Herb,
Please don't misunderstand my post...I was solely speaking about ECC's applicabilty to the VPN marketplace, not the marketplace in general. If a customer is building a brand new security app for handheld, and they're developing both the client and server portion, there's no reason NOT to use the more efficient ECC. (Assuming it's not cost prohibitive.)
The problem with VPNs is that the client software must interface with a VPN gateway. This gateway can be made by Cisco, SonicWALL, Nortel, Watchguard, Netscreen, etc...
All those companies use IPsec VPN technology and "should" be interoperable with other IPsec products like Certicom's Movian VPN client. BUT, they also must support the ECC algorithm in order for ECC to be used by the client. If I've followed the press releases aptly, to date, ECC is only available in the Cisco 3000 VPN, and soon it will be available in the Nortel Contitivity product line. But there are a lot of other products out there and in place, and I would imagine companies would be reluctant to replace, upgrade or add different gateways to an existing VPN just to support handhelds unless they absolutely HAD to. In the case of VPN support with Palms, they probably would, but PocketPCs...I don't think so. The last time I looked at the MovianVPN spec sheets, they proudly gave the performance stats of an ECC VPN session establishment versus a non-ECC establishment on a Palm. And the performance difference was significant. They said nothing about the PocketPC though.
But again, keep in mind Certicom has the only IPsec client for PocketPCs too right now. The market is theirs at the moment regardless which algorithms or platforms are chosen. Only time will tell though, how big that market really is with such slow wireless networks providing the connectivity. |
