RSA Aught-Nine

Well, it was a very busy show (at least for us) this year. We heard some complaints from folks at the booths about lack of attendees, but honestly it looked like the normal hustle-and-bustle from our vantage point. So, we’ll probably have some more to say about how various things played out over the next few days, but we wanted to put some thoughts together for an initial quick-hit reaction. And now that we’ve safetly made our connection back to beautiful NH, it seems like a good time to settle in, find out how we did on our pre-show predictions, and settle in for a bit of a recap.

First, let’s see how we fared on the predictions:

Government and the Law
We were half right on this one. Not only were the feds in full attendence (how cool was the NSA booth, right?), but there were speakers galore talking about everything from the new administration’s plan for cybersecurity to why standardization of logs was something NATO needs to get behind. As to why we were only half right? Well, we were expecting a bit more of a “compliance punch” this year than we wound up with – not that compliance wasn’t a major theme (it was), but it really seemed to be more about federal regs than about the more pedestrian regs that we in the heart of industry are familiar with. And GRC? Well, there were a bunch of vendors in that space there – but much of the particles have gravitated to the big players (Archer).

Clouds and Virtualization
OMG – this was HUGE, right?! Everybody had something to say about the cloud. Honestly, I sometimes found myself questioning whether the show hadn’t been taken over by a troupe of disenfranchised metereologists. It was all “cloud this” and “hyper that” – even from folks that had to stretch the analogy toffee-thin to make it work were selling a cloud angle. Chalk this one up to “totally right.”

Software Security
Strong message here from cool folks like Veracode (love them) and Fortify (props to the testing crowd) and a cool new tool that we learned about called Mykonos (sp?). We think this is the right message. There were also folks touting the virtues of the new CSSLP – now we’re not sure about how useful that is as a direction (more about that once we have time to do the topic justice), but still it’s nice to see the interest – even if it could be misguided. So, right again!

European Vendors
We’ve got a roll going here. Not only were there a ton of vendors from across the pond, but there were even industry groups representing technology from various EU countries. Take, for example, the German IT folks who were out in force (zwanzig – I mean twenty – vendors represented). Scoring this a win for us.

Insanitas
Crazy talk? Hmmm… Not so much. I mean, sure there were the odd few. the palm-vein booth and the CSSLP (oooh… did I say that out loud?), spring to mind. But there really wasn’t too much in the “bizarre as heck” category that I came across. No skull-resonance biometric systems, no PKI back-ported to the Amiga, and no phone-based iris-scanning. So, I’ll score that a loss for us.

So not bad right?