My friend and colleague Kevin Kosh has just about fully recuperated from his non-stop RSA Conference schedule last week—late nights that often involved banter over a variety of beverages and very early mornings. I suppose attending RSA is sort of like running a marathon. You strategize and train for months. Finally, when the big day arrives, your adrenaline is pumping and you’re focused on the long road ahead. Then you start to feel the fatigue as you near the end but you triumphantly cross the finish line exhausted but with a sense of accomplishment.
Kevin said that this year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco was one of the most memorable for him—highlighted by the keynotes, which included Art Coviello, Executive VP of EMC Corporation and Executive Chairman at RSA (and CHEN PR client). Art deftly addressed the need for public/private and international cooperation on major issues including cyber war, surveillance, privacy and trust on the Internet. The opening act for Art’s headline was none other than Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner (that’s Kevin and Mr. Shatner below) leading the crowd in a slightly altered (and from what Kevin says, fully-Shatner) version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. CHEN PR also took part in an incredibly fun party/book launch hosted by White Ops and in the loft of the esteemed Mr. Dan Kaminsky. And of course no RSA is complete without mingling face to face with some of our favorite security reporters and PR pals in the industry. One thing that Kevin kept reiterating throughout the conference was that he felt very privileged both professionally and personally to be amongst some of the finest people in the industry and getting to work with them on a regular basis.
Earlier in this blog we counted the results of our pre-RSA efforts – with 7 CHEN PR clients attending this year and each hit the show floor with a packed press meeting schedule thanks to the incredible collaboration between our clients, awesome security reporters and our PR team. The fruits of those efforts were many, including the sampling below of some of the best:
- Dark Reading had a great recap of the highly attended Art Coviello keynote
- Forbes highlighted RSA’s Innovation Sandbox finalists, calling out Co3 Systems and White Ops as ones to watch
- Computerworld’s article, “Booze, bots and other RSA ruminations” walks you through the beautiful insanity of the RSA Conference and profiles White Ops Chief Scientist Dan Kaminsky. If you don’t know what White Ops does, they basically put the kibosh on bots. Their tagline, which I love, is “Bots are bad for business, we’re bad for bots”
- The Wall Street Journal followed Bruce Schneier jumping from RSA to AGC to TrustyCon where he stepped on stage for an interview discussing if we can block the NSA
- Network World included a new service, Zscaler SHIFT, on their Hot, new products from RSA list.
- And heading into the show CRN named Vice President of Channels Todd DeBell from FireMon as one of CRN’s 2014 Channel Chiefs
Both Kevin and CHEN PR VP Bryan Grillo attended the conference to help RSA’s corporate PR team with a massive undertaking of press activities, which included over 100 meetings. Not to anyone’s surprise, the meetings went off without a hitch.
Congrats to another successful Conference everyone! We look forward to RSA 2015….but glad it’s a year away.