Good evening, everyone! Come on, you can do better – Good Evening! That's better, in fact that was inspiring.

Thank you for taking the time to come all the way to Toronto for Pathways 2009. In this economy, every dollar, euro, peso, pound or yen is hard to come by, so we really do appreciate your participation. And, it's a great honor to be here with you tonight.

It was tremendous meeting you over these last few days … and learning that Certiport products and services are the catalysts, and the supporting tools for these amazing initiatives around the world. Together, we truly are driving global change, and making a difference.

Speaking of global change, you may have noticed that I have an accent. For those of you who don't know me yet, you might be surprised to hear I'm actually from Atlanta, Georgia … well, by way of London, Ireland, South Africa, and Cyprus. Thus, like many of you in this room, I am not originally from the United States.

Before settling in the U.S. for the second time in 1990, I had the great pleasure of living and working in 4 continents, experiencing and enjoying many diverse cultures. While this international experience has enriched my life, my wife might have a very different opinion about our many moves I'm just pleased that she agreed to move with me to Utah!

Be that what it may, this global experience has certainly prepared me for my critical new role as Certiport's president and CEO.

In my role, I expect that my experience in the world's IT markets … and the education, testing, and certification industries—along with my understanding of the world economy and cultural differences—will help me understand your very diverse needs, so that I may quickly address issues that are important to your businesses and customers.

Speaking of the world, I am truly humbled by the incredible accomplishments that are occurring across the globe and that we've witnessed here tonight.

But before I address these achievements, I'd like to acknowledge and thank a few people, in particular, for being here and for making these initiatives and this evening possible:

I'd like to start with our program sponsors and their representatives: From Microsoft – David Gibson; from Adobe – Anuja Dharkar; and from ETS – Phil Tabbiner, Chuck Cascio, and Irv Katz

I'd also like to offer a special thanks to Certiport's Chairman of the Board, Bruce Hernandez and to a Director of our Board, Steve Hoffman.

A hearty thank you to all of our partners—present here tonight … and those unable to attend—who've made this event and its incredible Competition Champions … and Champions of Digital Literacy possible. You are the reason that Certiport's offerings are driving global change in 135 countries and 24 languages.

I also want to thank our keynote speaker, Commander John Herrington, a truly inspirational leader.

And, finally, thank you to the Certiport team that has made this evening and this event happen for all of us. Thank you Lee and thank you Jan for a great job of hosting this event. Please help me applaud the efforts of all of these amazing people!

Earlier in tonight's program, our Chairman of the Board relayed a message that underscored our total commitment to growth and our partners. I would like to expand on these themes and share a few interesting facts.

As the new Chief Executive at Certiport, I represent the driving force required for taking our company to the next level. It is my responsibility to help create new ways for engaging and relating with our partners and customers.

As the primary agent of change, I feel ultimately responsible to each of you … for delivering the best possible experience—be it personal, organizational, or product-related.

I want to earn your confidence in our ability to grow together. I don't take this responsibility lightly. In fact, I have been diligently working to ensure that our future is a product of working closely together and that my teams at Certiport are the most talented and engaged you can work with in our industry.

There will be many milestones on this journey. But let me share a few of these with you which we've accomplished in my first 100 days at Certiport. All of these initiatives have been aimed at aligning us more closely with our markets, our partners and our customers—as well as positioning us for sustained growth.

We've already made many internal organizational changes, intended to focus our day-to-day operations on listening to you, our partners and customers.

These changes include new talent and organization shifts. Changes that will create a best of breed sales and marketing organization that, in teaming with you, will achieve truly break-through growth in each of our sales theatres. In short, the next few years should be extremely exciting and rewarding ones for all of us.

We've also invested in our customer and technical support teams, so as to improve your experience and that of your customers. I do hope that you are seeing that already. We're changing the way we do business so that you, our partners, are at the center of more of the decisions that we make … to grow our business and market. We will ask you more frequently for advice on important decisions that will jointly position us as leaders within the market.

