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matt25, there was NO reference to anything resembling MSFT-Wave news. None, zip, nil, nadda. It is and always will be a Wavoid myth. SKS said nothing of the sort, not even close.
O.K. I got it wrong, it wasn’t in Q&A, it was during the segment speaking towards the size and growth of Trusted Computing and TPMs ….
(paraphrasing) ‘there are 500-600m TPMs … if you got a enterprise computer in the last 5 years its got a TPM, and what is interesting is this week you will hear from MS what they are doing with trusted computing in windows 8 and their logo requirements etc’
There wasn’t even an inkling, nothing, zip, nil, nadda indicating in any way, shape, form or fashion that there was or will ever be any sort of Wave-MSFT announcement this week or ever. The statement was that MSFT is going all in with TPMs with Win8, the implication was that this significant for the TPM-TC space. It was in the context of discussing TPM deployemnt. Period.
Misstatement my arse.
(edit: and there never will be, there will never be a joint Wave-MSFT deployment announcement of any sort, ever.)
titlewave, Was a prediction made? /e
All I get is that the webcast is expired.
titlewave, I hear you,
my question is, did SKS make a blundering statement at ACG? I discriminate between blundering statements and the misassignment of statements by others.
Does anybody know what was said in response to what? Is it:
1. making it up (hearing what you want to hear) so as to give fodder to bashing
2. making it up (hearing what you want to hear) to fuel irrational hopeful expectations
3. a blundering statement
NW, understood,
my mythometer has this MSFT as 80% likelihood of having all the actual meaning of the 3 word quote from superPAC political adds.
Lugan posted a phrase, others added ... so far I got no meat, I did hear MSFT in the 'time to go' segment amid garble and an inaudible Q.
Now I'm still giving 20% that SKS said something really stupid, but I listened and I had no Wave-MSFT news at RSA make it into my head.
Words are like farts and flowers, without context valence is unknown.
What was said?
I listened to the CC, and don't know what people here are talking about, but I could be wrong, I don't have a transcript, I generally filter Lee-Speak to the point where some of it doesn't make it down the ear canal, and I cewrtainly do not seek to be a Lee-speak-apologist ..... but .....
I heard the prepared remarks, they were getting cut off for time, somebody asked something (a question I could not hear) and SKS mumbled something to the effect of 'expect something from MSFT at RSA'
So, was the question he was responding to:
1) Is MSFT going to rebrand its OS to WaveSoft?
2) Is MSFT getting out of the software business?
3) Is Wave involved in Win8?
4) Will Win8 involve TPMs in any way?
'expect something from MSFT' means totally difffernt things to me depending on which of those 4 are being responded to.
The statement is perfectly sensible for 4), a 'no' would work for 1), and 2) is 'ask MSFT'.
Now, if the question was 3) then certainly that would be a Lee-tease extrordinaire (and one I would discount the second I heard it) ... but until I can see some quotes and context, I'm kinda wonderin what folks are b@!#ing about.
Lugan posted something very vague, it has grown, morphed, ... or not?
If folks are goig to work themselves into a frenzy over something, wouldn't it be nice to actually have some facts like what the Q and A exactly was?
(disclaimer I missed the first couple of minutes while switching browsers).
Seriouslt, what exactly are folks talking about??
wm, GD indicates they are putting together their TC thingy using COTS and other standards based technology. One possibility is that the went COTS for TPM management which would be scale (the whole effort is under construction/a pilot). On the flip-side the sum of the GD and Wave talking about GD comments leaves me less than warm and fuzzy.
TCBITP Features
•
TPM based attestation of BIOS, OS, critical agent software and applications
•
Updated SCAP content ingestion
•
Verification of USGCB SCAP Content compliance
•
Policy-based network access control based on IMV reports
•
Attribute based access control to tagged resources based on platform compliance and health
•
Harmonized reporting to IF-MAP server
•
Consolidated event logging
•
Visualization of platform compliance and health and information sharing posture
9
re GD
"TCBITPAIS uses strong authentication and remote attestation through – you guessed it – a hardware root of trust"
So, what exactly did GD build in those 18 months?
