David Spark

Thank you for listening to the CISO Series podcast.

I thought I'd try something new today.

Yeah.

Yep.

So I did walk the entire show floor, recorded 607 exhibitors.

That's a lot.

And wrote the state of security vendors, which was my impressions as a buyer who also does marketing of what marketers think they're selling, who's in what spaces, given a view towards like, where's the money coming from for VCs?

You know, where are they actually sort of investing in?

To sort of get this overarching view of what's going on, I got to say about 10% of the vendors had zero messaging on their booths at all.

No idea what they did.

I mean, I knew some of their names, but it was kind of crazy how many couldn't tell what they did from what was on their booth.

But think about this.

Yeah, so my 10% is there's no hint at all as to what they do.

No, no, I get that.

But 37% said they did AI security, and I still don't know what that means.

So I think that you're asking the wrong question because I do agree we have a problem, but that number isn't the indicator.

What is the indicator?

Imagine if you went to an automobile show that was aimed at the manufacturers, not at consumers.

So it is every sub in the entire industry.

Yeah, if you walked in and said to some random car designer, how many of those vendors do you know what they do a priori, they're going to tell you 25%.