A Word from the Product Manager

Jeff Harrell
Product Manager for PGP Products

As product manager for PGP products at Network Associates, I welcome you to the second edition of the Zimmermann Telegram. This quarterly publication will keep you up to date with the latest PGP happenings and developments.

With the latest release of PGP products, PGP has truly moved into the corporate arena as the weapon of choice for communications security. The desktop applications, which have long been PGP's strength, gained some cutting-edge new features, such as Blakely-Shamir key splitting and silent install for mass corporate installation. Combined with the new features is PGPdisk 2.0, which has been integrated into the PGP Desktop Security v6.0.2 and also includes the ability to use public key encryption for corporate data recovery. To provide scalability for an enterprise installation, the PGP Certificate Server v2.0.1 is available, including support for TLS (Transport Layer Security) for secure communications between client and server. The PGPsdk has also been updated, now version 1.5.1, to allow companies to create specialized applications using PGP's own libraries.

Clearly, the market has begun to appreciate PGP for the flexible, scalable, manageable solution that we have known it to be. In the September 27 issue of PC Week, PGP Enterprise Security garnered "A" grades in Usability, Management, and Performance in a technical review of PKI solutions. In the October 5 issue of InfoWorld magazine, PGP was deemed "a quick, easy, robust solution to global encryption and signing for corporate email and data." Consensus is building that PGP is the easiest to use, most manageable corporate solution available today.


The Future of PGP

As you may have read in recent Network Associates press releases, PGP has partnered with two of the leading PKI vendors to provide x.509 support to corporate customers within the PGP product suite. This will allow PGP and Network Associates to branch out into new markets including Virtual Private Networking (VPN) and E-commerce. When the integration is complete, PGP will be a complete security solution covering almost every aspect of corporate communications.

Also planned are new command line versions of PGP for Windows platforms (95, 98, and NT) and major Unix platforms. This new command line version will allow users to easily integrate PGP into their web scripts and automatic ftp batch processing programs. We also plan for these versions to be as compatible as possible with version 2.6.2 command line options and version 5.0 options. This command line release of PGP is planned for early to mid 1999.

Lastly, regarding one aspect of the PGP team's relationship with Network Associates: after the acquisition of PGP by NAI, there were quite a few rumors regarding the future of PGP's individual and freeware products. Consistent with Network Associates' earlier statements, I would like to reiterate that we fully intend to continue creating freeware and individual versions of PGP that provide low cost, high security solutions to users everywhere.

á