NW, is listened to the ACG webcast and didn't come away with "SKS indicated an annoucement from Microsoft involving Wave would be forthcoming" ... maybe its just that there is certain content I just tune out on, but is there a transcript or quote of the actual words on this?
alea, it seems we are in agreement,
and that it reflects the schematics over the years, I'm just trying to make sure to see a scene where the MNOs get a somewhat reliable piece of the pie while allowing for a parallel pie to grow more or less independently. MNOs must get some pie.
... that's where Ballmer will channel his inner mundo?
alea, so the architecture
of the statement sometime ago by SKS that Wave seeks to focus on communication and forgo the transaction business would be reflective of a split architecture, a SIM-secured transaction business run by MNO for buying nylons at Target and an MTM-secured architecture initialized by Samsung enabling enterprise/gov use. With said MTM architecture in place third party vendors can write apps to that space which are certified and installed by Samsung or a third party agent, such as Wave.
Something like that.
Said another way: if gov e.g. instructs Samsung, Moto, towards a particular spec ('Zone e.g.) running Android or Win8 then the administration of the Zone falls into the hands of those hardware vendors, or a third party provider, like Wave. Meanwhile, the MNOs similarly instruct handset makers to provide the SIM architecture for them to rent to payment folks.
Pretty much what we've been seeing in the various schematics for some time, or so it seems.
alladin,
I'm softening a bit on the MSFT thing, maybe they keep it short and direct folks as follows:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/board.aspx?board_id=17
or perhaps:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.aspx?user=25000
alea, it seems that MNOs
can maintain their rent-a-wallet on the SIM and gov e.g., can run its secure device infrastructure and execution in the 'Zone. That, it seems, would be ideal as I don't like Wave's chances of emerging from battle between goog-vrz-visa for the cash register or the resource pit it would be to make a run with those heavies.
If that is the direction then it is 'simply' a matter of being able to play in the Zone of a MNO tethered handset. If the Zone is for rent, it seems everybody is going to fight to be landlord. If Wave's play in the Zone is one-time royalty enablement, it would seem there would be less resistance. Even if royalties were some sort of per-app one time Zone enablement I could imagine it being tolerated, but recurring rent would be a battle.
I'm way out of my depth here, but fortunately that has never bothered me before and doesn't seem to now.
stjoe, random responses
1. Finread comparison: There isn't a comparison IMO. Wave never had a viable business plan prior to the TPM. They simply were not going to get their proprietary hardware stuffed into anything. As that was the plan for the PeterMeter and E2100, it simply wasn't a viable business plan. Since TPM deployment Wave has seen revenues from bundling: first INTC, Winbond, STM, BRCM and then beginning 2006 from Dell. This sub-buck bundling was never going to make them particularly successful, but at least it was a plan that was not dependent on things that simply were not going to happen. These latest announcements are simply stating they are continuing the plan of putting software 'on' other peoples chips, chips others are shipping, chips there is demand for, chips for which there is a consensus. Wave is saying that they have been successful in bundling with TPMs, selling upgrades to TPMs and SEDs, and they are going to migrate that success to other platformns were again other people are building chips that do sell, chips there is a demand for.
2. yup
3. It seems the notions about Samsung and SP perceptions may be a ihub Wavoid myth.
4. not sure what can be done about that.
5. If you are calling decent news $ news, I don't recall Wave ever having $ news in the context of major conferences ... well, Safend acquisition was certainly material, but not the rev $ news I assume you are referring to. Conference sare always vision news, demo news, ''works with news.
Wave has two booths at RSA this year, and they are definitely flashing some vision things. One booth links to the Wave website, the other links to the Safend website. I don't know what is going to be shown where, but it looks like a good conference at the right time for Wave. It follows nicely after NSA, speaks towards actually devices more, and has mobile all over it.
And again, MSFT is not going to say a thing about Wave. Those that want to see Wave in what they will say will see it, those that don't want to see it, wont.
trusted Logic,
It is extremely good to see Trusted Logic and Wave together. While I recognize they have a PR from the Jurassic period, and understand the wave of dots here insisting the relationship was intact, I had for some time feared that TL had moved on.
