When I was a marketing guy, RSA was the company everyone loved to hate. Not because they necessarily did anything wrong, but me and many of my security marketing brethren hated paying the RSA Conference ransom. This was especially an issue during the tech meltdown because you couldn't hit a customer with a 12 gauge shotgun at the show. There were none to be found.

And the quiet but steady erosion of their installed base of tokens made the company seem tired and on the long slippery slope to oblivion. Folks like Vasco and Secure Computing were making the token business about pricing, instead of functionality. It certainly didn't help that they bungled the Securant acquisition, basically getting into the space of web access management right as it peaked, paying a pretty significant premium.

A few earnings misses, the departure of a well respected CFO and VP Sales and Marketing and the wheels seemed to be falling off the bus. Clearly it was just a matter of time before one of big security aggregators bought RSA to milk their installed base.

But now a very strange thing has happened, RSA is turning it around. You can count on your fingers the number of companies that have turned the ship. They announced a Q1 [1] (with record revenues and beating earnings by a penny) and a good outlook for Q2. Of course, one strong quarter does not make a turn-around, but things look good. There is buzz around RSA again.

The reason is pretty simple. They bought a company called Cyota back in September. Cyota provides what I've dubbed "contextual authentication" services to most of the big banks around the world. Using their software, the banks can decide how strongly they need to authenticate a user for each specific transaction. So now, the banks can just require a password to check your balance, but can require a series of stronger methods if attempting a high value transaction.

Contextual authentication is the next big thing in the authentication space. No one really has a competitive offering, so RSA taking Cyota out of play was a strong move.

But more importantly, it gave the RSA field something strategic to talk to their customers and prospects about. Something the reps understand, which is authentication. That web access management stuff is different. So is provisioning, which they initially OEM'd from Thor (who was subsequently acquired by Oracle). RSA had a hard time selling those other applications because they weren't tokens.

At the same time, identity management became front and center on the project plans of many of the large enterprises and RSA has a decent story. They stick to their authentication knitting and add value to the big stack players. The Sign-On Manager is well regarded. Since customers are looking to add to their RSA offerings the renewal premium for all of those tokens goes down a bit easier. In many cases they are buying more and/or new stuff from RSA. This has a powerful effect on RSA results and momentum.

As I mentioned, one quarter does make a turn around, but the trend lines for RSA are moving in the right direction.