Peter Christy

RSA 2009

As always RSA was a good use of our time. The meeting was definitely slower than last year and there wasn't a lot of earthshaking news, but it is still unquestionably THE security meeting and a great place for use to meet with a lot of interesting companies and people efficiently. Security continues to be best viewed as a war between the forces of good and evil, and in the last year you would have to say that evil gained ground as evidenced by things like the Conficker virus. In the end we think that Conficker will be great wakeup call because it shows so clearly that if we thought we were well-protected because disruptions like SQLSlammer hadn't returned it was very bad thinking. There is unquestionably progress being made on much more sophisticated security solutions, with many forms of sensor input and often requiring analysis and some part of the solution in the Cloud. All the big desktop security companies seem to have realized that the desktop systems that get infected in the past are likely to get infected in the future. The value of this epiphany is that they act as a great Petri dish for the early detection of new malware. The cleverest application of this understanding is the realization that pirated security software in China running on pirated versions of Windows are a really good deal as long as they report what they see back to the mother ship. Machiavelli lives!

Rising Clouds

Cloud announcements don't seem to have been slowed much by the economy. It is still a very complicated and murky topic but there is no doubt that there is something important underneath. Recently VMware introduced the fourth generation of server virtualization infrastructure (now V-Sphere) as a Cloud operating system. At MMS, Microsoft spent a lot of time talking about Cloud as well. We think that Microsoft does the best job positioning Cloud within the spectrum of IT technology and architecture (although it's of course self serving since MS would have the most to lose if the world were to migrate rapidly to primarily Cloud models) and between Windows Server , System Center, Azure, Office 14 and Live, Microsoft is investing heavily in Cloud solutions. VMware still has a clear lead in exploitation of virtualization although there seems to be growing agreement that virtualization is in fact just one pillar of the solution. HP and IBM both are strong players for sure. It will be interesting to see what Google says at their upcoming developer meeting.

Cisco and Consumers

Cisco acquired Pure Digital, a very successful entrant into the video camera market having intelligently focused on all digital (flash) systems that were very easy to use for capture and sharing. But just as when Cisco entered the home media server business earlier this year, it makes to wonder why Cisco thinks it can succeed as a consumer brand when so many others fail, and consumer products are hardly a core strength. Were this any company other than Cisco we could probably bank some analyst points with a snotty and cynical projection of failure or limited success, but we've learned that's dangerous to do with Cisco. Cisco is pretty remarkable at doing things that are clear and important to them, and end-to-end video including consumers is unquestionably a clear John Chambers priority, no doubt. When we talk to Cisco about these issues, we always encounter smart people who both understand the problems and are working hard on the solutions even if this means fighting against Cisco history and culture. We'll remain skeptical but we're not going to bet on failure.

Cisco Day at RSA

For a second year Cisco organized a press and analyst event at RSA consisting of an overview to what Cisco was announcing and then followed by a field trip and dinner. Last year the field trip (and dinner) was all about Esurance, the Internet auto insurance provider. This year it was Kaiser-Permanente. Both of these companies depend intrinsically on the network, but Cisco is smart and generous enough to let the discussion range much more broadly. We visited the Garfield Innovation Center that KP has created in San Leandro where they mock up elements of clinics and hospitals and then bring in practicing doctors, nurses and other staff to test various ideas. Much of the discussion was about the fact that KP is well on the way through the conversion to paperless clinics and hospitals, and the significant health care benefits that this delivers along with cost savings, a really important topic considering that in the US we have the most expensive but by no means the best health care system, with costs continuing to spiral out of control. Cisco again delivered a well constructed event with excellent participation from a really interesting business partner.