Expanded version of previous post, put on WaveDD to glo:
"Sounds like you may be getting a little lost amongst the weeds when the whole lawn is in front of you.
This is a market which is being developed by the entire industry. Along the way, various folks have tried to own it or key bits of it. Those efforts have been repelled, whether they be Cisco's attempt to control network access or Wave's to absorb the opportunity inside a proprietorial chip.
That's also what Palladium was all about, for instance. The market didn't buy into it. If I remember correctly, only two major corporations agreed to submit to Palladium. MS abandoned the effort. Like Cisco, they tried the same thing with network access and again backed down.
These things have taken time. It takes time to get a behemoth to change direction. TCG is an expression of the acceptance by many companies that the internet provides a common good rather than a private property interest. Of an acknowledgement that in a network architecture you need to provide open links rather than proprietorial bottlenecks. Of a sense that carving a closed kingdom out of valuable information is a thing that is unacceptable to everyone else in the supply chain. This is shared real estate.
And that's before you even begin to address the demand side.
The corollary of the failure of Palladium and all the other efforts at proprietorial control was that there is a cross-platform opportunity open for someone. A company with no axe to grind in the incumbent realms of cyberspace. A company which joins groups of people together.
They all need someone to provide the roundabout between the different trusted highways. Wave is trying to be that company. It wants to support the OSs of Android, Apple and MS. It wants to work with both Intel's trusted execution space and ARM's trustzone. It wants to interoperate with every type of TPM. It wants to support every type of hard drive (including solid state drives). It wants to operate on phones, Tablets and PCs, and then in televisions, cars and other devices. Hence the relationship with Samsung.
And then it is also working on the demand side. It is proving its value to companies like GM and BASF and PWC. Meanwhile the Department of Defense is defining its needs and we see the evolution of BiOS protection and Wave building a product to match that need. So just as the R&D side is building opportunities in fresh fields, so Wave's sales team is expanding into fresh pastures. Key industries. Manufacturing. Healthcare. Defence. Banking.
This is a planned but also a measured approach. Wave is building its market as fast as it can afford, developing its products based on feedback from clients and gradually getting itself ready for the broad market to appear. Watch the revenue curve. It is showing consistent growth. Watch the sales hiring. It is structured to deliver further revenue expansion. Watch the move into Europe. The US is not the only game in town. etc. It's all under our noses. But we're watching too closely to see it.
Who else can do what Wave is doing? My answer. No one.
What's in it for Cisco, Intel and MS?
First, continuation of their existing opportunities. And then, some really nice revenue-generating opportunities: eg Intel will probably carve a per transaction fee from its execution environment. Plus protection from a company nipping in and taking the opportunity for themselves.
So patience is a requirement for an investor. Yet the progress is evident on Wave's top line and the costs of R&D and sales personnel demonstrate that Wave is pursuing its strategy in a disciplined fashion. The longer they can withhold insight into how they are addressing the opportunity the better, as far as they are concerned. It isn't that the opportunity is not broadly known. But if they can help it, they don't want folks to know what their products look like until they are market tested and ready to roll. They don't want people to match their costs against their sales for particular products. They don't want people to know which companies are enrolled in regular purchases of Wave-enabled SEDs and ERAS etc. It suits them to do so. The cloud of unknowing has value to the company.
So I expect to continue a sugar-buzz diet of fudge, not meat. It isn't fun but it's what is on the menu!!"
It is up to us to figure a way to have more insight into what the company is up to than what they seem willing to share.
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