Its all very de ja vu to see TL and Wave w Wave at the workshop with the SED folks and MW from Samsung (one of the E2100 engineers as I understand it). It could be argued that all of that 'wasted' money is coming home to roost, or not.
We will hear from MSFT,
but they wont say a bloody thing about Wave. For those looking they will see Wave implications, for those looking not they will see nothing.
I'm afraid nothing can be inferred from ROTH etc presentations.
Wave wasn't seeking any sort of placement in 2010 or 2011, and they kept right on doing the ROTH, Needham, etc investor seminars.
Yes they mobilized the shelf into the ATM.
Yes they could, I suppose, seek another filing, but at this point I find it difficult to imagine a placement + ATM over the same period.
Honestly, goal posts didn't move,
near term profits were not a goal, that has been stated at essentially every opportunity for some time. What has been stated for some time is all available capital will be plowed into growth. Moreover, it was indicated mobile development may take more than available cash. So, again, the goals posts weren't moved. The strategy was simply reiterated.
If I say I'm not planning on going dancing any time soon, and you ask me again tomorrow, and I say the same thing, I didn't move anything.
One can dispute whether the strategy is sound, but the moving goal posts thingy is fiction. One can argue that mgmt is stupid and that they should focus on making a near term profit, but they have amde it clear that is not their near term plan.
Yes on MW
BS USAF Academy
Prof Math&CS NCState
IBM (cryptography)
Fiderus (security, privacy)
Wave (E2100, TAN)
Seagate (security, privacy)
TCG
OASIS
Samsung (storage, security)
http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/community/michael_willett/
brief comment that AMI relationship good in affording bios compliance w DoD
its over now, I had to switch to IE, even with permission Chrome wouldn't run it.
Is Wave + Winmagic a good fit?
At the RSA TCG workshop there is a couple of gov speakers, a slew of Fortune 500 folks then Wave and Winmagic (which essentially provides much of what Wave provides in the enterprise-encryption-management business) and four customers (all Wave customers).
Winmagic has about 100 employees, most of whom are software engineers, spends about 20% of its budget on RD, and has (I'm guessing) $10-20m in revs. Their SecurDoc suite of goodies is very well regarded.
rwk, FWIW, I don't see those ideas as being in conflict,
Wave may "invent" the log (a bit grandiose for me) and install themselves as log-roller, but plenty of folks will try to jump on as a crowd gathers. The crowd is gathering, and Wave seeks to stay dry.
Perhaps my metaphor implies some sort of futility or panic that was not my intent. Nevertheless, log-rolling is difficult, regardless of who brought the log, and TWT if Wave has managed to assemble the team capable (with its near tripling of its workforce in a comparatively short period of time) of staying dry.
Today, they are dry. That's saying a lot.
cartoon, a Samsung Android handset I presume, although it gets a bit confusing when one excludes that market because Android is "imbedded" and phones won't have TPM/MTMs, military pre-solicitation notwithstanding..
(the following is loose recollections of mine)
About a year ago during CCs SKS was asked about mobile in a 'can we see it soon' kind of way, and the response was more or less earlyish 2013. There was the Samsung Tab - Wave youtube video, and now "integrating strong enterprise authentication and hardware integrity validation on an Android handset".
It was also stated that cash-flow looked good, but playing in mobile will likely take something extra ... ATM?
It seems to me things are moving very rapidly right now. Wave is now log-rolling and trying to stay dry.
There are a couple of companies that have products that can (at least) remotely manage SEDs in a TPM-aware/dependent manner (I'm thinking WinMagic and TrendMicro) although it is noteworthy that Micron e.g. is not bragging about compatibility with those solutions. In this arena Garter identifies Wave as the clear leader and one with comprehensive TPM management software to boot.
