WC, the point this thread was trying to make was that the five (5) million seat opportunity was .gov/.mil and not private enterprise.
Certainly SKS comments seem to confirm that.
With respect to SKS comparison of the challenge of supporting a scale of five (5) million machines to running a telco. On this point I believe SKS is under estimating the challenge.
Sure, commissioning a PC with TPM isn't much different than assigning a telephone number and enabling a tethered handset. But that's where the similarity ends. Once a telephone is commissioned, you don't have to many requests to change features or migrate to new equipment. Also, telcos aren't subject to audit requirements ( on a per phone basis ) like PCs are.
I think SKS would have been better served with an analogy to a wireless carrier.
But that's not my biggest concern, my biggest concern is that SKS talks as if managing even a small telco is a trivial task. That's insane. There's a big difference between managing a s/w development house of a hundred programmers and running a company with a customer support operation the size of a "small telco". (not to say that managing the software development side isn't a challenge, just that it's a very different challenge than running a SaaS service)
My takeaway from this a revelation is that the government is considering implementing this technology not as an " in house" managed service but, And this is important, as a SaaS service!
And that's just for one (albeit large government) contract!
The very nature of the company is about to change radically!
As with all changes of this magnitude there are challenges and great opportunities to such a change,
For instance the revenue stream becomes much more stable because it becomes service based as opposed to product sales based.
However, I'm concerned about the cavalier attitude SKS seems to have adopted with respect to the difficulty of executing such a radical change in the way the firm will be structured when the majority of revenues are generated by a service oriented SaaS operation.
Again, the above is just this one mans humble opinion.
AI
