Today's global economy provides many challenges for software development companies, especially those companies that do business in international markets. For the software application development community, ranging from consumer off-the-shelf software to high value proprietary software such as CAD/CAM, engineering, or manufacturing software, software piracy continues to be a major concern.

According to the Business Software Alliance, the average annual global software piracy rate in 2001 was 40%, or the equivalent of US$10.97 billion dollars in lost revenue to software makers. It's even more extreme in Eastern Europe, where the rate was 87% in 2001, and in a few countries in Asia, where 94-97% of the software is illegal.

Protecting valuable intellectual property and securing license revenues are critical concerns for every software development company. However, piracy is not solely an issue for software developers. Every corporation that owns and uses illegal software, whether they knew they had it or not, is responsible for not just the legal implications, but also the corporate reputation and business practice changes that ensue.

SafeNet' Sentinel product line, which includes Sentinel SuperPro hardware keys and Sentinel LM license management software, was created to address the market demand for software protection, digital asset protection and license management. The Sentinel product line was designed to meet the needs of independent software vendors (ISV's), software consultants, and software engineers, while remaining transparent to end-users.

Sentinel hardware keys have been protecting applications from software pirates for almost 25 years . The leader in software protection hardware keys, or dongles, in the marketplace, Sentinel hardware keys secure more applications than any other vendor in the world.

Sentinel hardware keys provide the necessary security of a physical device that the user must possess in addition to any code or password needed to run the application. As a developer, your software application incorporates the Sentinel hardware key and communicates with it during program start up. By requiring the end-users of your application to have a physical "key" installed on their machine, as well as a copy of your application, you ensure a higher level of protection from piracy for your application. Sentinel hardware keys are available in USB, standard parallel port, and "tiny" parallel port versions.

The Sentinel hardware key is a programmable device with multiple proprietary algorithms and on-key read/write memory. Sentinel keys are integrated with your application when you sell it and the communication between your application and the key can accomplish many functions in addition to allowing program execution.

For instance you may choose to continually check for the presence of the key, check for a pre-determined value in the key, or create a custom method of validating that the correct key is attached to the computer using your software. Software pirates may successfully copy your application, but without the proper Sentinel hardware security key, they will be unable to run it, thereby protecting your license revenues, your customers, and your target market.

The SafeNet Sentinel brand is extremely well regarded in the developer community, and often used synonymously with the term "dongle" because SafeNet invented the term to refer to hardware keys that secure software applications.

The Sentinel product line includes solutions that meet the needs of small to large application developers with simple to complex application software. If you are interested in securing your application from unwanted access, implementing license management, or offering evaluation versions of your software on the Internet, then consider the Sentinel Series of solutions.

Imagine if you didn't have to sacrifice convenience or simplicity or cost-effectiveness for security. That is the SafeNet difference. Our core competencies set us miles apart from our competitor. SafeNet is uniquely positioned in the high technology security market because our leadership, experience and innovation have allowed us to create world-class products and services. Why should you choose to do business with SafeNet? Here are some of the reasons why:

• We have 25 years of experience making security products that solve real business problems
• We have over 17,000 satisfied customers
• We protect over 25,000,000 end-user clients worldwide
• We invented and are the leader in software license authentication tokens with a 42% market share
• We invented the "dongle" hardware key
• We invented and are the leader in the USB token market with a 50% market share
• We invented SSL acceleration and are the leader in the SSL acceleration market
• We hold 16 patents in cryptographic process and products
• We are the preferred vendor for high-assurance communications and data encryption, strong enough for the top military and government organizations such as the CIA, NSA, Department of Defense and The White house
• We are the only company that can deliver products to secure critical corporate data with high end-user satisfaction ratings
• We power the largest e-commerce sites, such as eTrade, and other leading financial institutions
• We provide the technology used in all major server providers in the market
• We make complex security simple, convenient and cost-effective