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uh, because SEDs require TPMs? or uh, because making money managing SEDs w/o TPM use is somehow a lesser thing?
I said Wave has fallen out of the top tier of SED management. They have. You bring up apples in a statement about oranges.
Wave had a first mover advantage, your guy kept wandering into the basement to play on "consumer play" science projects, neglected customers, blamed floods and other vendors stepped in.
Some reminders (it seems these fundamentals have been lost on some of the "consumer play" folks):
How do I manage a large number of systems with self-encrypting drives? Is software available to administer these drives?
A: Multiple Independent Software Vendors( ISVs), who traditionally manage encryption functions, now provide management of self-encrypting drives, both locally and remotely. These currently include Absolute Software, CryptoMill, McAfee, Secude, Softex, Sophos (1H2011), Symantec (via Guardian Edge acquisition), Wave Systems and WinMagic.
My SED is incorporated in a laptop that includes a system TPM. How does the SED interact with the system Trusted Computing software and hardware?
A: The TPM and the SED are not required to interact. However, depending on the software authentication, secrets held within the TPM could be used to authenticate or to help authenticate to the SED. Note that there is also a disadvantage to using a TPM to participate in SED authentication. Should the laptop fail and the user want to move the SED to a new model, the management software would have to support moving it from one TPM to another. Otherwise the SED could not be unlocked, as it is in part controlled by the TPM in the dead system.
Do any of the software solutions that manage SEDs also manage the TPM?
A: Yes, some of the same software vendors that manage SEDs can also manage TPMs, allowing for a single management system.
Do existing software-based FDE providers also provide SED management?
A: Many software companies that support software-based FDE also provide SED management, allowing for a heterogeneous environment of both software-based FDE machines and Opal SED-based machines managed by the same infrastructure.
Given that Wave, while not having ceded the SED space has certainly fallen out of top tier in that space, and given that their remaining lead products are mostly large enterprise type products - enterprises that do perhaps more comprehensive risk analysis on their vendors - one would hope the board is looking at their options with some sincerity.
NW, but I don't see how that makes me as a buyer any more confident that the product will exist or be supported/updated etc in the future.
Strikes me like a need to find a merger partner, or a buy-out, otherwise it is a self-fulfilling circle. Cant sell cause financials look scary, financials look scary cause can't sell. All a point player has stressed a number of times.
"the only thing that is important at this point [...] is sales"
the dude really is stunningly frank compared to previous admin.
and
it does seem that the size and fragility of Wave serves as an impediment.
the notion of looking to piggyback with partners to overcome that impediment is curious but I can't quite see how that would map out. player?
that pretty much nails it
tkc, looks like srvs were 300k in Q3, and by voice it looks like they get some srvs revs for pilots, but interestingly the pilots were described as forward looking engineering projects, not the implied VSC sales pilots. It is beginning to sound to me that the pilots are WEMy thingys, not VSC thingys. By for the most notable thing so far (to me) and the reduced burn, definitely lower burn than i was pencilling in on my "$16m" thingy.
*yea, the drop in loss kinda surprised me
couple the lowered burn with Esign and that buys another Q of runway
tkc, is it always 1/4? if they sell a 3-year maint package cash up front don't they book it over 3 yrs as well?
So it looks like parlor game time
The predictors:
snackman is over $4.9m revs
and blue is under $4.5m revs
the rest seem to speak towards what would be good or bad and not predictions per se
The good/bad-ers
player: under $4.5 disaster, $4.9m or better good (coincidentally player has largely said a blue outcome would be a disaster, and a snackman outcome would be good ... who wouda thunk?)
tkc: billings $4.5+ would show progress
dig space: revs $2.5-$5.5, and as far as good/progress, I more or less go with tkc and player ... like to see revs go up (> $4.5m, sure 10% sounds good) and similarly would like to see some recovery in billings i'll be more generous and call $4.3m progress.
as far as predictions, put one stick in the ground so to speak, billings $3.9, revs $4.4
barge, correct, over the course of 12 years VirnetX was awarded 37 patents,
all of them sharing only 5 names, indicative of a systematic, layered, overlapping effort at protecting IP.
