Drive-By: RedCannon - Your Life on a USB Drive? - Not Yet

As part of my daily analyst ritual, I am always scanning the wires, looking for interesting stuff and trying to get a feel for the impact to the user of what I find. Yesteday I came across a press release from a company called RedCannon Security, and their KeyPoint access control system. 

Basically, if you believe the marketing stuff (since I haven't tried it - I'll put that disclaimer on) KeyPoint gives you the ability to plug a USB thumb drive into any device and get your local desktop (through Citrix) with access to whatever corporate files you'd need to get to. You could then enforce whatever usage policies are in use on your internal networks. All of the cookies and cache is actually written to the USB drive, so there is no record or information left on the device.

Seems pretty cool, no?

The thing I struggle with is why do I need this? Sure, if I have a bunch of managers roaming around a shop floor and they need to quickly plug into a kiosk and get information, this could be useful. But if I'm a mobile professional, is this going to allow me to stop carrying around that friggin' laptop. My chiropractor wouldn't be happy with that, but I probably would.

I don't think this gets me there. I can do a bulk of my email when I'm travelling on my blackberry. Attachments are challenging and it's a pain to write anything more than a paragraph or two, but it's possible. But how long do I want to sit in a business center or Internet cafe on someone else's machine to catch up on stuff? I'm pretty sure those Internet access devices that plug into a hotel TV don't have a USB port or a Windows OS, so that won't work. I also need to work on a plane, so this doesn't really help me there either. 

So in concept, I like this idea. If folks in your company always have access to some type of desktop, this could be an interesting solution to make sure your corporate policies are enforced regardless of where your users connect from. But I'm having a hard time understanding the use cases where this is anything but a niche. Yet another example of technology looking for a problem to solve.

To be fair, I have not spoken to RedCannon, so maybe they can explain more legitimate use cases to me. So why am I going to hit submit anyway? Because the rest of you out there don't have either the time or desire to call up a company and figure out what they do. They need to be able to tell you quickly and succinctly. I hate it when I'm talking to a vendor and it takes them 45 mintues to tell me what they do. If it takes more than 5 minutes for me to understand your value proposition and how you do things (not necessarily the specifics, but the high level), then your messaging and positioning suck and you need to go back to the drawing board.

From time to time, I'll pick apart the public face of some company BEFORE I TALK TO THEM because that's what users do. The vendor may not like it, but too bad. Got to love the First Amendment. If they can't make their value proposition and use cases very clear from their external presence and collateral they aren't going to be around for too long anyway. I'm going to call these pieces "Drive-By."

I do promise to be fair, so if the vendor does want to clarify things for me, I'm happy to publish a follow-up telling everyone what I've learned. But be cautioned that this cuts both ways. If the story once I hear it is no better (or even worse), then I'm going to publish that as well.