Fast Typists help Solidcore!

I received some interesting comments about my previous post, one of which enquired about Solidcore's innovation. Its time I responded to that. Much like our biggest competitor, our roots are in security and despite a shift in strategy to focus on the compliance and control market space, our original product continues do extremely well. In fact, a good 40% of all ATMs in Germany will be using the Solidcore Embedded product by end of 2008 for Change Control. The same product has hockey-sticked in Japan where all new Printers, Point of Sale machines and ATMs are shipping with Solidcore. But, the icing on our cake was Bsquare's recent announcement that the they'll OEM our product to provide security for "embedded devices in the marketplace that are vulnerable to several types of change control risks, ranging from traditional threats like viruses and malware, to internal threats such as employee sabotage"

So, why is this product taking off in these markets? I talked to one of our customers from Japan and they gave a very interesting factor that led them to us. Apparently, in the fast paced Japanese markets, retail branches are made (or broken) based on how quickly they can service their customers during checkout. This has forced all the checkout clerks to learn to type extremely fast. Turns out, some branches/stores were performing much better than others and a detailed analysis by our friends helped them realize that the anti-virus software on the checkout systems would often slow down the programs. This slowdown, often imperceptible, was however, just enough to ignore some keystrokes of fast typists. This led to billing errors, which led to a longer service time, lost business and ultimately a thriving business for Solidcore. Clearly, we did not lose out any momentum in our first product, even though we chose to focus primarily on Enterprise Change Control.