by Christopher Clark, President — Fiberlink

by Maribel Lopez, Principal Analyst, Lopez Research

Apple has announced their latest iPhone, the 4S, and it certainly is shiny. A more powerful chip, an 8MP camera, and best of all, you can talk to it! The Siri personal assistant responds to voice commands to locate restaurants and remind you to do things. She will even send what you say as a text and speak the response aloud! (Let’s hope this reduces the number of people who insist on texting and driving.) We won’t know if Siri will open the pod bay doors, though, until we can actually try the phone. And don’t forget the iCloud! Somewhere to put your digital clutter!

  I had the pleasure of spending time at the 2011 CTIA Wireless conference in sunny Orlando, FL, last week. It could not have been a better location for someone stationed in the Northeast. While down there, I took part in several analyst briefings, the ShowStoppers event, the MobileTrax Innovators dinner, and business meetings with customers and partners attending the show.  If you are a person interested in how your home and car are becoming integrated with the Internet, in software applications and in smartphones…then this was a cool show. You may have also had fun with all the device and accessory companies selling Hello Kitty cases for your new Android device.

It’s been a few days since the RSA Conference and I’ve had time to absorb everything that was there.  With the sessions, keynote addresses, vendor floor and the socializing, the whole conference was definitely something worth experiencing.  The conference had more than 320 companies exhibiting their tools and technologies, over 255 sessions and 540 speakers. 

The morning consisted of keynote addresses, awards and a panel discussion with the biggest names in cryptography. The opening keynote was made by RSA Chairman, Arthur Coviello. It was in part a call to arms. Art announced the Cloud Trust Authority initiative, a series of cloud-based services designed to enable organizations and cloud service providers to work together to design security into cloud initiatives. Art also commented that the cloud and virtualization will dramatically change security. No doubt, it has to. Traditional security technologies cannot scale to or adapt to the fluid nature of the cloud. This notion of change being needed in how security is implemented in a cloud model resonated throughout the rest of the day, and I’m sure will be repeated throughout the rest of the week. Art had VMware Chief Development Officer, Richard McAniff on stage with him talking about developing for a trusted cloud.

First day at the RSA Conference and it’s off to a great start.  As expected, one of the big topics everyone is talking about is cloud computing.  It helps that the conference started with the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, but it was bigger than just that.  The talk in the halls was all about cloud computing, as well.  From data warehouse vendors, to multi-factor authentication vendors, to consumers from all walks of life, cloud computing is on everyone’s mind.