appScatter Group PLC (LON:APPS) Chief Executive Officer Philip Marcella caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the acquisition of Abilott and how this fits in with their business.
Q1: First off, I wanted to congratulate you on your agreement to acquire Abilott, can you tell us a bit more about how this relationship came about?
A1: Abilott has been working with appScatter for quite a few years, in fact we first began working with them before we went public on the AIM market.
The reason we got involved with them is that the amount of data we collect is quite substantial and we also collect private data on behalf of our customers and clients, many of which are financial institutions and also some banks. We were fully aware that there were going to be processes put in place which would mean that to handle private data on behalf of financial institutions that our clients would require certification and various compliance issues.
So, we brought them in to help on our infrastructure and our compliance pre the IPO.
Q2: Are you able to expand a little bit on Abilott’s business and how they will add to your business?
A2: Basically, Abilott is a security service and compliance, they concentrate on IT infrastructure with technologies such as DDoS, penetration testing and zero-day vulnerability. That’s the main core of the business but they also concentrate heavily on GDPR and ISO certification.
That will be integrated into our platform because we are required by some of our clients to start automating some of our threat analysis products.
Q3: What will this agreement mean for your operations and for your clients?
A3: Our clients have requested extended security services, or compliance services shall I say. We offer threat analysis by analysing apps on our clients and look for GDPR breaches or any other areas where there could be vulnerability within their apps.
The big issue is really automating the process, there are automations out there where you can upload an app and it will tell you if your app is up to date with various FTK’s and API’s. However, there isn’t a service which will analyse GDPR compliance with current apps.
So, the main operations we’ll be doing is offering that service to our clients but also automating the process as we are a SaaS platform.
Q4: I’m sure listeners can relate with numerous articles coming out entitled ‘X amount of android apps that you should avoid’ as they contain malware. Is this something that your platform will pick up?
A4: Basically, that’s what we do. If you imagine, we work on behalf of the publisher or the developer so what they actually do is they import their app into our system and then we do a threat analysis. So, we actually look to see if they have malware or if they have any breaches whatsoever, whether it’s just general security or whether it’s GDPR so that is the point of the platform. I think there’s a top 200 most dangerous apps but if it was one of our clients, we would’ve pointed out to them that they do include malware and they would have to fix it.
Q5: How is Abilott going to further develop the company’s strategy to grow its mobile app management platform, I guess this is in addition to the acquisition you made of Priori Data in July this year?
A5: There is a lot of cross-selling between the three companies. When you actually look at the Abilott clients, they’ve got some great clients mainly from the gaming industry which include some of the ones that we’ve mentioned already like Betfred.
So, what we’re finding is that we have our data products that some of the gaming clients are requiring, we then have some of our clients requiring the security assessment or the automated software. So, the principal is really that we’re all striving for a single platform to have an end-to-end solution for publishers and developers and all the security products will be embedded into the appScatter platform. Obviously, we have the cross-selling between all three types of clients.
Q6: What can investors expect to see in the next 12 months coming out of this relationship?
A6: From the Abilott side, we would expect an increase in revenue and that’s because of the cross-selling as we’ve already explained.
From the appScatter side, we’re going to have the automated products and that will obviously give a better offering and we would expect that to see the same light and give us an increase in revenues.
I believe between the two companies, both revenue will increase but the services we offer to our clients will far superior.
