View from the AGC conference: Big is the New Small

One of the first things you do at RSA is attend America's Growth Capital's annual information security conference. Why? It's fun to see CEO's tell their story in 10 minutes. That's always a good exercise to make sure your story is tight. I will say it's much more fun to be in the audience, as opposed to crafting slides at the last minute.

So is there anything exciting here? Not really. Just a lot of reinforcement that there are still lots of small security companies (too many, in fact) and they are very undifferentiated. How is a customer supposed to know the difference between any of these folks. They all do the same thing...

But, one of the themes here at RSA is "big is the new small." For a long time, small was good. Big was bad. McAfee (back when it was called Network Associates) couldn't make the conglomerate work, so the model must be broken. Now it seems BIG IS BACK.

Besides all of the consolidation (Symantec closed the IMLogic deal today and 3 deals were announced last week), customers are fed up with too many niche security products. They want a SOLUTION, not a widget. We'll see logical integration, enabling a common security policy to be enforced initially. Physical integration will come later.

You're probably tired of hearing about this, but it's critical for customers who are selecting key technologies. If you buy a niche offering, you are at risk when inevitably the consolidation happens.

FYI, I will be at RSA all week, so my blogging will be lumpy. I'll be trying to get at least one post done per day, but probably not much more that that. But when I decompress at the end of the week, I'll do a full show de-brief.