Moreover, VirnetX publicly states the value of their patents, contests those patents, and continuously files and is issued new ones.
What part of Wave resembles anything VirnetX is doing?
Wave on the other hand is tethered to an open standard, has bothered to only very rarely obtain patent protection, doesn't enforce their patents, and indeed states (or at least your guy, SKS) that anybody could go out invest the resources and do what Wave does, in SKS words 'nothing is stopping them'.
The genius has a different view of Wave's patents, or should I say patent, than you.
Barge, Wave is not on record saying that Trustzone tramples their IP ... just the opposite, Wave is on record saying they support Trustzone, that they like what Trustzone is doing, that they are a partner. I would go with what Wave says on this one.
alea, the number of nanocap companies ...
that are largely ineffective at selling their products
that have a patent or three
that have message boards where the faithful roll said patent out like the arc of the covenant
that have members who raise their voice in jubilation and awe prophesying The Day when The Patent rises and Delivers Salvation
... likely number in the millions.
There is likely, today, a hundred such message boards, a company reeling from the last dilution, another SEC filing of awful cash flow, and a face painted crowd burning incense and chanting Patent.
Are you saying Wave has e.g. a CSP for ChromeOS and similarly a version of ETS for ChromeOS?
"Yup, where there are TPMs Wave is in the picture"
so, w/re: Chromebook? Wave is in the picture how?
tkc, that fits the bill for hopeful, and more or less how I see it,
that is that Q2 non-Dell Embassy sales fell, so a place for "improvement" would be recovery of that loss. Dell has been going away so far at a 500k/Q rate. I have never thought it made sense for Dell revs to fall in a linear fashion, expected more of a cliff, so maybe Q3 provides that cliff - or not. So maybe $1m is a fair guess, but perhaps best viewed as a top-end guess with effectively nil on the table as a possibility (Dell falling below 10% reporting putting an higher floor on Dell accounting). Maybe some initial VSC sales here or there, perhaps some improved sales in the SED emphasis area ....
Dell: 0-$1m
SFND: $1.0-1.5m
non-Dell Embassy: $1.5-2.5m
services: 0-$0.5m
total: $2.5 to $5.5 .... that's a revs calc.
Billings aren't broken down much in the report, I don't know what component of Dell is e.g. realizing defrevs but maybe that is addressed in the text and I just don't bother to read carefully enough. You are indicating non-Dell billings, so presumably it is in there, or you are assuming Dells revs are from current billings, I don't know which.
Basically, were I to be hopeful I would pull for billings of $5m and leave it at that, but I expect more like $4m in new billings.
rot, I doubt the MNOs would take issue with a branded device that they sell containing a TPM that they take ownership of, that they supply the device with apps, including wallet apps, that those apps use the TPM that they own to authenticate the actions of that device and so on ... it's not the TPM per se, it is whether the MNOs allow e.g. Wave to administer the TPM, provision e.g. wallet apps and so on. That the MNOs stand passively while Wave helps create an E2100-like world that steps between the device and the MNO to capture all sorts of applet hosting/switching/payment activity is what I think alea has long been observing as an obstacle. In one case the MNO is part of the commerce, in the other they are a bitpipe. BICBW
so as we migrate to a digitally secured identity where most things of value are digitally authenticated and the messenger digitally attested too, shouldn't the numbers underpinning risk enter the equation when one considers the equation contemplates the complete elimination of privacy and autonomy.
its the numerology that confuses me,
one could very reasonable argue the 2nd costs 30k lives a year, but it is a right, so presumably an acceptable cost. but that is 10 911s a year.
we apparently will happily throw the 4th or 5th under the bus to save 1/100th (over the last decade) of what we consider inalienable in the case of the 2nd.
apparently the glamour of cost is more important than the numbers, or perhaps it is the 'foreigness', but in the end none of it makes sense. We shred the founding scripture to prevent what we find completely tolerable in almost every other circumstance (voluntary vaccination, alcohol, youth driving, the 2nd, the list goes on ... things that yield a 911 every week, numerically speaking).
Given that the books closed on Q3 Sept 30th, it seems the opportunity for significant billings is slim. Given their unwillingness/inability to provide guidance, it is hard to see anything other than a drubbing.
