I worked the Feitian booth at RSAC 2026 for four days. The buyer questions I heard didn't match the vendor pitches happening 20 feet away — buyers were two conversations ahead of where most vendors were ready to meet them. These are the 7 patterns I noticed.
RSAC 2026 ran March 23–26 at Moscone Center. 43,500 attendees. Feitian was there for our 22nd consecutive year — booth in the South Expo, FIDO security keys, BioPass biometric keys, FKaaS demos. I spent four days at the table. Conversations with maybe 200+ identity buyers across enterprise, federal, financial services, healthcare. What follows isn't market research — it's pattern-matching from those conversations. No names, no deal specifics. Just what surprised me.
1. [Kevin: replace with real pattern title]
[PLACEHOLDER] Three of five CISOs asked about hardware roots of trust for non-human identities — unprompted. Half of them couldn't name a vendor solving it. The other half named SPIFFE or Cisco Duo and immediately said 'but the passport itself is software-based.' This was the most common pattern across all four days, and it's the seed of /perspectives/hardware-backed-agent-identity.
[PLACEHOLDER — add the specific detail that made this pattern credible. Numbers, roles, industries — no names, no deal specifics.]
2. [Kevin: replace with real pattern title]
[PLACEHOLDER] Passkey fatigue showed up more than passkey enthusiasm. Identity teams who'd rolled out passkeys 18–24 months ago were tired of training programs that should be self-explanatory. The promise was 'no passwords, no training' but the reality was 'no passwords, but we still wrote 12 pages of docs.' This is a productization gap, not a passkey gap.
[PLACEHOLDER — specific detail for pattern 2. What role, what sector, what surprised you?]
3. [Kevin: replace with real pattern title]
[PLACEHOLDER] Token2 was the only competitor mentioned by name more than once. Yubico came up half the time I expected. RSA SecurID never came up. This was the biggest market-perception surprise of the four days — the smart card vendors with FIDO additions are eating into the market faster than the keynote-stage vendors realize.
[PLACEHOLDER — what did buyers say about the competitive landscape? What was the biggest market-perception surprise?]
4. [Kevin: replace with real pattern title]
[PLACEHOLDER] Pricing was the most common SECOND question across every product line. First question: 'how does this work?' Second question, 90% of the time: 'what does this cost?' Vendors who don't disclose pricing publicly were getting filtered out before the demo.
[PLACEHOLDER — detail for pattern 4. What product lines did this show up on? Enterprise vs. SMB?]
5. [Kevin: replace with real pattern title]
[PLACEHOLDER] Compliance auditors at the booth had a specific frustration: 'agent' was not in their control catalog. I heard a variation of 'I don't see the word agents anywhere in your policies' from at least 4 different compliance leads. SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS — none of these frameworks have been updated for agent identities. This is the seed of /compliance-gap-analysis.
[PLACEHOLDER — detail for pattern 5. What framework came up most? What sector were these compliance leads from?]
6. [Kevin: replace with real pattern title]
[PLACEHOLDER] The buyer wasn't always the budget owner — and the budget owner was increasingly platform engineering. Six different conversations: 'security flagged this, but platform engineering decides.' This is the same pattern Aembit and Astrix have been pointing at for 18 months. It's now visible at RSAC at the buyer level, not just the vendor level.
[PLACEHOLDER — detail for pattern 6. What company sizes? What verticals?]
7. [Kevin: replace with real pattern title]
[PLACEHOLDER] Nobody asked about quantum-resistant cryptography unprompted. Despite the post-quantum keynote programming, not one buyer at our booth raised PQC in four days. This is a useful negative signal — the productization gap and the buyer-priority gap diverge here.
[PLACEHOLDER — detail for pattern 7. What other 'negative signal' (expected topic that didn't come up) surprised you?]
What comes next
I'm taking this experience into Cisco Live 2026 (where I'm speaking May 31) and Identiverse 2026 (attending Jun 15–18). I'm publishing predictions at /predictions/cisco-live-2026 grounded in these observations, and a deeper piece on hardware-backed agent identity at /perspectives/hardware-backed-agent-identity. If you're a CRO or hiring leader at an identity vendor and these patterns match what you're seeing — let's talk. /hire.
→ Cisco Live 2026 predictions grounded in these RSAC observations: /predictions/cisco-live-2026
→ Deeper essay: hardware-backed agent identity — what FIDO taught us and what comes next
→ Identity buyers' guide to Cisco Live 2026: Cisco + Splunk + Agentic AI
→ If these patterns match what you're seeing — let's talk: /hire
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