What Happens in Vegas Gets Blabbed

In a rare IRG show of force John and I both graced the Symantec analyst meeting held as part of Vision. As the mega players (MS, Cisco, EMC) invest heavily in security it has to make you wonder what happens to the traditional security vendors. When we attended Vision a year ago the John Thompson vision was good but it didn't seem to trickle down very far. This year John's vision was charismatic and engaging (as always) but the discussions from the next few layers much more coherent. The theme is risk management broadly. It's a nice way of tying a lot of their stuff together, and clearly becoming top of mind in IT management (Symantec nicely held a CIO Summit in parallel and exposed a lot of interesting CIO's and other customer senior IT management). Our old pal Enrique Salem from Brightmail was the master of ceremonies for all of Vision in his new role as Group President of Sales and Marketing (it's a challenging and highly important job) and it seems to suit him well (despite the fact that his first stint was in the early '90's as Peter Norton's 8th programmer). It's still a little hard to get your arms fully around what Symantec wants to do when it grows up but it's clearly growing up and we're both curious to see where this all goes.