an abridged RSA report
abridged from acctav
I attended RSA today- just the expo- to randomly walk around and soak. Here's some rather unenlightening stuff I learned, most of it a bit touchy feely. I spent some time with a few Wave guys and I am only going to comment on general information they gave me and my impressions of it.
* The Wave booths were staffed with energetic, knowledgeable real employees. Not just eye candy contractors that you often find at many shows. Through the day I spoke with three Wave employees who seemed equally enthusiastic about Wave's future. The first guy I talked to referred me to me a demo of a virtualized sim card using a TPM. The interesting thing about this was that it ran on Win7. He noted that this was a capability that would be in Win8 but I think the value was that they had it running on legacy systems (Win7). A general theme that seemed to come across was interoperability across platforms and the need for security across even non-compute platforms.
* There was a lot of enthusiasm about Win8. I got the impression that security has a big focus and this is the inflection point that will cause all those TPMs will get turned on. But going back to my previous point, not everyone will convert all at once nor will everyone convert all their systems. So a management solution will be required that can work across platform/OS etc. I didn't directly inquire about the relationship that Wave may or may not have with Microsoft but I'm quite confident they have been working close. Whether there will be a shout out to Wave in a forthcoming MSFT release remains to be seen. My personal feel is that this will not happen or if it does it will be one of acknowledgement of Wave's support and offerings. I didn't get the impression that it would be anything like "Wave's IP is incorporated into Win8 and will get a royalty blah blah". Regardless, what was abundantly clear was that Wave views Microsoft and Win8 as an enabler, not as an adversary. Similarly, my impression was that MSFT likely values what Wave does because it supports their initiative for greater security with Win8 and older platforms.
* The general feeling I got was that things were looking up in terms of the business. Gone were the days of selling stock to make payroll (despite what is spouted here daily). I was told that they were cash flow positive but I can't say if this was just a passing comment or one with any substance behind it. My impression, however, was that sufficient cash was coming in to make prudent and strategic spending decisions as opportunities arose. I didn't pry at all on business specifics or whether they had landed any big contracts because I wouldn't think that they would be a liberty to divulge that information. But it was volunteered that they had been having a lot of success in the medical sector but not so much in the financial sector. The reason for the latter was less about competition and more about tight purses. A view of competition was given to me as follows: they really don't have much competition in what they do- rather it's just getting customers to (a) have awareness about hardware security (TPMs, SEDs) and (b) to allocate their limited IT funds on Wave's management software vs. other opportunities. I was also told that much of corporate IT still doesn't understand the power and value of TPMs and SEDs.
* I spoke to a person at Dell who had worked with Wave in the past. She commented that while Dell has their own software for many things, the obvious choice for SED management was Wave. I'm paraphrasing a bit but I was somewhat impressed that she acknowledged their SED management tools.
* I saw the Samsung proximity demo. It's still just a demo but it was being "co-hosted" by a trusted logic guy. The Wave play here is the centralized management of PC/SED/tablet credentials. I believe what they were showing is that the wave cloud service was attesting to the credentials of all devices to enable interoperability. In other words, when the tablet is brought in close proximity (bluetooth in the demo) the Wave service would attest that the tablet was valid/trusted and then provide access to the drive connected to the laptop. Basically like a wireless token. Another tidbit about this was that Samsung seems to be leading the way with tablet security via the mobile trusted module. I believe this is essentially a firmware+trustzone implementation that mimics what exists in a TPM.
* In a rather unrelated discussion, I talked to some random NSA guy. Most of what he said went over my head unfortunately. My main question was about government adoption of trusted computing. The guy didn't have a good answer but he did seem to be in the "initiative" business so to speak. He kept talking about IA adoption across government as a best known method. I was a bit surprised that the government was pushing the Intel Architecture so hard and I finally got him to explain that IA was identity assurance or something like that (I may even have that wrong). But what was interesting about his rant was that it ooozed centralized management. It was all about knowing who and what was out connected and having control over it (ie centralized management).
Bottom line, while continue to be deeply disappointed in Wave's stock performance, I can in fact separate that from the underlying company. It makes it easier knowing that revenues continue to grow and that the company seems to have the option to informed decisions about how to spend their money based on incoming revenue. While I have no inside insight into this, the general tone of the discussion I had made me confident that this quarter will be another of increasing revenue. Despite ...{edit} . .. the company seems to be very well positioned in the right place at the right time. Their revenue is growing and they are compounding this with investments in the future. I can wait for the market to take notice.
AI