As the log turns Wave has added WES to ERAS for those so inclined bringing device security to small enterprises, and added WEM for those serious about device integrity in support of NIST directives. Wave has added a partenrship with AMI in support of, among other things, WEM. Wave is adding Android to its Wintel platform of device management software and has entered into a partnership with AndroidKing Samsung. Wave is leveraging its Safend portfolio in the iOS space. Wave has enterprise deployments with GM, BASF, PwC, and BP known military deployment with the Army FBCB2 and Naval Mine Warfare Unit. Wave has an enduring OEM bundling relationship with Dell, a bundling arrangement with Acer and reseller agreement with HP.
Are these sufficient for profitibility? No. These things are necessary, IMO, in executing Wave’s business plan of providing the shim to integrate and manage the proliferating sea of diverse end-points.
I’ll have quiche with my niche, thankyou.
mundo,
MSFT is a niche company primarily engaged in only selling Windows operating systems and productivity software.
SKS blog gripes,
it (as always) seems jumbled to me ...
1. iPAD
2. Adroid
3. WES
4. the social networking plug-in thingy
is the way that should read.
And can we lose the word "you" from pretty much everything?
There's more, but it would be a start.
Niche? or Early Adopter?
Wave non-bundling revenue, essentially a measure of those that actually use TPMs was $5m in 2010 and looks to be $15m in 2011, representing growth of 300% for that segemnt at Wave Systems yoy.
So, will history show GM, BASF and BP adoption of SEDs and ERAS to be a niche application, or are they early adopters?
Given the laws, liability, and associated costs ... trade secrets, reputation, and just plain life cycle cost, I'm leaning towards early adopters.
It seems the applying the notion of "niche" to data protection is a curious one. Adding to that the malevolent potential of a renegade/lost device as a VPN acces point and the notion of niche becomes further strained.
unix, you are very ably making the point of 'the other side' so to speak, you say:
what I'm saying is I can click a button and either change a devices passcode, or wipe it or find it
unix, again, Wave (buried in the details of 'our business' in SEC filings)does not build operating systems. Moreover, Wave is not in the business of building mobile operating systems, but were they your thoughts would be of some import. It is important to understand what a company builds or seeks to build to understand whether they can gain entrance to market. Wave does not build main battle tanks, and as such the goings on at Chrysler in that area are not somehow blocking Wave ... but tanks do have computers, so I guess one could presume that Wave is toast because the Abrams has computers.
A case in point on this is that Wave has generated some $82 million in revenue the last three years entirely off of software that runs in a Wintel environment, BUT, Wintel was well "imbedded in the marketplace" long ago, well before Wave. Your conclusion that there is no place for Wave in mobile because iOS and Android is "imbedded" avoids the established history of "a role" afforded Wave in the "imbedded ...marketplace" of Wintel.
Of value would be to more specifically examine what Wave builds and is trying to build and whether there is a market there and whether there is already an "imbedded" occupant.
I am not aware of an "imbedded" occupant providing software to centrally manage diverse (iOS, Android, WinOS, SEDs, etc) trusted devices. Are you? Do you know of a company that builds or is seeking to build platform independent trusted device management? Actually to the extent that there is an imbedded occupant, it at this point, Wave.
The final irony is that Wave requires that there be platforms (iOS, Android, WinOS) and to some extent requires they be diverse. How is the presence of that which they require an impediment to their business? A car wash needs ... CARS.
mad, most of what you 'ask' is clearly in the public domain. Goto yahoofinance or pretty much anywhere else and type in "WAVX".
The options is neither bullish nor bearish. It simply is. The company issues ISO grants annually, it is bullish or bearish as much as the notion that March follows February. It just is.
unix's fears etc:
1. that if Wave was waiting for Win8 to sell things it would be a while before revs, but they're not, whew.
2. that if Wave was waiting for Win8mobile to enter the mobile space that Android represents a significant obstacle, but again they are not, there is that outfit Samsung which is a/the leader in Android clients, and presumably the purpose of the Samsung-Wave relationship is not to develop things for what isn't, but rather develop things for what is. Moreover, something around 99.99% of Wave's revs to date have not come from the mobile space, so mobile talk is forward growth talk, not current business talk.
3. In couple of weeks the mighty annual report comes out (of limited interest to those who find Digging thru numbers a side-show) but for some it will be good fun.
