So what ever happened with Anvil?
I have had a few people email me asking what ever happened with this product. So I thought a post might make sense.
Getting working technology in place took no time at all. Getting it to a marketable solution.... that was an entirely different thing. Since my past post in October here is what has happened:
- We had to write the Installation Guide
- We had to build the production ISO
- We did a round of beta testing with trusted sites
- We did another round of testing to more open public sites
- We did another round of testing with some Microsoft MVPs
- We rewrote the docs after getting results from the test sites
- We had to fix some implementation problems relating to IAS + ISA
- We had to build a Token Inventory Control System
- We had to build a Token Fullfilment and Shipping System
- We had to get authorization from the Department of Homeland Security to ship to the US. Long story.... paperwork nightmare which in the end... we DIDN'T have to do.
- We had to build an online store, integrate it with our CRM, Inventory Control System and Token Fullfilment System
- We had to work with Cryptocard to handle token fullfillment
- We went to launch, and realized we were now in the holiday season. Delayed launch until the New Year.
- We had to launch the product
- We had to take our first order
That took months to do. But as of January, we were shipping our strong authentication solution around the world. A few user groups have had demos and I hear people are even talking about it down under at a few Microsoft user groups in Australia [Hi Wayne! :) ]
It's taken quite a bit of time to make a "product" a sellable "solution". Almost half a year in fact. Well, if you discount the holiday season, the DHS delay and the delay in receiving our first shipment of tokens it was really closer to four months. Not too bad. But longer than many people would have expected.
So whats next?
- We are releasing a bunch of new agents later this spring to round our our offerings
- We will be announcing some interesting partnerships in the coming months to deliver our solution in interesting ways
- Version 2 will come out with a whole bunch of updates, including Active Directory integration
- The sales team is being expanded to help grow our sales
- I'm going to be going on a tour in May to promote the product. Although not in stone, sounds like I am going to New York, Chicago, San Fransico, Los Angeles and New Orlean.
- Lots of other stuff I can't talk about right now.
Busy, busy, busy.
If you are a developer and like what you see, I'm pleased. But I would be MORE pleased if you thought about integrating two-factor authentication into your own applications. How? I have an easy solution. Why not partner with us and use our web services interface to immediately add strong authentication to your product? Not into web services? No problem... we have a traditional COM interface as well that you can use. It literally only takes 5 lines of code to integrate strong authentication to your application when using ours. And we have already built the inventory and fullfilment systems to handle those bits for you. What could be simpler?
Interested? Then send an email to dana@scorpionsoft.com and start a conversation to explore the opportunity!