant. So I've got zero tolerance if you are not ethical or honest.
Ashley Jones 12:33
Yeah, understandably so. That's a great reminder, Bob. Well, anything else that you'd like to share about the work that you're doing, and maybe how one of our listeners might fit in at Innovative Solutions?
Robert Heriford 12:44
If you want to come to a place where we make a difference to our clients, we get in, we fix the problem, and we get out. Now, yeah, there's places where we have "butts in seats," and they're long term, but our data warehouse solution takes literally 15 minutes to implement. Now, that's implemented, now we've got to write all the analytics and the dashboards and reports, and that might take anywhere from six to 24 weeks, depending on the client. So a lot of times what we get is people that will come to us that say, "hey, I just came off of a five-year contract, and the next one's not starting for a year and a half." We can fill that void for you if you want to.
Ashley Jones 13:29
That's great. Sounds like you have opportunities for people to come on long term and also, like you said, to fill that void in the interim. So that's really cool. Thanks for sharing that info.
Robert Heriford 13:39
Just quickly, as we wrap up, we have a relationship with a company who has built a solution that is DoD approved to swap data between the NIPRNet and the SIPRNet, which is like unheard of.
Bob Wheeler 13:55
I can vouch for that. You're right, that is unheard of. And that can be a very valuable tool.
Robert Heriford 13:58
Yeah, well, we're working on like four opportunities right now. And that will absolutely, any of those, will require somebody with a minimum of a Secret. And one of those that we're working with right now is DISA. And if you want to work on that project, that is a TS/SCI requirement. And then we got another solution that basically takes on structured data, videos, cameras, photographs, it doesn't matter, runs that through their system, creates relationships, as I'll call it. If you're technical, it's a join. That creates a relationship and that dumps out into a Microsoft SQL database. Now, just think about that for a minute. Let's say you're hunting terrorists, as I did in two trips in to the desert, and you get drone footage, and you're hunting somebody, you got a picture in front of you, and you're looking through hours and hours and hours of video. Now, what if we could take that, dump that data into an analytics platform, have you write a couple of very simple queries and figure out, oh, look, Johnny terrorist has been here five times, and they've all been on Thursdays in Melbourne after six o'clock. That kind of simplifies targeting, doesn't it?
Ashley Jones 15:11
Yes, I'd say so. And you really painted some great pictures for us today with your examples, and I'm sure folks will be eager to get in touch with you. So what's the best way they can reach you Bob?
Robert Heriford 15:21
Send me an email. That's really the best way. It's Robert.Heriford@inn-sols.com.
Bob Wheeler 15:39
Thanks for joining us today. Man, this was a really great conversation. And I just really enjoyed learning about what you've got going on there at Innovative Solutions, and also some of the industry knowledge you have. I think it was really great. So thank you so much for joining us.
Robert Heriford 15:49
Thank you for your time. And Ashley and Bob, thank you for your patience with me. There's another thing -- have patience with me, that will get you a job.
Ashley Jones 15:59
Love it. Where to begin? Oh, wow, our chat with Bob Hereford was jam packed today. I mean, it was exciting to dive into the technology and really understand what Bob's world looks like over at Innovative Solutions. And I'll admit, he talked about a lot of things today that I've never heard of before. But you know, walking away, I feel more informed from our conversation. And he really knows this stuff when it comes to the technical side of things going on there for sure. What about you, Bob? What did you think?
Bob Wheeler 16:26
Yeah, I agree with you actually. He really does know his stuff. And you could hear it coming through in his voice when he started to talk about different things and cyber and single pane things and how passionate he is about his job in the industry. But what I really took away on top of that was to be trainable, because he said I can teach you to do stuff. And I think sometimes job seekers don't really understand that. If you have a good relationship, then you've got a lot more opportunities, especially with Bob Heriford there.
Ashley Jones 16:52
That's true. I agree. Well, thank you to all of our listeners today who stuck around with us till the very end of the podcast. We'd appreciate it if you'd leave a review, follow us, tell your friends about us. And until next time, bye.