And, in a wider social context, we're also building a grants and foundations program that will work with organizations stretching from the First Nations of Canada to the United Nations. These initiatives will create a best-practice approach to the creation of economic development programs, supported by public and private funding.

Based on candid conversations with partners, clients and our own people, we have begun the process of altering our current technology development processes. These changes are designed to improve our portfolio management … getting you more and better products in less time. Our goal here is to harness a broad range of technologies —ours, yours and others'—in order to create a more seamless and friendly way for the world to learn about Certiport, its partners and the value we offer together.

We've even gone so far as to create a Certiport Social Network website. This site contains an area where you—our customers and partners—can engage us in ongoing conversations … provide valuable feedback … and influence product and packaging directions, including messaging and more specific pricing strategies.

So who is tweeting out there right now? If not, I hope you soon will be – maybe later though.

That is a quick account of the recent past. Let's review some quick facts about the present. With your continued partnership, Certiport has a current portfolio of over 450 certification exams and learning tool products across 3 programs, in 24 languages, and in 135 countries across the globe. Today, we deliver an average of over 110,000 exams per month. And, we don't blink an eye when we deliver one exam every second. To date, together, we've delivered close to 7 million exams, and positively influenced the lives of over 3 million people.

We appreciate and applaud the untiring efforts of our network of partners worldwide whose local operations are the backbone of our shared success. And, we are constantly encouraged by the support of our longstanding client partners, Microsoft and Adobe, and the recent support of our newest partner, ETS.

Thank you for being our partner!

But, what about the future?

Change is a constant as we have learned all too well in the past year. And successfully coping with change is not an individual or isolated exercise for a company like Certiport.

Our mission is to establish Certiport as the leading provider of world-class certification products and services that provide value to our shareholders, partners, and the individuals we serve. To achieve this mission, we need to ride the waves of constant change that shape global business, technology, and education.

We must do so with a steady eye on what lies in front of us … and a steady hand on the tiller of this ship that we call Certiport.

This is not work we can perform successfully alone, or in a vacuum.

The market demand for the new skills we assess and verify is far outpacing the production capacity of most educational establishments. We need to grow together, allowing the momentum of each of our individual and organizational efforts to create a collective speed towards a future that is both socially responsible and profitable.

We need to maintain the vision of a day when the phrase "technology savvy" and the word "Certiport" become synonymous with each other … and when both come to represent the opportunity for progress and advancement in the mind of every work-ready individual in the world.

We need to increase the number of opportunities we create for educational systems to connect their skills development programs to real opportunities in international commerce.

We need to prove the value of certification so that it is not a question of if, but when to become certified.

We need to connect people and businesses in countries like Peru, Japan, China, Scotland, the United States and Libya—regions we mentioned earlier tonight—through standardized technology skills that lead to jobs.

We need to sustain and grow our businesses, to help build a global commonality that begins to break down walls of difference, creating at least one aspect of global identity through the universal language of technology.

Tonight, we have witnessed the rise of a new generation of young champions from 53 countries demonstrating their excellence in desktop skills through the Worldwide Competition on Microsoft Office. We have seen teams of teachers and students collaborate to win the IC³ Cup for digital literacy. And, we've recognized the leadership and dedication demonstrated by our Champions of Digital Literacy.

We've also experienced the desire of champions around the world to use educational programs focused on digital skills development as platforms for success and prosperity—benchmarking their progress against global standards.

It is an honor for Certiport to be an integral part of so many missions of empowerment.

All of these moments and initiatives are an expression of the inevitable driving force of change on the global economic and social stage.

They are also clear reminders that it is up to us, as partners and leaders to choose to affect change or, inversely, to be effected by change.

While this may only be my first year with Certiport, I am motivated by the progress we have already been able to affect together. Above all, our change and improvements will be focused on you, our partner community.

We at Certiport are truly humbled by the wealth of optimism and energy you've expressed these past two days.

