Having Returned from Black Hat….

As I mentioned - I hadn't been out to the conference previously and my exposure was somewhat limited as I really wasn't attending most of the presentations. Technically a great number of them were over my head and, although interesting, really weren't terribly useful for me personally. Now, that's not to say that the presentations weren't excellent (I heard some very good things about a number of them) it just means that, in my role, the information presented was only grasped at a high level and didn't really have a lot of practical use for a sales/marketing guy...

I did sit in for a bit on the spyphone preso and it was a little scary and very interesting, but I didn't stick it out to the end. I had client meetings to get to and I think I got the high-level gist of what the presenter was going through (i.e. my phone is probably tracking/watching everything I'm doing right now...).

The client meetings and the attendees were excellent, however. We had some great people stopping by (NetSPI had a booth this year) and very good discussions around vulnerability management and application security. Overall, it was certainly a conference worth attending. The need for a vulnerability management and correlation solution is now fully apparent so CorrelatedVM was the primary focus of most of our conversations at Black Hat.

Of course it was in Vegas, so there were parties to attend, alcohol to be consumed, and money to lose. All of this happened (as expected), but things were reasonably under control and everyone came home having taken minimal damage. We do have a few in the company that can still do multiple, back-to-back, all-nighters, (not me) but they even came out of the trip in reasonable shape.

Rapid 7's party at Rain

Rapid 7's party at Rain

Overall, the booth experiment proved a success and I think we'll be back again in 2014.

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Alex Crittenden

 

About 

I'm an Enterprise Account Executive with roughly 2 decades of experience working with growing organizations. My focus and experience is on driving sales, building strategic messaging and market positioning, and helping companies to grow. This is a personal blog and does not represent the opinions or feelings of any company that I currently work for or with.

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