Replies to post #239432 on Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[Bluefang]

Alea: I think what you said is true. Does it matter how sterling Wave's technology is, if buyers shun it?

Many have touted the advantage of Wave's 'superior' technology, but Wave has failed repeatedly the only real test--in the marketplace.

No doubt Solms & Co. are working 24/7 to fix that, but given a late start, insufficient finances and a horrible company reputation--I wonder if he and his new team can pull off a worst to first finish--or even drag Wave to profitability anytime soon--let alone in the time frame the new CEO has set for himself. Thus far, it does not look promising, IMO.

In fact, I'd bet against it, precisely because of the big obstacles lined up against Wave.

The biggest obstacle may be the lynch-pin of Wave's basic strategy--using the TPM to harden defenses against the wholesale attacks going on now. TPM usage may be going up, may be static or even declining. It's hard to say, because the usage is not yet at a measurable level. Of all the obstacles Wave is facing, this may be the biggest.

The best technology does not always win, although the worst technology almost never wins. Where does Wave sit on that spectrum? A: We don't know. We do know Wave, despite efforts, has never been able to sell its product in a sustainable way.

These are the reasons I am so pessimistic about Wave's chances at a future better than the past 26 years. The short run looks horrible, the longer run not much better and complicating the long run's issues, is the lack of financial stability at Wave.

All of the wild squandering of resources under the past CEO has endangered Wave's future, IMO, to the point it will take a long-shot miracle to reverse things and an even longer-shot miracle to bring those long and faithful shareholders back to profitability.

Blue

[RootOfTrust]

the new ceo hopefully continues to focus his attention far more heavily on feedback from the demand side.

He's targeting the incumbent enterprise authentication solutions, primarily OTP hardware devices and their software versions. These solutions are widely deployed in large commercial enterprises. As he's described, you establish dialogue with the customer, listen, identify the pain and offer a solution to both eliminate the problem and be more cost-effective. In reality the sales people go into the customer knowing "the pain" is in their deployed authentication solution and that the Wave solution offers a superior alternative, but still they "listen" and want to "tailor their better alternative to the customer's needs" vs. trying to evangelize some huge TCG-based paradigmatic shift. Imo the "listening' part is good customer relations where in reality the Wave sales guy already knows he's selling a better solution, it's a question of doing the selling the correct way, something the SKS-led Wave could never put together. Of course it would have helped also to do enough listening to customers in the design and concept stages in order to first develop an off-the-shelf TPM product that actually delivered what the average enterprise IT department (both SMB and large customers) needed to replace what they were already doing for authentication. Obviously SKS failed to make the tough choices to populate the company with the right people to accomplish that since he alone was unable to do it.

My own sense based on news of the first gov't customer and the dozens of pilots is that there is interest/growing demand to replace incumbent authentication solutions with a next-generation better approach to security ie. move software to a hardware-secured root of trust. Frankly, it appears VSC 2.0 is beginning to sell.