What is CPX (2010)?
In short, it’s the Check Point Experience. Several vendors sponsor it and describe their latest Check Point related technologies. They give demonstrations about their products and answer questions about product limits and features.
Here is the official link on the Check Point Website to the CPX 2010 event.
I have pictures but can’t upload them until I get back home on Thursday.
If you’ve never been, and are into information security, network management, or the like – this event has been great.
I’ve spent time in high level presentations and had a chance to corner product engineers and discuss their technologies. DLP (Data Loss Prevention) technology seemed like one of the most useful new technologies from Check Point, but I’m really looking forward to the more detailed session breakouts tomorrow instead of the marketing and high level that was presented today.
CPX 2010 Vendor List
Off the top of my head, here are the vendors that impressed me:
- Fujitsu – their pay as you grow model makes great sense for manning operations as cheaply as possible. Outsource your mundane firewall tasks and leave the hard stuff to your firewall admins.
- Algosec – very intuitive firewall management software. See where you can improve your firewall rules for security, optimization and compliance.
- Resilience – Top notch high tech firewall clustering. I work with clusterXL on a daily basis, but this Check Point partner has higher technology and a more sophisticated clustering mechanism.
- Riverbed – WAN Optimization: ultra cool. They claim up to 140x speed increase by lowering latency and reducing bandwidth, LAN access to AWS anyone?
- ZScaler – Cloud Content Filtering – very cool, and very useful anti spyware, anti malware, anti phishing technology. I consider this vendor one of the most needed new technologies that I reviewed.
There were others there, and all of them had impressive technology, but these are the ones that I found the most interesting – because of their business model or technology.
CPX 2010 Food
I wasn’t impressed by the dinner on Monday: Good meat and white bread rolls with fancy butter….. However, the breakfast was eggs (with tobasco and jelly), suasage (didn’t taste it), and some delicious grapefruit juice was wonderful. I met a cool guy named Paris from Capitol One and was impressed by his character and love for his wife.
Lunch was pretty good too – and quite a bit more fancy: Several variations of noodles, some Italian style chicken, and several desserts.
However, dinner was great! I ate dinner with Deb, Josh, Dan & John (Check Point Sales), Guy (Check Point development) and David and his Wife (IT for Apollo group) and a Co Worker (Jim). They treated us to an exquisite meal that was the best I’ve had in a long time. Meal time technology discussions is where it’s at folks – conversations like these are what makes the events so valuable.
Did I mention there was an item on the menu for $17,000? A bottle of wine, ouch! Luckily the rest of the meal was not insanely priced!
CPX 2010 Party?
If I had chosen to go, there was a free party below in the “Haze” nightclub. It sounded fun, but I have some programming that I’d like to work on instead (as well as this blog post). Anyway, Check Point blocked out the club for attendees only from 8-10, no cover and free drinks. Pretty cool if you are into that stuff!
So far this has been a great event and I’m looking forward to more of them. I’ll post more about Day 2, after it’s happened!