—or PeopleSoft, or any of those large companies, despite their deployments not working. Once Entrust acquired my business.... Entrust was a secure messaging company that used our content analysis to see what was in an email before deciding to encrypt it and send it off. By the way, you use it in the Government of Canada, and have for a number of years. Once Entrust bought our compliance business—we were selling a compliance server that dealt with email and sensitive content in email—it essentially turned around, and the Government of Canada bought our product. Remember, AmikaNow!, my first company, was a spinoff from NRC that did AI and content analysis. I couldn't sell to the government, so as every other software entrepreneur has done, I eventually had to exit. I built it up and I exited. Then Entrust turned around and sold a site licence to the Government of Canada, 250,000 users, for approximately $5 million. Now I have to tell you that you still benefit from this today, and it still benefits from this today. As an SME, I went in with the golden handcuffs, did my time—my three years—came out, and started a new company. We certainly don't benefit from it today, and this is many years later, about 13 or 14 years now. That's a really good example of our technology certainly being good enough to get into the government, but you don't buy it.
Luckily, in 2010 we finally found out about a new program called the OSME program, the Office of Small and Medium Enterprises, which is part of PWGSC. We went there, and we were very excited. Thank you very much for setting them up. We signed up for their training.
Then they announced through OSME, I think, the CICP, which was the precursor for the BCIP, the build in Canada innovation program. In my opinion—and I've now been an entrepreneur for 17 years—it is a fantastic idea. It is the natural next step in getting innovative technology in trial with federal government departments, especially for someone like us, who has leveraged IRAP and SR and ED. We benefited from your other programs to do the innovation and the leading-edge stuff, and now we can take it into the government.
When they were in trial with us, while the testing labs at CRC in Shirley's Bay were in the BCIP with us, they had their first haz-mat emergency. Isn't that a good way to test if an emergency communication and safety system works? Obviously, they finished the testing. We were successful. They bought the products and they've been paying us support now since 2011, so they're a customer.
The second example is...it helped us understand the process.
Just give me 30 seconds. I won't give you more details on that.
We tried again to reply to RFPs. Again we were not successful, so we innovated again. Again we applied to the BCIP, and this time we were successful with some more work. We actually chose a completely different department, CBSA. I'm happy to report that CBSA has been our customer since 2014 because of BCIP, not because of any responses we've done to RFPs. Again, we integrated with gunshot detection, which is leading edge. The RCMP wanted it, etc., but nobody would buy it. We applied to the BCIP, innovated again, and now the RCMP is testing it through BCIP.
The bottom line, to me.... I know the BCIP is $40 million. I honestly think it should be a $250-million program, very similar to IRAP. I have said before that we keep throwing money at the banks, but that's not where we should go.
I'll stop there.