On that, I'm expecting about $37m in reported revs, around $46m in reported expenses for a reported loss of around $9m or around a dime a share (loss per share largely meaningless at this stage, dilution e.g. would constitute "improvement" or reduced loss per share which is just plain dumb-think).
That will print as something like 43% yoy rev growth, 29& QtoQ rev growth, and RD plowing along at about 35% of expenses. Revenue as a percent of expenses (measuring distance to break even in relative terms, 100% = exactly breakeven) will likely decline to to something like 83% reflecting the comparatively massive bulking up of the workforce.
So the annual report will leave the question on the table: Is the build-up in staff in preparation to the well publicized migration of gov to trusted computing a good idea, or will it prove to be a waste, with either the government abandoning its well-publicized migration to trusted computing, or that the government seeks a vendor other than Wave for the TPM/SED/pre-boot management? In other words, 2011 will represent the first half (the investment half) of the gambit surrounding the gov's well-publicized migration to trusted computing, 2012 will represent an important part of the second half of the gambit and to the extent that said migration to trusted computing slips into 2013, WAVX will suffer dilution. If, for example, the government in a fit of fiscal discipline decides trusted computing is a waste of time and instead insitutes a policy of doubling password refresh rates to every 45 days and that they can TOS all this TPM/SED ballyhoo into the bin where it belongs, then that would b bad for Wave.
Of course, there is always non-gov business, and whatever growth that may occur there to influence 2012. In short, are GM, BASF and BP the only enterprises that are going to adopt Wave solutions ... is that finished now ... or will there be more?
rwk's got it right,
Issuing stock options today is not a reward for the last year, it is an incentive for the next.
Expiring options represent past incentives for which performance (for some options) failed to meet the requirements for the incentive to be realized as material compensation, past options were SP conditional compensation, the SP failed, the compensation went up in smoke.
End of year cash bonuses on the other hand are immediate material compensation for past performance. To the extent that SP is the only metric (which it is not) then cash bonuses should suffer, not the issuing of incentive options. Indeed, I think cash bonuses should shift to incentive options, more options and less cash is the formula that aligns executive and shareholder interests.
My beef has always been with the relative weighting (and absolute amounts) of cash vs incentive options compensation in the context of a cash-flow negative development stage company.
alea, yes, this is what has me hoping in some ways that the FBCB2 Sole Source Engineering Contract is for, say $50k as opposed to $500k ... I'm hoping that it is easy for Wave to get a team at the Army up to speed, that Wave is deploying a COTS solution, as opposed to a faux-COTS solution with engineering intensive fiddling of each effort.
wavetrain,
none of Seagate's SED tech partners (Wave, Winmagic, Secude) are on the list.
alea, yes, motivation is presumably high, bad things may well have happened that we don't know about, real humans may have been ambushed as a consequence of compromised data, this all being much more than a remote possibility to have already happened, so it could be a matter of not just obligation/duty, but passion.
On the flip side, the best trained, best equipped, most motivated folks around seek to do things all the time and fail to achieve at their goal rate.
I'm in show me mode.
It seems they take on 20k seats, move to 80k seats, then maybe start knocking them off in batches of 150k, each push going to specific platform types and configurations, each make/model/bios being a discrete effort; prepped, pushed, verified and then on to the next group. I would expect make/model/bios to be target groups but that to be further broken down by organizational structure all while maintaining redundant fully functional mission capacity. It just doesn't strike me as turning on Christmas lights.
Just getting the ball rolling, say a few 100k seats will do for me. The of course as far as jas' post on PE and SP etc., all this stuff has to bill, book, and so on.
I don't think profitability 2012 is in the cards, but the emergence of a clear quantifiable path would be 'news' enough.
awk, that makes sense,
but didn't it take about a year to deploy 18k new seats at BP? I basically agree with you, but the systems being activated/upgraded/replaced are presumably in use and my limited experience is the Tom Clancy world of everything working the way its supposed to is reality-based fiction, but fiction in the end.
TWT
615 typo, <650 correct /e