Office cold, kettle on, pad open. The break was, by the standards of recent years, unremarkable in operational tempo, which is itself a positive comment on the year-end customer-portfolio posture.
The portfolio. Six vCISO clients carrying through. Eighteen SOC customers. Twenty EmilyAI commercial customers entering the year, with three additional prospects in late-stage commercial discussion for Q1 close. The team is at thirty-nine. The 2024 hiring plan envisages four to six further hires through the year.
The institutional-capital decision. The conversations through Q3-Q4 of 2023 have advanced to the point where two specific deal-shapes are on the table for early 2024. The decision is not straightforward — both deal-shapes are commercially attractive, both have implications for the company's long-term shape that need careful consideration. My continuing disposition is conservative against raising; the company's bootstrapped position has been operationally sustainable for fourteen years and produces strategic-decision-making freedom that the post-investment shape would constrain. I expect to make the decision through Q1, possibly Q2. I will write more when the decision is made.
The NIS2 transposition deadline. October 17, 2024 — nine months. The customer-portfolio NIS2 readiness programme is in execution across the affected customer organisations (the manufacturer's overseas operations, Northcott's overseas operations, the retailer's various EU operations). The programme work is on track but the operational tempo will be sustained through Q3.
The book. "The Model Is Part of the Programme" publishes on the 26th of February by the same UK technical-publishing house that produced the 2019, 2021, and 2022 books. The publication-cycle work for Q1 will include the standard launch activity (interviews, podcast appearances, the few security-community events that produce useful audience for technical-publishing work). The book is, in shape and substance, the most strategically-positioned of the four — the language-model-environment material is, in 2024, of particular interest to customer-organisation strategic-planning audiences, and the book's reception is likely to be commercially better than the previous three's were.
The threat-landscape planning. The continuing supply-chain pattern. The continuing ransomware ecosystem. The post-language-model offensive-side capability progression. The post-NIS2 regulatory environment. The Russia-Ukraine geopolitical context (now in its third year, settled into sustained low-intensity cyber operations rather than the early-acute pattern). The aggregate threat picture is consistent with the 2023 trajectory.
The product roadmap. EmilyAI v3.3 in Q2 with substantive language-model-capability extensions and the multi-cloud detection-content support that customer organisations on AWS-and-GCP-and-Azure deployments have been requesting. Subsequent v3.x releases through the year on the steady cadence.
The kettle has boiled. Inbox now.