Transcript
This transcript has been edited and refined for clarity.
Michael Novinson: Hello. This is Michael Novinson with Information Security Media Group. We will be discussing Nightwing, a new company spun out from Raytheon earlier this year with John DeSimone. He is the chief executive officer. Good afternoon, John. How are you?
John DeSimone: Great! Thanks, Michael, for having me.
Novinson: You're very welcome. So, let's get into things here. I know Nightwing launched in the spring and previously had been a division of Raytheon. Two-part question for you. First, what was the thought process behind launching Nightwing as an independent company? And then secondly, what's the impact been for customers, prospects and employees?
DeSimone: Absolutely. Based on the thought process, there was a merger between UTC and Raytheon. It formed a much larger corporation. As the leadership there was rolling out what they were going to do with the larger entity, and as we were continuing to grow in the market and providing service to our customers, it made a lot of sense. Particularly, from a customer standpoint, Nightwing standpoint and legacy RTX standpoint, it made sense to allow this business to put off into its own trajectory to better serve our customers and employees. And that's shown to be true in all aspects. It's been much more beneficial to ourselves as a company being able to be a little bit more agile and focused on the national security mission space, specifically, the intelligence service space and cyber, and it's been helpful for our customers, allowing us to spend money and do more R&D that are directly related to things that supply value to their mission sets.
Novinson: So, let's double click on that. Specifically, what are some of the things you've been able to do as an independent company that would have been either harder to do or impossible as a division of RTX?
DeSimone: There are some different pieces. There's a back office, which is not as interesting, and there's some of the solution piece. So, I'll touch on both. Our people are like the blood of the organization. We're arm in arm with our customers and delivering their mission value. So, setting up back office systems, or you have HR systems, and benefit structures that are employee-centric, focused on the type of employees that we have. It's a lot harder to do that in large companies because you're dealing with massive amounts of employees and a lot of diversity, so they try to normalize those things. We're able to be very specific and provide things that are important to our customers and employees. When you are on the solution side, we can work in the direction where we have more flexibility. From an investment standpoint, with our new ownership, we not only look for acquisitions but to take some of the dollars that we make and reinvest it back into technologies that we know will be important to our customers in the future.
Novinson: From an acquisition standpoint, what would make a company a good fit for Nightwing? What are some of the criteria that you consider as you scour the market for potential acquisition targets?
DeSimone: We're pretty broad and diverse from a technology standpoint. So, several companies could fit well from a technology standpoint. We're a very no-fail mission first from a cultural and organizational standpoint. So, companies that are in our space or have that same kind of DNA that are used to dealing with no-fail missions, especially those that like to say we're not on the cutting edge; we're kind of defining it. So, companies that tend to be in that spectrum will fit well for Nightwing.
Novinson: Since launched as an independent company, you've announced a couple of key executive hires. First, a chief technology officer and chief data officer in September, as well as Tricia Fitzmaurice as the chief growth officer in October. Two-part question for you. First, I wanted to get a sense of what puts Christopher and Tricia on your radar. And then secondly, what have they brought to the table in their new roles?
DeSimone: Absolutely. First, I'd like to step back and say, at least from my perspective, we as a company, as we came out of our previous ownership, the entire leadership team came with us. So, we were very excited to have that, and we've been able to keep that. So, Chris and Tricia - you mentioned our addition to that core leadership - as well as some other additions that we've had with Dan Almasy and Sarah Lynn. So, we're very excited to be able to add them to our leadership. We're very excited that the leadership we had previously wanted to stay and as we have, we're growing and we're adding capability; your team is a vital part of our success. Chris and Tricia bring a wealth of experience from the outside world. Tricia has done a lot of selling in the intelligence, products and services, and solutions space. We're leaning toward driving more of a value-added product or a service model as we move forward with our customers. Even our customers ask for that. So, we want to lean forward on that. She has experience in doing that. And Chris has a wealth of experience. I could be here for an hour talking about the things he's done for our country in his previous role. So, we're excited to have him leading the technology group and helping us chart the future to where to spend some of that dollar, where to look for acquisitions, and technology is going to be critical to our nation's missions going forward.
Novinson: Let's double-click here on the cyber protection solutions business unit. Specifically, what are some of the priorities of that, and what are some of the key areas of investment since launching Nightwing as an independent company?
