End Of Story: Ensconce Profits Off End-of-Life Data

The Portsmouth, N.H. company, founded in 2002, markets a Digital Shredder system built around technology used by the U.S. military that destroys hard drive data beyond forensic recovery. With companies facing a new wave of government data compliance and security regulations, EDT is looking for solution providers that want to add end-of-life data solutions to their security and storage practices.

"With this tool, solution providers have the ability to make margins they haven't seen since the '80s," said EDT co-founder Dan Schneider. "From our military experience, we saw an opportunity in the enterprise world to come up with what we consider a failsafe solution for end-of-life data on all hard drives."

EDT's Digital Shredder offers a way to decommission hard drives that have reached end of life that the company says is more reliable than commercial software, degaussing machines and mechanical destruction. The Digital Shredder's Secure Erase technology utilizes internal disk drive code to perform low frequency recording. It can erase up to three hard drives at once and disks can be of mixed type ATA/IDE, SATA or SCSI (available in January 2008). It also supports 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives.

Next: Hot Factor The Shredder allows solution providers to help their customers decommission hard drives onsite without shipping them to third parties. And it provides a defendable audit trail to aid companies in meeting compliance regulations.

As a result, EDT is mounting an aggressive VAR recruitment campaign with the goal of having 85 percent of its annual sales go through solution providers. EDT is currently engaged with business partners in Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and Brazil.

"We're not interested in distributors or the big boys who say, 'Evangelize the product, sell the product and hand us the account and then we'll move on to the next one,' " Schneider said. "We want ankles and elbows on the street."

Schneider said that end-of-life compliance issues give solution providers a great opportunity to sell consulting services beyond the Digital Shredder point product.

EDT is set up with Web-based and in-house technical and marketing support infrastructure as well as lead registration. Schneider noted that the ideal end-user customer for EDT's Digital Shredder has 500 seats or more and could be in virtually any vertical including legal, financial, government and medical.

While EDT has set a goal of having solution providers generate 85 percent of the company's sales, President Philip Bracco said he would like to have a VAR involved in every sale.

"Our operating philosophy is to find a reseller for every opportunity that materializes. Ultimately, the customer will make the final decision."