Day One from McAfee FOCUS 09 – People Get It

I am in Las Vegas at the McAfee FOCUS 09 user conference and yesterday was a very invigorating first day on the exhibit floor.  As a member of the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance and newly designated McAfee Compatible offering, we are a sponsor of the show. 

We always set up our three minute malware challenge demo at shows where we release a rootkit on a victim VM machine and show our server detecting the rootkit, repairing the hooked system calls, correlating the changes to the machine made by the rootkit and building a remediation for the attack all in three minutes. 

After more years than I can count working tradeshows and conferences, I can honestly say that Resolution Manager is by far the easiest product to strike up a conversation about on a show floor.  First, it really is unique in its ability to spot malware or compliance issues on an endpoint.  Second, the ability of the product to build a remediation on the fly really is intriguing to people and gets their mind running in a thousand different directions.  Third, we normally have a screen up on the monitor in the booth that shows the hundreds of thousands of attributes that we collect and monitor, so that helps people see the depth of our scan scope and the amount of situational awareness we can bring to the party.

At that point I normally stop talking and watch the inevitable result of seeing all of these elements of Resolution Manager – people get it.  And they get it in a variety of ways because each comes to the booth with their own set of needs and problems, and there are so many ways Resolution Manager can address those needs and problems.  Of course, if they have time to see the demo, they are really hooked.  And given that we were just announced as being McAfee Compatible, they understand that they can access the information from resolution Manager through McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator which gives them a single point of access.

Some days on a show floor, the minutes go by at a glacier’s pace.  Last night, the exhibit hours were over before I even took a minute to check my watch.  If you have spent an hour manning a booth you know how refreshing that can be.