Unfortunately, IMO, even if the underlying numbers show traction and promise, I suspect the numbers as a whole hit with a thud no matter what.
Seeing that they book small order revs more-or-less straight away, there is an outside chance at a surprise in revs, but it would seem to me that no matter how solid those numbers look they will get drowned by the magnitude of the loss and cash on hand.
barge, confirmation to some,
SKS thinking the CEO of HP doesn't get it is part of SKS not getting it and not listening. That SKS is willing to share with you an example of his closed mind hardly substitutes for listening where it counts.
replace "people" with "companies" eom
alea, I've wallowed in the supply chain with the best of them,
and found your crystallizing the circumstance in simply supply and demand terms to be rather useful. I mean it should be obvious enough, but it is easy to get caught up in things.
Take e.g. the hoopla around the Wave products on the Lenovo site juxtaposed with your statements regarding the US sovereignification of Wave ... and somehow the conclusion was that your idea is amiss as demonstrated by Lenovo ... ignoring the fact that this is just Lenovo trying to sell things, nothing about anybody buying things. The buyer decides, not Lenovo.
Moreover, nothing about the Wave products listed on the Lenovo site differs from the Wave products previously listed on the Dell site .. same links to brochures, same best in class babble ... and yet they simple fact is the same product Wave hopes to sell is simply being displayed on a different OEM shelf.
Sure, things need to be on shelves, but it is agonizingly well demonstrated that that is far from sufficient.
Lenovo isn't being a fool, and the shelf is well-populated (WinMagic, Sophos, Absolute, Wave and an inhouse), Lenovo is giving customers choices, time will tell what they buy.
I should clarify that the word "fluff" used by me to describe a PR is not intended as some sort of pejorative, but I realize that it is often used that way so it is a bad word choice. I should just stick to what it is 'a long term development update' which for this Wave Systems here and now does not contain what this company needs here and now. In that sense it is meatless, as for this company here and now I describe meat as something with essentially immediate revenue impact.
For this company here and now the eSign PR was much meatier than the world conquering in every box uber standard cradle to grave world dominating industry standard MU PR.
barge, I certainly appreciate your passion and don't fault it, but I have for some time backed off that for myself, preferring the more mundane task of sorting and counting beans.
With the notion of the problem being the TCG, and given who the founders are, I have for some time held the notion that there is no way those guys let uber-billions flow to Wave ... multi-millions? sure, why not, but massive chunks of pie are targeted for subsumation, redundancy, and obfuscation.
Their lack of a greater sooner push and resources (and comparative lack by many now) likely reflects their greater understanding of the market than Sprague, so while Wave sat and mocked e.g. soft-FDE, money was being made there. No coin in evangelizing.
That PwC bought CSP to build their own VSC (in so many words) should have been a wake-up call to SKS of a real opportunity, but he just kept evangelizing and hopin+prayin for the big paradigm shifty thingy instead of working to make money. For that he should be soundly unabashedly purposefully ridiculed for - we are talking hundreds of $millions without even casual regard to sensible business practices with PwC-VCS-like potential a glaring example.
You are blaming the people that didn't blast through hundreds of $millions for the acts of one who so casually did. They are not responsible for SKS' behavior, he is.
Finally, his visions have simply been incorrect. Cool, but incorrect. Metering wasn't to be, data-casting wasn't to be, neither in the way he envisioned, other things filled that demand. I cannot praise cool failed ideas as much as some. Those ideas did entail developing IP related to a hardware root of trust, something that current investors hope has value, but on that he was demonstrably incapable of monetizing the property.
Barge, with respect,
Your content of late has puzzled me. You were recently lamenting Solms’ apparent lack of addressing and/or even understanding attestation. I was looking at the earlier MU PR, and the comments in CCs, and was wondering of you got it on attestation. But I knew better, well at least I assumed so. Nevertheless it has seemed to me that Solms has discussed – in well over a “5 minute” fashion attestation, and has indeed updated on it with some regularity. It occurred to me that it couldn’t be the attestation idea that had you concerned (as obviously it is easy to see he has been addressing it for some time), but the lack of the word itself (which means nil to most), … and a lack of the leader getting all worked up into a sweaty lather and making wild irresponsible projections about revenues, timelines, market opportunity, engagement … you know, the standard undisciplined blather that it seems to me some require for anything to have actually been “discussed”.
