Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[cliffdweller]

Ramsey2 - just to clarify, by big brother I'm referring to an SI partner with lots of business collateral with the customer. A simple reason for this is that the services costs for large projects greatly outweigh the hardware and software costs, usually by a factor in the range of 3:1, but sometimes by as much as 10:1.

I do agree that a lead from a Dell rep can or often does place Wave in, or ultimately leads to, an audience with senior management, and in modest scenarios, that can carry the day.

Mega deployments are a different case. In my experience, the sales cycle can easily exceed a year, and testing and certification usually follows being either short listed or selected ... what proceeds this is basically a parade of demonstrations, even if they are tailored to a customer's specification.

I recall very clearly my CIO coming in to a meeting / demo with an emergent British product company that despite having had no prior sales in North America had won the selection process for application software at the core of a 3-year $100M program. The CIO was courteous to the British company's reps, who he was meeting for the first time. But he spoke business only with the integrator, literally asking if they were prepared to bet their reputation and future business opportunities on the efficacy of the application software. They replied yes, which was the answer he required, and he was satisfied.

To be clear, the CIO did not address the business question to the application vendor, nor even to me, the program prime, but to the SI.

Two years later, after unacceptable delays and cost over-runs, the SI was gone from the company, but the application software is still in and humming.

Deploying security solutions may be less complex and cost-intensive than was the case with that particular project - apples and oranges - but for a 350,000 seat program, scope more than makes up for the lack of complexity, and yes, it better be right. Much better to outsource the potential rolling of heads.

Large enterprises are famously risk-averse, and with good reason in the case of IT. Here's a current reminder, and a couple of famous cases in point from Wikipedia:

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25096128-5013040,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(software_development)

"Among the most infamous death march projects are the Denver Airport baggage handling system and WARSIM, a U.S. Army wargame. The latter project was originally called WARSIM 2000 at its inception in the early 1990s. A decade after its original scheduled delivery date, WARSIM has yet to support a single Army training exercise, but is still being funded, largely to vindicate those who conceived of the system and defended it over the lifetime of its development."

cliff