Hard to believe, but RSA 2009 was just last week. I found it to be a very successful show and now it's my turn to recap.

Themes
Every year the marketing team tasks me with finding themes at the show. In no particular order, the top themes between the talks and the booths were: virtualization, cyberwar/cybersecurity, and compliance/policy/regulation.

Attendance
During the first part of the week, I had noted that the attendance appeared to be dramatically lower than usual. To my surprise, as the week progressed, the attendance appeared to be on par with prior years. In fact, a member of the RSA conference PR team emailed me to say that the unofficial count for 2009 is less than 15% off of prior years. Considering current news of financial cutbacks, a drop in less than 15% would appear to be pretty good.

Best Event
Without a doubt, the security bloggers meet up on Wednesday evening was the week's highlight. This was a great chance to chat candidly with bloggers, press and friends.

One Thing I Learned
The Virtualization Security Panel opened up slew of new thoughts for me. Hopefully, I'll have some time to both implement my ideas at work and share them in a blog post.

Special Thanks
Special thanks to a number of journalists who let me share some time with them: George Hulme, Dennis Fisher and Ryan Naraine

All my blog posts from RSA 2009.