And, I'm looking forward to communicating regularly and working with all of you to continue to build a future filled with promise …excitement … and growth.

Before I wrap up and say good night I would like to thank you again for coming to Toronto. Thank you for your on-going commitment, diverse insight, and continued support of Certiport.

And, finally …

Thank you for helping to engender and embrace the collaboration that I know will drive change and growth for all of us in the coming years.

Thank you and good night!
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Well, good evening, everyone, and thank you for allowing me to speak directly with you tonight on a topic that I'm as passionate about as you: Certiport.

It's an absolute pleasure for me to be involved with this company, its partners and what we all stand for—as business partners and as thought leaders.

As a partner in a private equity investment group, I've heard many good business ideas and seen many bad business plans, too. And have invested in some of both, I am afraid to say!

Frankly, I've also been around long enough to have been through numerous corporate shifts and ups and downs in the stock market and have the scars to prove it. As an investor in radio stations, cable television companies, motorsports marketing companies, and—of all things—professional bull riding, I must say … the concept of technology skills certification as one of our next growth companies was just a little foreign to my partners and me when we first heard about Certiport.

However, we were particularly aware of the Microsoft and Adobe brands, and were intrigued by the growing demand for digital literacy and the promise of the IC³ standard and products as well.

Speaking of Microsoft, if you haven't switched your computer's default search engine to Microsoft's new Bing.com from that other search engine, you are definitely missing something.

We were amazed that a substantially growing American company, based in American Fork, Utah—with such strong ties to two of the most successful software industry companies in the world—could spend almost 10 years under the radar screen and have such a global market presence.

We'd discovered a truly great secret at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains that was both inspiring and had great growth prospects and pretty close to some great skiing as an added bonus.

Given this unique and exciting discovery, Spire Capital committed to invest in Certiport in November 2007 to help accelerate its growth and expand its business worldwide.

We did this just prior to the time when the world began quickly moving toward a global economic contraction—shortly before 128 Fortune 500 companies posted a total of $519 billion dollars in losses, shortly before 11 of the 25 largest corporate losses in Fortune 500 history, and, soon before consumers and organizations around the world stopped spending money on anything that was not critical to their survival.

They say timing is everything, right? Well, while we didn't get this timing right, we were sure then—and remain very sure now—that our decision was quite smart.

We know that education and certification programs typically show strength in even difficult economic times, as individuals who are unemployed or concerned about their job security will elect to spend their money on training and certification to ensure they are—or remain—employable.

As individuals who are unemployed or concerned about their job security will elect to spend their money on training and certification to ensure they are—or remain—employable.

Evidence of this can be found within the four walls of Certiport where from June of 2008 to June of 2009, Certiport grew its overall exam volumes by 20.54%. This growth has come with the support of our partners at Microsoft and Adobe as well as our global distribution partners, many of whom are here in Toronto. This growth will only accelerate with the upcoming delivery of new releases from Microsoft, Adobe and our own IC³ Digital Literacy platform; not to mention the upcoming release of our first exam with ETS.

With respect to our partners, I hope you have felt the energy and renewed focus that Certiport has placed on all its partners since Ray Kelly joined the organization, literally 100 days ago as Certiport's CEO.

The truth is, we had become somewhat complacent, and frankly, had not been providing all our partners with the focus, resources, and tools that they needed to succeed in the marketplace. Certiport had become too inwardly focused and that, my friends, changed the day Ray walked in the door. Ray's vision, which he will share with you later on in the program, is distinctly focused outward and on our collaborative efforts with all of you.

A new beginning for Certiport is upon us, and you, our partners, are at the center of our growth and our future. We will be successful together and grow our collective business and at the same time—inspiring and preparing students, workers, and officials across the globe to succeed in tomorrow's technology advanced society.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you tonight. I look forward to meeting with each of you later this evening, and in the coming months.

Good night and good fortune to all of us!
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