Zen, that is how Wave has described their business on numerous occassions. Here are some things they have described that they do.
One of the real tenets of trusted computing is the ability for an individual user to control how they project their image or identity to the network. So it's something that's very much in the hands and the control of the end user in establishing that capability. And so we demonstrated the server that tests the viability of the TCPA chip and says "yes, this is a real TCPA chip," or now TCG chip, and then also delivers the authenticated credentials to that device. And we think that that process which is known inside the industry as attestation, is something that is something that is going to actually be very important to the industry at large. And today, we're the only company that's built a server that's capable of achieving that.
The second aspect of our business model is really built around a services model. And those services are the services to provide the tools to manage the lifecycle of a trusted computing platform. And these services are things like: How do I get a credential? How do I move that platform from one machine to another? How do I back up a platform? So some simple examples are, I go out and get a new trusted computer and I want to move my life from one machine to another, how do I effectively transition all of the keys and relationships and business applications that I have on one machine and move them to a second machine? And these really are the services that Wave is focused on.
Right, so it's going to be imperative for someone who takes ownership of a TPM, we believe to establish what they call in the specification a maintenance relationship, which says that ultimately I can go to a vendor and they can be my backup and recovery service provider. And ultimately, I'd like to make just one more point on this, as an enterprise product we should be able to sell a piece of technology to the enterprise. So a company like GE with 50,000 desktops is their own support organization. Because this is really about moving around the core keys on these platforms and they would want to control that internally themselves.
We think there is definite demand for the type of product we're providing, and we believe the demand will ultimately develop for the services model. Because at the end of the day we think you're going to want to be able to call an 800 number if you lose your laptop and help get your keys recovered. And, you need somebody to call. You don't want to call a hundred different service providers. You want to be able to talk to your IT department, if you're a large organization, or you want to be able to call the service provider if you're a small organization and you've outsourced that capability.
So, I think a good way to think of this is in two ways. There are two types of services. An application service: So let's take an example, a firewall vendor wants to put certificates on a TPM. And in that case they just want to use other tools to do that. They don't want to have to worry about how do I manage those, how do I back them up, how do I recover them. They just want to use the trusted computing infrastructure and not have to think about all those details of trusted computing. In that case, that's hugely beneficial to Wave, because we want to do all that heavy lifting work to actually make the trusted computing platform work, and easy to manage for an enterprise for their business users, and let the application vendors tie into that. That's very cool.
I think, the place that we have not yet seen any significant competition is in the context of, are there other companies trying to build the same thing that Wave's building. Which is the infrastructure to manage and help deploy and make it easy for a business to adopt trusted computing and use it broadly, within the solutions that they offer. And there, I think, that ultimately there is room for a number of vendors. I think we are clearly first in the market. We're the only ones that I know of that have demonstrated the service today. And we enjoy being first in the marketplace on that. We are, I think, very well prepared for competition in that space. We have tremendous technology and investment in building that. And we have the years that we spent in building our EMBASSY infrastructure that we've been applying to managing these kind of services. It gives us a pretty good understanding of how we think we can execute in this space.
And we’re beginning to see from the volume of TPM's that been shipped into the market and the volume of trusted computers that are already in the market, the customers who have acquired a significant number are beginning to ask the question. “How do I backup all the keys that are in my enterprise? How do I manage these trusted computers?” And we're working both with our customers, the large OEM vendors, Intel, Microsoft, and others who have influence in this market, as well as ultimately now the end customer, to try and satisfy the need of “How do I manage this installed base of potentially millions of PCs? But inside my enterprise, it's ultimately thousands of PCs.”
So in order to accomplish that, Wave has leveraged the technology that we built over time. And, many of the aspects of key management, and backup and recovery, are tools that we built in connection with Wave’s end-to-end EMBASSY security solution, that was built on our own hardware. And we've been able to modify those basic principles and those implementations to support the now industry standard of trusted computing. And so we're very quick to market with a solution. And we think we have pretty clear vision on how to implement it. And we’re beginning to get really good customer feedback on how to take the next step. So we're hearing the market ask for what we're building. And we’re beginning to satisfy that need in the marketplace.
Wave today on the services side provides an enterprise or a large service provider with the servers that they can use to initialize a customer and manage the keys on that customer’s platform. So really simple things like backup and recovery. So if I use my keys to have access to 500 different places and I lose my laptop or I want a buy a new laptop, I want to move my whole life in one-button, from one machine to another. Just like today, I walk into it Verizon store, and I take in my slightly crushed phone, and I say, “Give me a new phone." And 20 minutes later, I walk out of the Verizon store with a new phone, but the same phone number and the same voicemail account. It's really cool. And you want that same type of capability with your PC. You want to move all of your relationships, not one at a time, but en masse, assuming you're allowed to by the service provider, securely from one machine to another. Or to be able to buy a new machine, back it up, or to migrate, or move keys from one machine to another.
Wave as a company is building software to do today some very simple applications like file folder encryption and document signing, etc. which actually I think many of those will ultimately become functions and features within the operating system. The core of our business is around creating the tools to do management of the platform: how do I back it up; how do I recover the keys; how do I ensure that it’s maintainable in an enterprise. So we like to believe that one of our goals is that when you lose your laptop, you can go somewhere, kill the previous one, and two hours later walk out of Fry’s with another one that’s been reconstructed with all the same service relationships. Right? That’s how our cell phones work. That’s how our set-top boxes work. Why can’t our PCs work that way? And so we strive to make it really easy to use. And I think this morning Phil made some really good analogies.
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