Braintech: Intelligent Vision

In my "Touch Them All" I explained our intent to redirect Braintech from a Research & Development company to one that is Product, Market and Customer driven. Since then, focusing on “touching the customer” has been our number one priority. We have held dozens of meetings with end users, robot manufacturers, system integrators, vision providers and even competitors. We have traveled the Midwest, West Coast and Southern USA as well as to Europe and, of course, to Canada. In the interest of cost, we have hosted dozens of WebEx presentations for potential customers around the globe. We have talked VGR as it pertains to aluminum and armaments, cars and cameras, trains and transmissions, planes and plastics and many other products and industries. And as you know we have recently executed a strategic acquisition in order to accelerate our access to these new markets and customers and to offer them new products. Needless to say, our commitment to further access and acceleration remains and our efforts have been significant.

For the purposes of this blog I will reference and expand upon our “Touch them all” initiative. It is more vital than ever that we touch AND listen AND react to current and prospective customer feedback. As I have been told (a few too many times), there is a reason we have two ears and only one mouth . . . and our business and sales models are taking this to heart after our whirlwind tour of the last quarter.

Allow me to share some of the feedback we have received from the marketplace and more importantly how we are reacting to opportunities for growth.

1. Get closer to the customer.

Braintech is excited about the opening of our new Northern Virginia Corporate Headquarters, as well as the opening of our Metro Detroit Regional Sales and Application Engineering office later this quarter. These facilities—and the resources that will occupy them—afford us the opportunity to better serve our customers and enhance our revenue pursuits. While taking on these locations is a bold move in the current economic environment they are absolutely necessary to support our Government and Industrial sales plans. To be prudent, we have reduced the footprint (but not resources) of our North Vancouver Research & Development facility to significantly offset the costs of this expansion. We will also realize significant travel savings by eliminating significant cross-country travel that is currently commonplace. Also, if there is a silver lining to the current real estate market, it is our ability to acquire outstanding office space, in both markets, at appreciable discounts to historical rates.

2. Put more “feet on the street”.

We are also excited to advise nearing the addition of necessary sales resources to accelerate our sales into the markets we have defined as critical based on our investigations last quarter. We will soon be adding a dedicated resource to the Government space as well as a dedicated resource to our Industrial pursuits. Successful implementation of an integrator’s program will be key to our ability to scale without the restriction of managing the installation and commissioning of the systems. Additionally, we are in pursuit and negotiation for outside sales representation in certain target vertical markets including Vision Hardware Providers and Food & Beverage.

3. Make our software architecture more open.

Codename: We are the World. Over the last several months, we have implemented the process of executing this game-changing development for the company. By the end of the 2008, we will be communicating with multiple industrial robot brands as well as multiple vision hardware brands. We are leveraging our acquisition of the SHAFI Companies to expedite this process with the intent that 2009 revenues will come from multiple industries, end users, robot OEM’s and system integrators. Our software will be indiscriminate to hardware types, so we will not be limited by the market or market-share of any single customer.

4. Match changes in product development to changes in customer requirements and the future direction of the industry.

I hope you read our recent press release and Babak’s blog regarding our new offering, eVisionEngine (eVE). While I’ll defer to Babak’s great blog to explain the history and justification for this product development, I will add that this is our unequivocal approach moving forward. The industry is moving towards integrated solutions with smaller hardware packages, and eVE puts us in the sweet spot for meeting this layer of demand. Industrial end-users are attempting to limit their hardware on the floor (pc’s, keyboards, cabinets, etc.) while Vision Hardware providers are attempting to incorporate the power of vision guidance into their machine vision (measurement and inspection) products. Having eVE available allows us to compartmentalize and sell different layers of our technology to meet each customer’s unique requirements. We are basically creating a menu of VGR product offerings from the basic 2D and 3D pose calculation algorithms (which can be imported into various processors on the robot and camera hardware side) all the way up to turnkey Random Bin Picking solutions driven by our eVisionFactory vision software platform.

5. Make eVisionFactory more powerful AND easier to use.

The above items may not typically be linked in the same sentence, but this is exactly our pursuit. The acquisition of SHAFI and the RELIABOT product affords us an opportunity to take the best of both RELIABOT and eVisionFactory and merge them into a new offering of eVF that will be—yes—more powerful and easier to use than conventional VGR software environments. In addition to consolidating the market and elevating our position within it we will come to market with the best VGR tools in the world. We look forward to this anticipated product introduction in 2009.

While we have been please to hear positive reinforcement from the market so far, we are keenly aware that the only thing that matters to shareholders is that the future value of their investment be greater than the present. As such, you can rest assured that while we have reached out and touched the market, listened to what it has said, and initiated necessary actions to improve our company’s prospects for the future, we fully understand that the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the pudding we need to make has one main ingredient, which our CEO, Rick Weidinger, has made very clear: Revenue, revenue, revenue. After touching, listening and reacting to the feedback from dozens of customers and partners we are confident that our reprioritization and reorganization has us well positioned for a profitable future.

Thanks for staying tuned.

Jim Dara