dig, here are a few more details from the SHM to consider in regard to Wave's final competitor for that big fish...
* The competitor is an $8b IT security company. I don't know how many of those exist, but McAfee and Symantec come to mind.
* The competitor also happens to be the incumbent and is currently providing 100k copies of encryption s/w to the buyer. They're naturally putting up a fight to keep this business, but ironically they're doing this by "practically giving away" their SED management product, thereby commmoditizing that and possibly jeopardizing the pricing of their bread-and-butter FDE s/w products.
* The competition has been down to just Wave and the incumbent since late last year, and six months has been added to the process so a lab could be built to test the two offerings. This also allowed the incumbent more time to improve their offering, but from what I heard it still falls short of ERAS.
Here are some notes from correspondence (over 6 months ago) with Lark regarding the advantages of Wave's SED management solution over that offered by competitors:
Because it's factory installed, Wave's SED management solution has performance advantages for setup and reprovisioning. Factory installed code is much less complex than the stripped down legacy FDE code assembled by the software vendors for SEDs.
One other area which we believe is a differentiator is in the ‘integrity’ of the compliance data. In Wave’s solution, when an SED is managed by ERAS on a central basis, then all local access to the settings of the drive are turned off, even for someone with administrator level control. The reason we do that is to make sure that when the drive or laptop is lost that the log data kept in the server is accurate about the security settings on the drive when it was lost since the only evidence the enterprise will have is the log files to prove that the data was not only encrypted, but that the access controls were in place. I don’t know how other ISV’s handle that situation, but it is a key benefit of Wave’s solution, particularly since the main driving factor for enterprises to buy SEDs is to meet the compliance laws and get protection from the safe harbor provisions of those laws when the machines are lost or stolen.
Beyond the current advantages that would weigh in Wave's favor, not to mention integration of SEDs with TPMs, I believe enterprise buyers have got to be giving serious consideration to the other capabilities coming along Wave's SED roadmap, such as out-of-band management with vPro, self-healing hypervisors and TXT, to name a few.
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