Enterprise Digital Rights Management

I work for a Venture Capital firm and I am looking to invest in this industry, I would appreciate your inputs on these concerns 1) What are the key success factors to succeed in this domain and How important is technology a differentiating factor 2) With established brands like Symantec and Adobe in the space, what do you think about prospects of a startup firm 3) How big is the untapped market opportunity and Who are the potential customers.

Anonymous

My advice to you is invest cautiously in this industry. As you know the trends in the IT industry is moving at an unbelievable fast pace. Organisations are beginning to allow their employees to bring in their smartphones and tablets into the workplace. Some have even gone further by allowing their employees to view corporate data on their personal devices. This along with corporate data in the cloud should begin to answer the question where your money should be going. Other than this, unless your investment has a big marketing machine behind it the risk of seeing a profitable return on your investment begins to wane.

All Enterprise DRM products have limiting features that give its customers a complete satisfaction. For example I am currently working on a project that is cloud based solution but only works with one web browser and not the others, this can always lead to frustration for the client, resulting in canning the whole idea altogether.

The market opportunity is still highly untapped especially in the Apple iPhone and iPad space, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry (currently in decline, but still big in many parts of the developing world) and other personal electronic devices. There is also the Cloud, in other words you develop solutions that will make access to confidential data stored in the cloud seamless, but the true secret to such a solution is making it seamless in terms of access to all mobile and desktop operating systems.

Regarding potential customers, I would say from a corporate perspective banks, pharmaceuticals, legal firms, publishing, oil and gas, and manufacturing are your main targets. On the whole anyone who needs to control how sensitive and confidential information is distributed. Symantec and Adobe are great products, but have very limiting capabilities and are not the market leaders in Enterprise DRM, but as I said previously there is scope for growth. I hope I have answered all your questions.

Persistently Protecting Your Computer Aided Designs

Enterprise Rights Management over the years has made great inroads into the protection of computer aided design files. 95% of CAD files represent intellectual property of businesses around the world, however the dark-side to CAD is that in electronic format can be emailed or transferred to another party without the knowledge of the owner of the content.

Today many designs are sent to countries like China, Indonesia and India for manufacturing with confidential disclosure contracts binding on the manufacturer, but what happens if a rogue employee gets hold of the designs and sells it on to other businesses? As an owner of intellectual property like computer aided designs you owe it to the survival of your business to make sure you can monitor where your IP is and be in control of it no matter where it may be located.