nicknamen, your points:
I have never heard Wave say or imply Seagate will bundle TDM only for free. Show me where you saw that. If you go over the CC you'll see it's mentioned three times that Wave is expecting TDM relationships with both their OEM partners (currently Dell and Gateway) AND Seagate. I am predicting a Seagate 8-K for TDM. It's become clear IMO that Wave is better off to make TDM available directly through the major PC OEMs, as distributing only via Saegate would tend to commoditize it, so I would agree with your point that Seagate does not want to lock in a long term TDM bundling cost on ALL of their drives as that could be an issue with competitors' pricing. However, what you may not have considered is that initially FDE drives will be a premium product, priced higher non-FDE drives, therefore the additional cost for the software is not a big issue since most of the additional premium will be in the hardware.
I don't know where you get your notion that Secude key management solutions for FDE drives are cheap. Frankly I don't know what Secude costs, but the Wave TDM part of the FDE drive package will be pretty darn IMO cheap at say $25. How can $25 for software be expensive, when most of the premium for the FDE drives will be in the cost of the drive? So, if the FDE drive is say $140 more than non-FDE including the Wave software, show me the comparison to Secude. So, if the customer wants to pay the premium for the Seagate FDE drive but not use it with their TPM and instead use the non-TPM Secude solution for managing their keys, what does the Secude software cost per seat? I don't know. The whole issue of Wave vs. Secude on Seagate FDE is really the issue of the enterprise implementing TPMs or not implementing them. The fact is, the Secude solution only makes sense if there are no TPMs in their network (pretty unlikely if they are buying new machines) or if they are not yet going to the additional expense of using their TPMs. So, I concede to your point that some will take the cheap way out and use Secude instead of implementing their TPMs and use TDM, but then at the same time they are paying a premium additional cost for the FDE drives. Frankly I think the Seagate strategy is mainly to see TDM distributed with the drives, and they will do the channels Wave's OEM partners don't. However I will concede there could be orders where the drives will go to users who plan on using Secude, in which case no TDM would be distributed.
As for your HP comments, I think you may be uderestimating the significance of the Wave interface going forward as more Dell customers implement their TPMs using Wave. Some of those customers may have HP also. And of course the government...if Wave wins enterprise-wide mandates, HP will have to look very closely at implementing Wave...may just be cleaner for HP to adopt the ESC interface.
AI
