I was given a great opportunity to attend RSA Conference [more pictures here] this year and even asked to speak at a partner’s booth while I was there. San Francisco, being February and all, was damp, chilly, and prone to bizarre and unexpected attacks from hail – I got caught in a freak hail storm while walking to breakfast on Wednesday morning. Inside the Moscone Center the weather was fine and the people were warm and welcoming.
As I wandered about the show floor, I was impressed with the advancements in security technologies, especially in terms of cloud,virtualization, and new end-point OS support & protection. Very fascinating new technologies and services were abundant no matter where I turned and there was no shortage of mind blowing conversations going on. I wish there had been more time for me to learn from those demoing their wares at the show.
Caption: Franklin presenting in the NEI Booth at RSA Conference
On two occasions I spoke in the NEI booth about Dell OEM Solutions and our relationship with NEI. In those talks I described how technology transitions through a value curve of being highly proprietary high cost through the mainstream COTS value to the low cost, low value pure commodity area. Sometimes technologies start in the commodity space and grow in value to move into the high quality COTS region. It was interesting to hear what others thought about this way of looking at technologies, especially in terms of the RSA market. We also gave away a couple of Dell Streak 5 tablets to attendees of the NEI conversations.
I took some pictures of my favorite booths and posted them to our Flickr site for all to see. I was impressed with how COTS hardware can be used to create robust and reliable platforms for the computer/network security market. Included in my photos are LogRhythm, Exar, TechGuard,NEI, Websense, Apcon, and StrongAuth. There were many others I wanted to take a photo of and share, but I wasn’t able to get a good shot due to crowds or positioning.
This was a great event and I look forward to next year.