On behalf of Fisheries and Oceans Canada I would like to thank Electric Edge Systems Group and in particular Bryan Stevenson and Phil Bailey for their significant contribution to the successful development of our new Electronic Monitoring program in the groundfish fisheries. Your system development efforts were key to finishing this very challenging and ground breaking 2 year project that has been called by some as "the most significant change to fishery monitoring in the last 30 years".

Your willingness to work long hours under challenging conditions and still produce a high quality product on time are noted and sincerely appreciated by the Department and industry. We would be pleased to act as a reference for your future work. Please contact Lorne Collicutt at 250-756-7273 for specific reference information. Please feel free to use this correspondence in any promotional material for your company. Once again, thank you and your hard work and perseverance during this important project.

Yours truly,
Deputy Director Radford

This letter is in reference for Electric Edge Systems Group of Victoria, British Columbia. The Sustainable Harvest Sector (SHS) is a fishermen's cooperative of over 100 permits licensed in the New England multispecies groundfishery. In 2010, the fishery largely converted from an input-based fishery management system (via regulated allowable days-at-sea) to an output-based system (via hard total allowable catches). Each cooperative, or "sector", is allocated a share of the total allowable catch. The Sustainable Harvest Sector manages about a third of the total fishery's allocation, and is responsible for ensuring that its membership does not exceed quotas.

As is common in other US fisheries, the National Marine Fisheries Service collects catch information (such as species caught, capture location, fishing gear employed, and so forth) via paper forms mailed to the Service by fishermen. This system is inadequate for timely management of a quota based fishery, and the SHS decided it required an electronic catch reporting system to improve data transmission speed and reliability, and to reduce mistakes and transcription problems common to the paper system.

After reviewing a government-provided option, along with other software products available from private sector firms, the SHS selected Electric Edge Systems to develop an electronic logbook reporting program for use at sea, plus an integrated shoreside quota management and trading platform. Development and customization of these applications is currently underway. We chose Electric Edge because of their:

• Experience in multispecies fishery data management with complex stock/area allocation schemas
• Ability to interface smoothly with National Marine Fisheries Service data protocols
• Implementation of leading edge software products such as Adobe Air, and well-designed web data portals
• Flexible system design allowing for multiple data layers and ability to support fishery management plan changes
• Ease of installation and use on board vessels
• Ongoing success with Electric Edge's onboard and onshore applications for trip hails processing and dockside monitoring coordination (in continuous use by the SHS since May, 2010)

Electric Edge offered the best combination of product features, system support, and investment value. Considering their experience in other fisheries and the quality of their electronic hails system, we believe this electronic logbook program will be straightforward for them to develop and successful from the start.

Sincerely,
Hank Soule

Greg Rusak and Phil Bailey of Electric Edge Systems Group have provided a wide variety of software development services to BC Ferries over the last four years. Most recently, I managed a major development project in which Greg and Phil were instrumental. The project involved the design, creation, and implementation of several mission-critical software applications that replaced legacy, mainframe-based systems. Greg and Phil were a pleasure to work with. Their skill, professionalism, and enthusiasm were greatly appreciated.

Electric Edge was easy to work with and laid out a clear plan of work that needed to be done and the costs involved. They were quick to respond to any concerns and corrections to be made as we proceeded through the work...we greatly appreciated their commitment.