The Stars Were Out at RSA 2008

Since this is my first post to the V.i. Labs Software Protection blog, an introduction probably makes sense: I'm the marketing manager at V.i. Labs and work with your usual blogger, Vic.

It’s been over a week since it ended, but I’ve finally recovered from RSA 2008 in San Francisco (April 7-10). While there’s already been some interesting commentary on the RSA conference, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion on all the celebrities that were in attendance. Apparently, the aisles were a virtual red carpet – just from the V.i. Labs booth we saw Omarosa and Bono (click the link for video or see it below). I’m still not exactly sure why they were there – when you attend the RSA conference you expect to see Art Coviello, not news crews from “Entertainment Tonight.”

What I am sure about is the interest we saw in software protection. To be sure, most of the attendees were focused on traditional information security topics – authentication, access control, perimeter security, etc. It was interesting to see the number of attendees and exhibitors who had already been thinking about protecting their applications from tampering or code theft (especially for those folks developing for Microsoft .NET). Even better, there were other exhibitors addressing various aspects of software protection – a positive sign of market interest and need.

- Michael