DeSimone: From an investment standpoint, we're rolling that out this year. We've been out since April 1. So, CPS, specifically our cyber protection business, as you see in the news and you hear everywhere, AI is going to be critical, and we do a lot of things for our customers, specifically in that business; so being able to use it as a force multiplier, as you're dealing with attacking and defending against the adversaries coming into our government customers' networks. So, it's a very stable stake for anybody in the space. We're figuring out how to implement it across the mission space, and then we're trying to figure out how to implement it at scale. Data, everything we deal with, even if it's on the offensive side, defensive side or technical collection side, data seems to be at the heart of it. You can't have good AI solutions without data to feed it and to provide the correct answers, information and services that are needed to increase the mission priorities. So, that's probably the two main areas.
Novinson: And what specifically within data and AI have you been investing in? Where within there do you feel customer need is the greatest?
DeSimone: We started with the backend. So, we're familiar. As I said, everything we do, from the technical collection standpoint all the way from offensive to defensive cyber, is dealing with some form of data. So, as we were setting up our back office, we invested in a data mesh architecture. We're calling it internally Merlin. I don't know what we are going to call it externally. That's enabling us to integrate better back office systems so we can plug and play, provide a better user experience and customer experience. And we're hoping to take that. We're layering this thing called agentic AI across that architecture to provide the foundation to put AI and multiple types of AI, so you don't have to stick with one large language model. You can plug and play and almost commoditize it at the end based on the mission needs. So, we've invested in that internally to set our back office systems in that way and to figure out how to push it toward our customers and their mission needs as we roll it out.
Novinson: And I want to talk on the flip side of the coin in terms of threat activity. What's been notable in terms of what you've been seeing on the offensive side from threat actors for customers in the national security arena? What are your customers having to deal with from a threat standpoint?
DeSimone: What I can is that it has continued. In the seven years I've been running this business, it continues to increase. So, it's never gone. There has never been a law, and there has never been a decrease. So, the number of people that are considered threat actors, the amount of attacks, the variety of the attacks, and the severity, have increased. It is ever-increasing. We talked about AI being a need to be a force multiplier, and getting cleared personnel inside of our industry is going to be critical, because the threats are ever-increasing.
Novinson: Lets specifically talk about AI. What are some of the most notable ways that you've seen it being used offensively by threat actors? What are some of the biggest opportunities you feel for AI to be used?
DeSimone: Today you have very specific, unique mission sets or scope. So, like, whether you like code pilots, AI helping you generate source code as you're doing different types of activities, you're developing things, or in very different mission sets where you're analyzing datasets. So, that's going to continue. So it's very specific-purpose built, whether you're using that to defend, whether you're using that to attack. And as it gets more and more effective, you'll see it start to expand into larger enterprise use cases.
Novinson: Makes sense. I wanted to get a sense in terms of what's the profile of a typical Nightwing customer first, and then secondly, to what extent is there overlap between in terms of from one business unit to the other? Are many of the customers engaging with multiple business units, or do you tend to have a distinct customer profile in each business?
DeSimone: That's a great question. The one thing I'll say is there are no absolutes inside of Nightwing. So, we have a little bit of both. We have some business customers that overlap with multiple business units, and then we have some customers that only interface with one; we have a large portion of what we do is classified. So, if you're going to put up our customers in, one general attribute, I would say is to classify the work we deal with across the spectrum. But, we do have commercial customers. We do have state and local customers. We're pretty diverse all over the map, but, to answer your question in general, no-fail missions when things have to be done and have to be done right, and they cannot fail. That tends to be the missions that Nightwing, excels in, and that we pride ourselves in, and we have the employee base and the capabilities to kind of execute on those.
Novinson: Finally, as we head into 2025, what do you feel are some of the most significant cyber opportunities for Nightwing and some of the biggest cyber priorities for your customers?
DeSimone: For Nightwing, we have to continue to extract ourselves and stand ourselves up and build our back-end systems as an independent company. So, I know that's kind of priority number one for us internally, because we have to be able to service our employees and our customers, and then obviously our customer needs, as you mentioned. It's an evolving threat arena. We have customers on the defensive side, dealing with things, new things every day. So, building technologies and building capabilities to help them - that mission is critical to us, and same for the offense. So, on the flip side of that coin, as threat actors are putting into the field, how are we helping our customers with offensive capabilities and tools, not only to attack the adversaries but then to feed back into our defensive solutions as well to provide higher capability defensive systems.
Novinson: Important stuff, John. Thank you so much for your time.
DeSimone: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Novinson: You're very welcome. We've been speaking with John DeSimone, CEO at Nightwing. For Information Security Media Group, this is Michael Novinson.
