go-ks
As I read it, SKS believes Finread SCRs are DOA, or at least in any meaningful volume...that is why I now predict that Finread, or an approximation of it, will be implemented on the TPM platform.
It's unclear to me if LaGrande will be programmable or if it will be the TPM that will be programmable. I would like to see Wave Embassy IP enabling the programmability as I think it will further strengthen Wave's leadership role and will also provide some ongoing licensing revenue.
Robert Catrell, Private Investor: Thank you, Steven. Could you give us an update; you said that we wouldn’t see anything like American Express here in this country in the near future. How does FINREAD look in Europe?
SKS: Well, from one end of the spectrum they’ve got a lot of work still to go before they're going to deploy in any volume, because I don’t think there's an economic model for the specific FINREAD reader. On the other side of the spectrum, we have strong expressed customer interest from a couple of the banking groups. So I'm trying to balance that interest to understand are they just seeking more information or do they really have a plan to deploy. You know, I think it's going to be interesting to see. The statement that I've made to that industry a couple of times is that they haven't, they’re deploying a device that does trusted input, trusted display and a secure smartcard reader interface. All of those capabilities are going ultimately to be part of the Windows OS on NGSCB. And so the interesting question is, do they have enough traction to have an installed base of trusted smartcard readers in the market, or is there a really large role for building a trusted application that runs on the Windows operating system that runs in emulation of FINREAD, in a similar manner to how we run FINREAD today as an application on our EMBASSY reader. So time will tell on that. My guess is from having talked to banks in the US and in Europe, that if they have a choice between using technology that the consumer already owns or spending 20 bucks to give you a smartcard reader, they will opt for the technology that the consumer already owns as long as it does 90% of what they need. And so I think that it will be interesting to see. I think it's in their hands to go figure out. We've done everything we can to drive it forward. Hopefully it's clear to everybody with our announcement today that we would like to take the work we were talking about in building with, building a trusted PC in the European market, and certainly our interest is to bring that effort and energy to supporting the new TPM platform, and not a proprietary Wave platform supported in the market. And I think that everybody would agree that that's the thing to do.
Catrell: Any idea of how many of the NEC PCs went ahead with our software?
SKS: So, we shipped a bunch of them. I mean, it was measured in the, as far as I know there're none left in the warehouse. So it was a few thousand units. It gave us an opportunity to test the software stack against the EMBASSY chip that we ultimately supplied to Intel. Right? So, NEC became a test platform for telling us what features and functions were important to them for file and folder encryption, identity management, etc., but it was all built to the EMBASSY chip model not to a TPM model. And so the customer service questions, the models to support in the marketplace, the internationalization of that code, all the things that went around supporting that technology got done. And then what we had to do was make some changes to move it from being supported on an EMBASSY chip to being supported on a TPM chip, which we did last fall and into the springtime of this year. And that's been a great example for us. Right? But would we continue to try to press NEC to deploy an EMBASSY platform in the market? It makes no sense. Then I would be competing against Intel and Microsoft and all these companies. And that's not what we want to do. We want to take the services and software and the economic model we always said, and you can go back to almost every conference call I've ever done, I’ve always said that chips aren't where we expect to make money. Chips are the necessary evil. So now the industry has adopted a new platform model for hardware security, and we have been flexible enough to change our support from our own proprietary hardware to the now industry standard, we fully support. We’re fully behind. We’re driving from a standards perspective. We are trying to be the guy holding the flag in front of the charge with all of the troops behind. And, you know, it's cool job.
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