As a specialized software company that focuses on data encryption and security with strengths in key management and overall encryption management, it’s extremely important to maintain strong relationships with OEMs.

With hardware constantly evolving at a breakneck pace and the pressures it puts on software to keep up, being able to work with the OEMs as they bring products to market is critical. Whether it’s a new laptop or desktop or a new drive (SSD, SED or other) coming to market, we need to test it to ensure compatibility with our software.

Never has this been more true than today, with the introduction of Windows 8 (and UEFI) and the onset of more regular adoption of SEDs, our development and testing teams are constantly under pressure.

Thankfully, we’ve have good working relationships with companies like Lenovo for the past 3 or more years and most recently Hewlett-Packard as we find our data encryption engine embedded on HP commercial notebooks and desktops. Much of our discussion these days with these partners revolves around how to best support Windows 8 and how to best leverage UEFI as it was meant to be leveraged. Ensuring compatibility with new hardware coming to market and running Windows 8 is critical and this includes Intel-based Windows 8 Pro tablets.

While overall demand for Windows 8 remains somewhat stagnant, we are seeing increased demand for Windows 8 tablet support and we’re delivering. In the coming weeks we’ll be offering enhancements to our existing software that increase and improve our support for Windows 8-based devices as well as a host of other features and updates. But I’ll save that for a later date. Regardless, these enhancements and updates wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the relationships we have with the manufacturers and our ability to collaborate on solutions to address customer needs.

In addition to this, we also work closes with drive manufacturers, as evidenced by our recent Ponemon study on SEDs. This is yet another critical area of focus as more manufacturers begin to support SEDs as a default configuration option. We’re one of the very few software vendors that have a really strong, deep understanding of the TCG Opal specification and how to best implement it. The way we’re able to managed Opal SEDs via SecureDoc is an industry-leading feature we offer and these manufacturers recognize our expertise in this area and work with us to ensure the way they’ve implemented the Opal specification on their drives is done properly.

While these are just a couple of examples, it clearly demonstrates the value of working with OEM partners. The end goal for all of us is flawless integration that leads to increased customer satisfaction with both hardware products and our software.