Re: Impractical Sales Tactics by Entrust.. Any recommendations?

From: Brian E (brian_anon@hotmail.com)
Date: 12/30/01 

From: brian_anon@hotmail.com (Brian E)
Date: 30 Dec 2001 05:59:42 -0800

Thank you for the feedback. My blood is stil boiling over this.

The only piece of information I left out was my first contact with
this same sales rep about 1.5 months earlier.

Our first contact was my preliminary research, I knew the demand for
this was coming. I was actually expected to rollout a desktop (disk
and file) encryption client as soon as possible. The sales rep
refused to provide some technical documentation so I could understand
how the solutions work. He insisted on scheduling a demo a week later
which I missed. The sales rep must've taken my absence very
personally. I dropped the idea of using Entrust as he insisted he
couldn't provide a solution and that we "walk-away" from it.

At the time, I chose to rollout PGP Corproate Desktop even though I
prefered to use Entrust's Desktop Manager (Entelligence). We are a
major financial service provider. Many of our clients have already
standardized on Entrust products. PGP Corproate desktop isn't a
wasted effort. It will support CA's from many vendors, including
Entrust. PGP Corporate Desktop has only been deployed in a limited
pilot. Entelligence is still my longterm preference.

I am not exaggerating this story. I just couldn't believe Entrust can
afford to behave this way.

By the way, I am the Communications Security Officer for our
organization. I manage information security for about $30 billion of
client assets. I even hinted that one of our clients was very
interested in us issuing digital certificates to their customers (this
would account for about 310,000 digitial certificates each year),
however I said it was unlikely our client would follow through with
this requirement once they fully understood key management issues.
Still, the opportunity is there for the right solution.

I am now contacting providers for a hosted and managed Entrust CA
service and have requested proposals from competing CA vendors. I
also intend on forwarding these experiences to the president of
Entrust. Most of my communication with Entrust occured through email,
so I will also forward the email thread.

Regards,
Brian