Usually, there are fairly strong themes at the RSA Conference, at least on the exhibition floor. For example, last year's conference revolved around data leakage and network access control*.

This year, I think RSA could be characterized as the year of the niche. Our industry has grown enough to have many large product categories. At this stage of the game, the niche products are filling gaps of coverage, weaknesses in existing products, and new technologies. Some are clearly poised for bigger and brighter futures, but in this economic environment it is particularly useful for companies to solve specific problems. Here are the product categories I found interesting at RSA (some of which I've been following for a few years):

Data Masking.
Out-of-Band Authentication.
Firewall Policy Analyzers.
Online Fraud Prevention.
Hardened USB Drives – "personal portable security devices"
Secure File Transfer.
Privileged User Management.

More on all of these areas in the near future…

It is also worth noting that while cloud security and virtualization had significant mindshare – with a number of sessions (including my own) on those topics, they didn't have a whole lot of presence on the show floor.

* It as actually surprising to see that these themes almost disappeared from the floor, with a few exceptions.