Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[rwk]

vickers2 / UBS

I once worked at UBS. It is uber anal about secrecy and security. As part of their "clean desk" policy, my desk top had to be bare and all the drawers locked on a nightly basis. Also, I had to sign-off and power down my PC evey night.

One year, the powers in Zurich sent out some grey suited efficiency experts. Their focus was on improving work processes and efficiencies. I pointed out to them that it took me about 15 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night to power up and down my pc and my various applications each with individual 12 alpha-numeric character passwords. I suggested to them that if all 40,000 UBS employess did the same, the annual cost to the firm was in the order of $250,000,000. I suggested they develop a more efficient manner of accomplishing this routine task.

Now, imagine that a TPM applet could do this. At $30 a year per employee, the payabck period would be about 2 days and the net savings in the order of $249,000,000. Also security would improve as the passwords would no longer be stickied to the keyboard!

The experts nodded their heads and went away, never to be seen again.