Dateline – May 27 Austin
Zippy and I just got back from the North American OEM Roundtable in Chicago. What a wonderful town! Great theater, great music, world class comedy (Second City – spawned a lot of talent for SNL), restaurants, shopping, museums, sports, scenery (we took a dinner cruise on Lake Michigan – the Chicago skyline at night is spectacular). It’s affordable (much less expensive than either coast), and absolute nirvana for a dog – the meat packing capital of the universe. Lots of drooling. It’s the third most populated city in the U.S. after New York and LA, but really doesn’t feel crowded. The secret to Chicago? Everything you want from a big city – without all the hassle, the attitude, or the cost.
We met with the OEMs for two days and got great feedback on our plans for PSQL. Two topics that really piqued interest were: Digital License Enforcement and finding better ways to sell the security products – in this instance AuditMaster.
Digital License Enforcement: Trust But Verify (and use an electronic guard dog)
If you’ve been reading the Insights newsletter, you’ve been getting hints of a shift in the way we implement licensing with Pervasive PSQL. Starting with Pervasive PSQL v10 and for future releases, Pervasive will employ technology that will help ensure the validity of copies of Pervasive PSQL generally, and in particular enforce license terms of one active installation per license. Prior to digital license enforcement, we had very few controls to limit copying and relied on customers’ common sense and good business ethics to not violate the terms of the license. We trusted everyone to do the right thing. And, mostly, they did (and do). Now, we’ve got technology that restricts the use of a license key to a single server (enforcing the terms of the software license agreement).
Why is this interesting to OEM customers? They’re selling software too. If an end user is making illegal copies of the database, you can bet they’re making illegal copies of the OEM application. By providing stronger controls over the licensing of the database, Pervasive is effectively giving the OEM the same protection for their software – any unlicensed copy of the OEM application would be rendered useless because the database couldn’t be activated. So there’s no reason to copy the OEM application. The really neat feature for the customer – they don’t have to do one thing to their application to take advantage of the added protection. Typical Pervasive embedded database approach – great technology infrastructure without the hassle. If you’ve installed a trial of PSQL v10.10 or purchased online, you’re already using digital license enforcement. If you didn’t notice the difference, that’s just fine with us.
Zippy Learns to Embezzle
The other really fun thing we got to do this month was to learn how to commit fraud with a popular ERP application. We built an AuditMaster demo for a vendor’s tradeshow – the goal was to convince resellers they needed to add AuditMaster to their repertoire. Given the right amount of access and application knowledge, a crafty person can cover their tracks well enough to make discovering “accounting irregularities” a very difficult task. We were able to change the name and address of a vendor, write ourselves a check, and change everything back so that the check registry had no record of any money going our direction. A cautious thief could go on for years before getting discovered because the standard reporting wouldn’t show anything amiss. Brilliant! And scary. In April, an article from Techworld pointed out that “six out ten employees stole company data after leaving their jobs, while McAfee calculated that the total economic losses from insider security breaches reached $1 trillion last year”. That’s a lot of potential risk – especially in a struggling economy where layoffs are rampant.
The great thing about AuditMaster is its ability to track things below the application – logging changes at a database table level – so that what’s invisible to the application can be seen using AuditMaster and a reporting tool. While you wouldn’t see these changes in the check registry (we covered our tracks), the record of name, address, and check description changes showed up clear as day with AuditMaster and Crystal reports. The big benefit was that the vendor’s resellers completely “got” AuditMaster because it was presented in a context they understood – as part of an application they sell every day. And that’s the thing that resonated most with the OEM’s in Chicago – great functionality, end user’s will struggle to implement it, but…give it to us as infrastructure so we can build it into our application and deliver the audit features as just another report (end users don’t care how it gets the information, just that the report is there) – and we’ll have a hit. One more example of the value of good, embedded data management (in this case security) tools – all the benefits of the enterprise stuff without all the hassle (or the price).
Chicago, NYC and Databases
I love NYC. But it’s work – you’ve got to embrace the noise, the pace, the cost – and you’ve got to cop a bit of a attitude to get things done (or just get where you’re going). Chicago, on the other hand, you can just arrive and enjoy. No rush, no fuss. Easy. Pervasive – we’re the Chicago of database management companies.