RSA 2008

On the ground here are RSA 2008, the show is a big yawner. The biggest difference from my standpoint is that Greylock Partners (a VC firm) moved their party from Tuesday night to Wednesday night. Other than that, the entire week is like deja vu.

Not having a laptop has largely taken me out of the flow of the news stream. And forgetting to charge my iPhone on Tuesday night (so I had no phone for most of Wednesday) didn't help. I found that not being connected was possible, but inconvenient and not the best mode for RSA Conference duty.

In terms of what's hot and what's not, I've made a couple of new hypothesis, and I'll be rolling those out in more detailed posts next week. I've got some new ideas on the state of MSS and how security marketing (at least RSA show messaging) is probably 18-24 months ahead of most practitioners. I'm also getting some good field level perspectives on things like PCI and just how challenging it is to be a security professional.

These are things that I've known for a long time, but it's good to confirm, validate and expand my perspectives on how our industry is evolving. So although from an "excitement" standpoint, RSA 2008 is a big yawner - it's an important part of continuing to calibrate the markets and how security practitioners need to evolve their own tactics and behaviors to be successful.

I'll be back on Monday, ready to rumble... Have a great weekend.

Welcome to today's dispatch from RSA. Day 1 was as expected. Lots of news about virtualization. Quite a few Barney releases. And a good deal of being festive.

I had grand desires of doing a 23 strong laundry list, but I awoke to a dead hard drive on my MacBook. The bad news is that I'm relegated to this text input on my iPhone. So you'll get unformatted pieces from me when you get them, and you'll like it.

I'm planning to go to John Thompson's keynote later this AM, and I'll try to give some first impressions. Until then...