Tag: About

One thing you can say about AppDirect, the company that powers a number of the biggest application marketplaces on the Web: Its timing is pretty impeccable.

AppDirect smartly (or luckily, depending on your perspective of the company’s prescience) raised a truckload of cash over the past few years and, rather than blowing it all on frivolous things, has seemed to follow a careful strategy. That strategy sees it grow strongly, but appropriately, both through expansion of its own footprint and through acquisitions.

A few weeks ago while in Europe I managed to get myself invited to sit in on an AppDirect customer day in which some big European customers spent time talking with the company, but more importantly each other, about the issues in standing up and managing customer-facing application marketplace. While the stuff I heard was in-confidence, and I probably shouldn’t divulge which companies were present, suffice it to say that AppDirect seems to be asking all the right questions, and listening intently to what its customers ask for.

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It’s a heartache, nothing but a heartache. Hits you when it’s too late, hits you when you’re down. It’s a fools’ game, nothing but a fool’s game. Standing in the cold rain, feeling like a clown.

When singer Bonnie Tyler recorded in her distinctive raspy voice “It’s A Heartache” in 1978, you’d think she was an oracle of sorts, predicting the rocky road that encryption would have to travel.

Just a year earlier in 1977 the Encryption Standard (DES) became the federal standard for block symmetric encryption (FIPS 46). But, oh, what a disappointment encryption DES would become. In less than 20 years since its inception, DES would be declared DOA (dead on arrival), impenetrable NOT.

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