It's always interesting when someone asks an Applied Trust employee what they do for a living. Some manage to quickly spit out the company line: “Security. Infrastructure. Performance. Availability. Incident Management.” Whoever happens to be listening usually smiles, and then gives the characteristic blank stare. Other employees opt for the more simple approach of just saying “IT Security,” as a decent number of folks have some idea of what that might involve. In reality, almost half of Applied Trust's business is outside of the security realm. This exemplifies one of our biggest challenges: It's difficult to tell folks, in a concise way, what we do.

Perhaps our competitors have an easier time in this regard. The vast majority of them either manufacture a product or are closely allied with vendors who do. In their case, their very existence is defined by the sales of those products. Need a load balancer? Vendor X surely has the right solution for you, and it's on sale this month. Need recommendations on how many application publishing platform licenses you need? Not surprisingly, the vendor recommends a few more, based not on careful measurement and analysis of your environment, but rather the company's more generic “recommended model.”

Applied Trust is a radically different beast. In that light, we're proud to launch The Barking Seal as our quarterly publica－tion for our clients, supporters, and friends. Rather than trying to tell folks what we do, it's our hope that this can be a conduit to show you parts of our world. Our goal is for this newsletter to become one of your trusted sources of useful information about the IT security and infrastructure arena. When we do recommend a tool or technology, you can be assured it's because we have real-world experience that has demonstrated it as best-of-breed.

Finally, we'd like to use this opportunity to share a few words about our stability as a company. Later this summer, we'll begin our fifth year of business. We have consistently delivered profitable operating results that meet or exceed industry averages. We were recently ranked fourth in revenue among network security consulting firms in Boulder County, behind global product-oriented competitors such as Computer Associates. In 2003 we took advantage of favorable real estate conditions and purchased the top floor of the Columbine building in downtown Boulder, where our corporate headquarters is currently located. In summary, we're very committed to building a company that is operationally excellent and will be here to serve you for the long haul.

Please let us know what you think about this issue, and future issues, of The Barking Seal. We want to hear your feed-back not only about this newsletter, but about all of Applied Trust's services.

We thank you for your loyal support. Give us a call if we can ever be of assistance.