Blue re:BP
well they certainly didn't give it away, an SEC 8-k being something I doubt they would falsify:
On November 30, 2011, through one of its distribution partners, Wave Systems Corp. delivered in-full against a $1.7 million order from one of the world's leading international oil and gas companies for Wave's EMBASSY(R) Remote Administration Server (ERAS), EMBASSY(R) Protector software and related maintenance services to manage laptop computers with self-encrypting drives.
The order, which involves tens of thousands of licenses and related software maintenance through the end of 2012, is a "large" class order (5,000 or more licenses) for which VSOE has not yet been achieved. As a result, Wave expects to record $1.7 million as revenue ratably through the end of 2012.
I post the text for a few reasons:
1. It states that the sale was through a distribution partner, if that partner was Dell then the revenue gets buried in the Dell 10% filing requirement,
2. It states that the revenue will be recorded ratably, the consequences of dividing up the billing over multiple quarters drops the event below 10% of revs (at the time)
3. It states that among the products sold is "Wave Protector" and it is worth noting IMO that Protector is Safend IP, the desire to completely trash the Safend acquisition seems to ignore important facts regarding the products acquired (products that Credant, a competitor, was also licensing).
Yes, they did Safend as poorly as one can, as if they went to 'how can I bungle this?' school on the matter, but the acquisition strategy is defensible. (and a reminder that the shares printed to acquire Safend represent 1.3% of outstanding, Safend represented 42% of non-Dell revs in most recent quarter, and 31% of company assets .... it certainly has outperformed the Ionosphere purchase e.g.).
As far as the number of seats that awk is stating, to me that involves some speculation. Sleuthing revealed that certain IT folks from BP added to their resumes on linkdin the notion that they had done an initial deployment of some 20-25k seats of ERAS for BP. That would be $85 a seat. It's the remaining 75k seats and the revenue for the that is more of a mystery. The entire BP affair has been masked as much as allowed. THere was an accelerated maintenance payment a couple Qs ago from an unnamed large customer, but I had long been expecting to see another 'big sale' to BP as part of a revolving replacement (25k seats in round 1, etc). If 100k seats was actually deployed, then it seems some discounting occurred, it would knock things down more to $20 a seat.
But not free. Hope this clarifies things as much as possible.
The above content is my opinion.
