Tokyo IT exhibition – exKlusively.

After all the good fun with the kids at Japan’s Disneyland and TeamLab, it was time to turn my attention to work. And that meant the Interop 24 IT exhibition, meetings with business partners, plus several interviews with the press…

I also needed to drop by our Tokyo office to lift the spirits of the team there given the ongoing geopolitical turbulence ->

The exhibition was a biggie – taking up two large halls:

Of course, we needed to take a look at what our competitors are up to (we need to “know them, find them, stop them”!) ->

The market leader here is still the Taiwanese-Japanese-American Trend Micro (everyone’s red, for some reason) ->

Symantec Broadcom (ok – not everyone’s red) ->

This turquoise company I hadn’t seen before ->

It turns out it’s a local project financed by Japanese companies.

Here’s our stand; as ever – green, but with more and more “serious, brooding” black encroaching by the year. But we need to be serious, for here in Japan, due to geopoliticalisms, our business has shrunk by 50%. However, the good news is that at least it hasn’t been 90%! Yes – 私たちは何があっても決して諦めませ! (we never give up – no matter what!) ->

Of course I had my traditional stroll around the exhibition, not for any professional reasons – just for curiosity’s sake and to see what’s what…

Really long corridors; all the same – no enormous stands ->

Japanese IT isn’t well known outside the country; and within it they still prefer to do things modestly ->

However, large Japanese IT brands were once all the rage. There was NEC, Toshiba and Sony, to name but a few. But then, for various reasons, they mostly left IT to concentrate on other markets – where they’re huge to this day, as we all know. In the IT consumer market only smaller Japanese companies remain, with the odd exception like Nintendo, for example – and only in niche segments.

Splunk! A big thank-you to them for abandoning their customers in 2019 and making us develop our own SIEM – KUMA – upon which we’re now building our own cybersecurity solutions ->

Juniper (networking tech – a Cisco competitor) – seem to be going all-in with the AI BS thing ->

Whenever I see such an emphasis on AI, I start to doubt the competence of the companies doing it.

Companies that make hardware for digital outdoor advertisements – bright and conspicuous:

At the end of my exhibition-walkabout I realized there were hardly any big international names at all; like – no Microsoft, for example. Thus, Interop is really a domestic Japanese affair, with just a few “special guests” invited from abroad.

Another thing I realized: we were the only Russian special-guest company present! Exclusive!

And that’s about it for today folks. My walkies came to an end – as this post is doing shortly…

A little later I was speaking up on stage to a small but very attentive audience. I shared updates on cybercrime in general, on digital espionage, and on various prominent super-ouch cyberattacks of particular interest – which we of course uncover and reveal to the world.

I also touched upon our secure-by-design OS-platform (nothing to do with the “secure-by-design” on Wikipedia, which is all about development processes; we make things secure architecturally!).

And that was that. Arigato – I hope until next year!…

The rest of the photos from Japan are here.