Travis Howerton describes C2 Labs as bringing DevOps to regulatory compliance
By Tom Ballard, Chief Alliance Officer, PYA
It always helps to have a name or tagline that not only describes what you do but is also something that prospective clients will remember. That’s certainly the case with C2 Labs Inc.
“We’ve rebranded as RegOps,” says Travis Howerton, the start-up’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, adding, “We bring DevOps to regulatory compliance.” The DevOps term is defined by Wikipedia as a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops) to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
That seemingly innocuous change in the way C2 Labs defined itself made a big difference, tripling the traffic to the company’s website.
We chatted recently with Howerton, a well-known leader in the governmental IT sector here, to update this teknovation.biz article we posted nearly two years ago. That was soon after he joined Anil Karmel, a former executive at Los Alamos National Laboratory, at C2 Labs Inc. The latter is based in Washington, DC, while Howerton leads R&D from Knoxville.
In fact, C2 Labs recently opened an office in the Innovation North Building at the University of Tennessee (UT) Research Park at Cherokee Farm. It’s part of the company’s strategy to work more closely with UT in a variety of ways.
C2 Labs also recently launched its signature product. Named Atlasity, it is described as a “digital core for compliance management, bringing the benefits of DevOps to your compliance program.” The company says that clients can accelerate their digital transformation by using the product to make compliance both dynamic and real-time.
In this YouTube video, C2 Labs explains how its offering can help overcome the risk averse nature of organizations that want or need to transform digitally, but are worried about failing an audit, being fined, and losing their reputation. Traditional methods of documenting compliance are slow. Atlasity utilizes simple wizards to create compliance artifacts, automated drag and drop workflows to speed needed approvals, real-time assessments to reduce risk, and collaborative capabilities to improve staff productivity.
There’s also a second YouTube video that explains exactly how a client might use the tool.
Howerton said there are two versions of the product. Atlasity Community Edition, which became available broadly in February, is entirely free, and there have been more than 1,700 downloads since it was offered. The second product is an enterprise version, and Howerton says those downloading the free version see the value and are creating a “nice pipeline that is building-out. In fact, we just landed our first paying client . . . a Fortune 200 customer.”
He adds that “there is no tool in the market that provides what we do with Atlasity. With the technological leap forward that we have made, we are helping our customers lower costs, reduce risks, and provide assurance that they are meeting their important compliance obligations in real-time.”
In addition to its first product, C2 Labs also provides a variety of DevSecOps services that help companies accelerate their digital transformation goals. Those are described here. Initially, the company had targeted four customer sectors – government, finance, energy and healthcare. Howerton says C2 Labs has gained traction in the first three, but not the fourth.
The company is currently raising a seed round. Once C2 Labs reaches $1 million in annual recurring revenue, it plans to launch a Series A round to further accelerate their growth.
