"i suspect the dream has died, pretty much. they wouldn't have fired ss if things were running on rails."
alea, it's too early to be writing epitaphs for Wave. The way I see it the company would continue to run off the rails and the dream would indeed die if they hadn't dismissed SKS. I have a pretty good idea why SKS was sacked and when, and it hasn't been offered up on any of the message boards. Time will tell if I am right.
On the question of demand, we have three major enterprise wins as evidence of demand for Wave's SED solution, and we have one large win - PwC - to show there's been demand for a TPM/VSC solution to replace tokens for large companies using PKI. Wave has had a solution to address this need for two years, yet it took until this summer for several large companies to discover this for themselves, essentially dropping these opportunities into Wave's lap. What were the salespeople doing all of that time to capitalize on the PwC win?
I've written for several years that Wave has sorely needed a strong sales culture and competent sales leadership, at least in North America. There has been too little investment in providing the necessary resources to execute sales of the viable products they've had. The prevailing interest has rather been in developing yet another 'next best thing' for TC while neglecting to stay focused in the very areas where demand has been evident.
There have also been some cases where demand from large enterprises has led to actual closing opportunities, only to have the prospective customer back away at the last minute over concerns of financial stability. And there have been other cases where the CEO either oversold or talked his way out of a sale rather than staying focused on the specific solution requested by the customer.
I might add too that we had a CEO who was known to say he did not like the enterprise side of the business but kept his primary focus on the consumer and subscription services. Fine, but the CEO has to get us there first.
So as I see it, the CEO move was not about giving up on the dream but rather giving up on a brilliant dreamer who had way too much control and couldn't effectively execute.
AI
