RSA Keynote Rant

It's the time of the year again when the RSA Conference comes to town. It's always an interesting event as security companies get to strut their stuff. The market for security products has changed radically -- five years ago the threat landscape drove infrastructure gymnastics and lots of spending as IT managers wanted to avoid being on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. But today's threats, although more lethal, are not as visible in the media, causing repercussions among security vendors as they're trying to learn how to sell in this new environment. It was really frustrating last year when speakers at the RSA Conference talked about the consolidation that was going to occur in the security market as weaker companies would be consumed by the stronger guys. Rather than preaching these gloomy self serving messages (self serving because it's the big company guys who get to do the keynotes) we're hoping that in this year's speakers come up with some good ideas as to how the security industry can provide greater customer value -- like in making products that are so valuable to customers that they'll buy them.