The application here is interesting and plays to SealedMedia's strengths as an enterprise DRM technology.  The DecisionPoint documents that need to be protected, which are in various file formats, contain financial models that are the company's "secret sauce."  DecisionPoint's implementation consultants and customers need to be able to see certain portions of these documents, but the company needs to protect them in order to keep its proprietary methodologies confidential. 

In practice, this may mean such things as keeping formulas in Excel spreadsheets from being seen, so that DecisionPoint's customers could see their outputs but not how they are calculated.  SealedMedia is virtually unique in its ability to assign rights to specific features of client applications, such as reading or editing formulas in Excel, or reading comments in Word documents. 

More important than the application itself is that this installation is evidence of the viability of the ASP model in the enterprise DRM market. Several companies over the years have tried to implement DRM ASPs for consumer media; the only ones that have succeeded are small vendors working the low end of the market, such as EZDRM, while the larger and more ambitious attempts (such as Reciprocal, Massive Media, and DigiHub) have crashed and burned.

The problems are that the ASP model has a high cost structure, and it only really appeals to customers with volumes of documents to be protected that are too small to warrant buying and running their own DRM software.  In other words, the service is salable at a reasonable price neither to large companies nor providers of low-value information, such as most consumer media.

Yet outside of the world of consumer media, there may be many scenarios with the right combination of attributes -- that is, relatively low volumes of high value information.  DecisionPoint Software is a perfect example.  A good chunk of the company's intellectual property is bound up in a small number of documents -- about 100 documents are now encrypted -- the value of which is such that their compromise could put DecisionPoint's business in jeopardy. Installing a DRM server just to protect and license usage for 100 documents is hardly worth it, so a natural solution is to use a common outsourced DRM provider for all of the company's customers.  The combination of SignetX's availability as a DRM ASP and SealedMedia's good fit to the application's requirements is proving serendipitous for DecisionPoint Software.