We are a creative and inventive species! As I look back over the last year of this decade, it amazes me how many new technologies and services have been introduced despite the challenging economic times. We’ve seen new smart phones, tablets, book readers (galore), cloud computing services, web services, and more. Many of these wondrous technologies have the amazing ability to entertain as well as educate. What a divine gift we’ve received in this ability to create new ideas and new tools!
These innovations inspire us to help PTSS customers protect their data carried on these new technologies. This year we’ve brought forward new encryption, key management, tokenization, and systems management products. These include new PGP encryption offerings on the IBM System i and IBM System z platforms, a new key management solution for all platforms, a data tokenization product to complement encryption, and a wide variety of enhancements and features in our existing products. It has been an exciting year for us as a company.
Of course, to keep up with these innovations we make a large investment in research and development. The PTSS development team is a much larger percentage of our company than you would find at the typical software company. I believe that this is a necessary fact of life for a data security products company. To keep our customers safe, we have to keep up with a constant stream of technological innovations, while always working to stay a step ahead of the cyber-criminals trying to break into all this shiny new technology.
I’m especially grateful for the uptake of our security technologies in the ISV and embedded systems market. Our products are increasingly being incorporated into third-party solutions where they quietly help customers protect sensitive information. I’m proud of our relationship with Quantum, the leading provider of managed tape backup solutions; as well as partnership with companies like PGP Corp. You will be hearing more about our partner successes in the coming months.
A large part of my job is to try to look into the future and anticipate the coming needs in data security. Some time ago we saw the emergence of NIST standards as a part of compliance regulations. We did the hard work early on, and now have our encryption solutions NIST certified. We are currently in FIPS-140 certification for our new key management solution, and I am confident that we will complete this process in 2010. I continue to believe strongly that NIST certification will be important to our customers in the future. I believe that our current and future customers will benefit from this effort.
I hope you all have a good holiday and I wish you a happy new year!
Patrick
When most people hear the name Patrick Townsend Security Solutions, they think of company founder and CTO Patrick Townsend. But while Patrick remains a driving force behind the company, we also have a rich pool of talented people who have made significant contributions to our success. One such person who has been with us since our earliest days is Lead Developer Paul Ohmart. Paul has worked closely with Patrick for nearly half of his 30 years in programming, and has had a hand in developing many of the products on our roster.
“Paul’s fingerprints are on many of our products.” Patrick agreed, “He’s been a major collaborator in overall product and feature development, and his contributions have been crucial to the success of those products.”
When PTSS first recognized the need for certified AES encryption specifically for the IBM mid-range and mainframe computers, Paul combined his expertise and thirst for knowledge to soak up everything he could find on encryption technologies. The resulting Alliance AES encryption and key management product lines have become cornerstones of the company.
More recently, Paul focused his talents on developing the key management technology Quantum, Corp now licenses for use in their Scalar Key Manager. Beginning in August of this year, all Quantum tape drives sold with encryption and key management capabilities contain the key management solution developed by Paul and his team. This same team is now putting the finishing touches on PTSS’ own Alliance Key Manager product. That technology is currently being NIST-certified, and will be released in early 2010.
Paul is not always chained to his computer keyboard however. He also takes guitar lessons, is learning to sail on the Puget Sound, and nurses a life-long addiction to the Japanese board game GO (igo).
When asked to sum up his work at PTSS, Paul said, “I enjoy the opportunity to exercise my creativity at PTSS. The Alliance Key Manager project in particular has provided the opportunity to bring together many of the experiences of my career while giving me a chance to delve deeper into the fascinating world of encryption.”