Frist, thanks to you, Webby, going and others for your constructive, even generous, comments. This kind of discussion is very useful for all, IMO.
In terms of "free", this is from the excerpt you posted on 12/7, from a CC: "We are probably the main proponents of not giving this thing away for free. There is an incredible desire by the manufacturing side of the industry to drive costs out
at all cost, and I think that’s true in the long term
and I think Trusted Drives will become, long term,
very close to free".
In terms of cheap, I am not only referring to the price of software; in fact, often software cost is often nothing compared to the cost of manpower for implementation and maintainence. Headcount is usually the most difficult item to increase in the budget. The increased cost of a FDE drive is a one time budget issue which can go through pretty easily as management approvers understand they will hang the next time their company makes the news with the loss of data. Fear motivates them and will sell hardware for Seagate. Plus the advantage of hardware data encription is easy to understand.
There is a lot, maybe everything, I don't know about the Seclude versus ESC/ETMS solutions such as: what are the software costs; how does each work; what are the manpower requirement to install, maintain and support; and, if current in place technical staff can be used, what are the training costs.
Unfortunately, I just don't have the time to study all this. Although retired, three plus decades in sales and management in the computer industry leads me to suspect that a client software component has less of a total cost of implementation, maintainence and ownership than a gold standard solution we represent.
Wave management should have armed their sales force with a total cost benefit, ROI analysis for this very issue, like whaT the customer did for Papa Gino's.
On HP, the way management thinks is that their way will force customers to go with an all HP solution even though it won't. When it doesn't work they will fire a few salesman and managers until they accept the truth.
All for now.
AI
