Crucial Point LLC is a strategic technology and due diligence consultancy formed by Bob Gourley in 2007. Since then Crucial Point has served over 100 businesses across multiple sectors of the economy with advanced technology services including cyber security consulting, due diligence reviews, security engineering and federal market advisory services.

We are now part of OODA LLC.

OODA serves high tech firms with advanced and particularly virtuous technologies by providing business growth consulting and services.

Bob Gourley has spent a career evaluating the business impact of technology and building strategies that optimize the contribution technology makes to enterprise missions.

He captures lessons from experience in technology due diligence in a short presentation on the OODA YouTube Channel and at this link:

These lessons are provided in a way that should be of use to organizations on both the buy-side and sell-side of potential transactions, and concludes with actionable recommendations including expectations you should have when selecting a due diligence partner.

Our hope in producing this short overview of lessons learned from technology due diligence is that you will keep OODA in mind for your future needs. In tech due diligence, experience matters, and we have that.

OODA services meet client needs in:

Security For The Modern Age

We live in an age of exponential change. With the impact of evolving technology and resurgent ideologies being felt world-wide. Borders shift, regimes crumble, and networks fail. Attackers seek not only financial gain, but to erode the trust of our institutions, and exploit technology as a new domain of conflict. With over 20 years of experience predicting and managing cyber threats, our team can help.

Over the next decade, we will see a rapid adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies as organizations seek to utilize those technologies to advance growth and capitalize on the ubiquitous sources of data captured inside and outside their enterprise.

It is important that these technologies are developed and implemented in the most secure manner possible. OODA offers an AI and machine learning specific service offering that engages the best cybersecurity testers and data scientists to:

Identify technical vulnerabilities in the technology and supporting infrastructure that could be exploited by malicious attackers and work with you to mitigate your AI attack surface.
Ensure that algorithms and machine learning code deployed is not susceptible to algorithmic bias that could introduce risk or reduce opportunity for the business.
Validate training models and training data to align them with expected outcomes of the algorithms being deployed.
Identify non-security pathways that might be exploited by attackers to influence algorithms towards particular behaviors or non-optimal outcomes.

Opportunity In Dynamic Environments

At OODA we believe in creating new value through investment, partnership, and nurturing emerging concepts that have the potential for disproportionate impact on business, science, culture, or society.

We are firm believers in the concept of black swans and also in the notion that trends and opportunities can be identified with thoughtful analysis and judgments about the future. We study and look to understand the environmental, technological, scientific, and geopolitical factors that will impact the future as well as the gray area phenomena on the fringe that could present unexpected challenges or opportunities.

We provide specific consulting services designed to help our customers and partners capitalize on business and investment opportunities.

Our intelligence services are designed to help manage uncertainty in complex environments by discreetly answering hard questions.

Drawing on a network of over 500 global security and intelligence professionals, OODA can provide advanced intelligence services, including early warning on emerging threats or ground-truth assessments to shed light on dynamic global risk situations. Our intelligence methodology blends the best practices of several analytical disciplines to determine probable futures and likely outcomes to some of the most difficult international questions.

We support private equity firms, venture capital, and businesses looking to acquire other businesses. We can also help independently verify and place into context the discriminators of technologies in the firms you are considering. Our Due Diligence services can also help customers appropriately investigate and qualify new business partners and investment opportunities or identify and manage regional, cultural, and security nuances in emerging international business environments.

Leverage experienced professionals with proven past performance. Our clients include major telecommunications firms, defense systems integrators and IT firms with dramatic, “game changing” technology. We also help highly regulated businesses and government agencies respond to a continuous stream of new mandates for cybersecurity compliance.

Our team can develop market engagement strategies to help get your technology or service adopted by federal government buyers or help transition a mission-oriented technology to create private sector solutions. Our experts can deliver market potential analysis, provide product offering development and create marketing/messaging plans.

Through our investment arm OODA Ventures, we make early stage investments in technologies and disruptive markets.

Technology Assessment and Understanding

OODA maintains expertise along the full-spectrum of technical innovation to help conceive, design, develop, deploy, and integrate emerging technologies into diverse operational environments. We are early adopters and thought-leaders in determining the opportunities and risks associated with technology surprise and disruptive technologies. Our team has worked developing early stage technologies and provided technical assessments for billion dollar technology transformation programs.

We can help you understand the emerging technology landscape and develop and deploy innovative approaches and solutions. Big data, machine learning, advanced analytics, cloud, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IOT), and cybersecurity are examples of technologies in our comfort zone.

Virtual CTO/CIO/CISO

Our model provides highly qualified, experienced Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) leadership on your staff to manage and lead your technology partners, developers, engineers and IT support. We offer part-time, full-time, retained and hourly services.

With Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) services we can provide on demand leadership of security efforts. Our virtual CISO can also provide architecture reviews and action plans for enhancing cybersecurity. We analyze solutions, products and the strategies associates with cybersecurity risk management.

Due Diligence

OODA LABS Assessment

Our technologists evaluate your product or solution and provide meaningful feedback, market strategies, and roadmap recommendations.

CTO VISION Portal

CTOVision.com is our premiere information portal for the enterprise technologist. Operating for over a decade and recipient of numerous awards, it serves as a primary source to track developments in the enterprise technology world and provides forward-looking analysis on emerging and disruptive technologies. You can visit at CTOvision.com.

We publish the community-focused CTOvision.com and site and contribute to OODAloop, the blog of the high tech consultancy OODA.

Bob is also the co-founder of the cyber risk consultancy Cognitio Corp. Bob is the author of highly regarded reference to adversaries in cyberspace, The Cyber Threat.

Our Approach

We help our clients understand. We do that with a network of serious information technology professionals. We help our clients implement solutions, especially highly scalable Cloud Computing based solutions.

All of our work is performed by thought leaders experienced in enterprise technology and focused on your mission needs. Our executives, PMs and analysts have experience in the entire technology stack from hardware, software, data and applications and every architecture from client server to cloud computing. We are versed in ITIL and CMMI and program management. We have a deep and intimate working knowledge of federal IT mission needs and the requirements of federal agencies.

Partner With Us

We love learning about new capabilities in the ecosystem, especially new technologies that can make dramatic positive differences in the missions of enterprise users. If you are interested in partnering with us or in becoming a client we would love to hear about that too!

Please Connect!

We are easy to reach, feel free to start with our Contact Form.

But What About Privacy!

We do have a privacy policy, and also offer services to ensure the privacy of your corporate information is maintained. Also see our list of cybersecurity best practices.