Now you lament the absence of a self-avowed demand-sider putting meat on a long term development supply-sider story. Odd.
Isn’t this really just about longing for the good ole days of getting all frenzied for fantastic futures based on the idea that a company plans to build a product (while questions about when and if said product is actually purchased seem to demonstrate an aptitude deficiency)?
RE; "fluff", an entirely subjective term for which context is important. Given this Wave Systems, here, today, I view a long term development PR as "fluff". Meat is near term revenue impacting information. Had MU stated that they had advanced Wave $5m for said development, that would swap ham for fluff.
you've got the wrong nobody
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=107609119
NW, certainly anything resembling a situation
where a partner assumes costs associated with development can only be a good thing. I have a difficult time imagining we are talking enough coin to move the needle, but we will know soon enough.
FWIW, the USG "pilot" fees for WEM (around $1.5m) was essentially subsidized development IMO. That SKS somewhat recklessly referred to it as sales at the inception (that first $500k "customer" thingy in a Q3 report a few years ago) was an abuse of terms, but income is income.
Wave lacks the resources IMO to dump coin into development of a supply chain+APT integrity product, but with a willing funding partner that is a separate matter.
yea, I back-peddled in edit EOM.
A concrete specific analysis
of a product the suppliers say does not yet exist, but that they expect to exist sometime in the vague time frame of the first half of 2015 ...
Concrete on custard.
Here goes:
The suppliers plan to build a product, plan to have that product available in the first half of 2015, and hope folks will buy it. I may be stretching it, they plan future announcements about a product, not necessarily a product itself, in the first half of 2015.
Perhaps it is a good time for a concrete specific analysis of Win 10?
I am afraid I have begun several sentences in various places with
"Setting aside the obligatory statement of optimism ..."
hooked me wit that.
It seems the copy editor has again left the building, the marginally coherent babble that many of us understand because we know what he is planning to say before hand returns.
exhibit A. eom
MU and scrambled eggs.
Wave requires significant near term revenue, hopefully in the form of income from operations. For that Wave is looking at VSC and presumably renewing interest in large scale SED management. Those efforts rely on products that are on the shelf today.
A company such as Wave must also keep an eye towards the future - regardless of how tenuous their future may be.
The company occasionally updates on that future, or what they think it might be.
Enter e.g. Bell-ID and MU et al.
Investors seem inclined to take the above (VSC, SEDs, Bell and MU) and throw it all into a blender, pull out pieces and remark how MU is not going to produce $16m by Mar31 2015, or that the requirement for $16m does not exist because there is MU.
Correct, MU will not produce $16m by Mar 31, but that was never MU's slot. Similarly, the $16m is very real, and MU does nothing to address it.
There seemed to be considerable condemnation at least by some that one of these futury thingys supposedly missed a deadline (the infamous "anticipate definitive agreement in August" bit). While I agree that that statement had no place in that PR (it added nothing, and provided only an opportunity for perceived failure as indeed, had such an agreement been announced, it would mean no more or less than that effort does today .... something that might generate some revenue some day).
Perhaps it is my penchant for categorizing thingys and putting them into boxes that leaves me a bit flummoxed when some use items from the purple box to describe the contents of the green box.
So some look at the future purple box as salvation - something I think it has no business doing given current cash flow, others look at the contents of the orange box and say the green box is doomed.
Scramble away.
the PR thingy,
FWIW, all between the lines, it seems like Micron and Wave some time ago entered into a development agreement of sorts to develop bottom layer attestation/flash/WEM cradle to grave product certification. I put attestation in there for barge, apparently what Solms has been talking about on this needs to have the exact word in there, otherwise it doesn't exist, unless of course I got it all wrong and supply chain PC build health verification is not attestation.
This is work IMO Wave as been doing, and it seems they have decided (they is Lenovo IMO) some standardization is in order - we are talking bottom layer. Lenovo figured they couldn't have one bottom layer provider ponied up with Wave and another wandering around.
