RSA 2013 – Through the Eyes of a Marketer and First Time Visitor

Two weeks ago I had the amazing experience of attending the RSA Conference in San Francisco. I have only heard about these types of conferences from my colleagues in the past, as generally there was an army of people responsible for offline events in the previous companies where I have worked.

Unfortunately we didn’t have a booth at the conference, due to the fact that we were too late in applying for one, but that didn’t mean we weren’t extremely busy both before and during the conference.

Before the conference we released our (perfectly timed) new Swamp Beta. The Seculert Swamp is an elastic, cloud-based, automated malware analysis service, designed to enhance users’ existing on-premises security solutions. Upon signing up for the Beta you will have the ability to upload malicious files via our web portal or API and allow them to live in a near real-world environment. The malware behavior and evolution will then be closely examined over time. Once the files have been analyzed the results will be available via the Seculert web portal or API. The API automatically integrates the results into your existing on-premises security solutions.

During the conference we were meeting with reporters, analysts, customers, prospects and potential partners. We also held a very successful Wine Reception just a block away from RSA. If you didn’t attend you missed out on some great wine, food and a beautiful venue.

So, what did I, as a marketer, learn from the RSA Conference? First and foremost the realization that there is a huge amount of security vendors out there each one offering completely different security solutions to an ever ending amount of security issues. Each company claims that they have a unique solution. Some are more tactful about their approach to their competitors and others blatantly critical of them and mention their ‘so-called’ weaknesses during mini-presentations within their booths.

I also realized that everyone is doing something in order to get their hands on leads and attract the visitors to their booths. So I am already trying to plan out in my mind what we should be offering at our booth next year in order to collect all those lovely leads. Will we offer popcorn, coffee, t-shirts, notebooks, pens or a roulette wheel?

Well, we have almost a year to think about it and many other events to prepare and attend beforehand, so maybe we will try a few tactics at these other events and see which seems to draw the most attention.

So, looking forward to seeing you all next year in our booth at RSA