So, on balance, it is a fluff PR, and by the looks of it not a Wave originated PR, and while not a specific product announcement, it seems largely in keeping wit the earlier Micron thingy.
On balance it is meh, not what is needed (revs), not a goal post move IMO (MU was never anything resembling near term revs and the previous thing was indeed largely an initial development thingy), but something that will may well be leveraged for a little CC distraction fun.
NW said that MU has been shouldering some dev costs, FWIW.
ugh, this should be fun.
Revs, something likely over $3m, exp likely something near $8m. Non-cash around $1.5.
Billings will be worth looking at, heck maybe but likely not some guidance ...
seems like a seat-belts affair.
I might well miss this one and read about it later. I can't see it not being a bit agonizing. It's kinda like following a sports team and knowing they are going in for good a drubbing under the lights.
alea, last bit on that,
I may be willing to accept your assessment in applying it to a population, I am disinclined to take the population data and derive predictive power for this single event.
Certainly the Chief of Staff designation is an odd thing. If I worked there I can’t imagine I wouldn’t at least roll my eyes at that. Alternatively it may be a deliberate effort to devalue the position – the guy is not a COO per se, … uh, never mind, I’ll just stick with it being odd.
On the broader thing – the matrix, privacy, quasi-governmental etc., you may well be correct, this being an area where in a broad sense I am rather uncomfortable. The notion of a cashless, digital credentialed, cloud-based, back-doored, erasable human dystopia strikes me as a very real possibility – almost likely (eeks). Probably gist for a mill elsewhere, I may have slipped off the reservation a bit here.
the baggage is a non-thing to me,
he is not running for public office, or even an elected position within the company, the signatures from a special interest group saying they don't want him to lead the gov't agency covering there interest means nothing to me. the current nominee for Surgeon General has not thousands, but likely millions of signatures blocking his appointment as well, but were he to withdraw I doubt those signatures constitute baggage
I can't imagine that any of the target companies that Wave hopes to do business with could give a flying monkey about the interaction between Patton and a Lieutenant in a war hospital in Afghanistan, BICBW.
Similarly, in a company the size of Wave (a mere 150), people will form opinions about Patton based on reality rather than baggage in comparatively short order, its one thing to hold onto a news clipping about somebody at a company of 50,000 - but 150?
Could you perhaps come up with some sort of scenario where said baggage has any impact on anything in this situation? It seems to me this is more-or-less a prime example of the type of position and circumstance where said baggage has absolutely zero impact or potential for it. But I'm listening, your circuitous construct skills are impressive, so how does the baggage impact something? Labor Union negotiations?
On examples I have no idea,
Given the leader is Solms, the broader question to which you refer was well in place long before Patton's hiring.
I have no good sense of what Patton's role will be with respect to "leading" and the degree with which he is to be a decider or an implementer.
I have no idea as to whether Solms felt Wave lacked a hard-nosed manager and he got Patton, or whether Solms thought that he himself tends to be a bit too hard-nosed, and picked somebody from his past to be the people person or any variety of other possibilities, but in any event I do not see Patton as the leader of Wave. If so, then I would definitely be concerned. "Chief of Staff" sounds implementer to me - not leader, decider, visionary etc. it would seem that if what you say is a problem, then the problem started back in Nov of 2013. But that is just how I see it.
I have some familiarity with situations where the creative folks are in one bucket that is managed by another bucket (lead by e.g. full bird Col) and there being no evidence of the flight of imagination to which you refer.
It would seem to me that the hiring of Patton is one of experience/familiarity, Solms drawing on someone he knows. It may be the taxidermist on a space station as you refer, or it could be an accountant switching from doing accounting for a hardware store to doing accounting for Victoria Secrets (yea I know, they are both retail), my point is I have no idea if the specific role "Chief of Staff" is in this case fungible requiring only a broadly applicable managerial skill set. Obviously Solms thinks it is, and he could easily be wrong or right IMO.
"Journalists are held in wide disdain" .... and so too, apparently, are Generals on the matter of whether they can be effective managers at public tech companies.