McAfee Execs Chart Course For Partners, Products

McAfee executives outlined the impact of the security vendor’s 2005 acquisitions and mapped out a technology course for the coming year at the company’s partner summit on Wednesday.

With $1.1 billion in cash and growth expectations in the neighborhood of 15 percent for 2006, McAfee plans to continue to make security-focused acquisitions to help drive its product strategy, said Chairman and CEO George Samenuk at the Las Vegas event. McAfee has spent 18 percent of its fiscal 2006 revenue on research and development, he said.

Technology from the purchase of SiteAdvisor, which analyzes and assigns ratings to Web sites based on their threat level, is being incorporated into McAfee products for small- and midsize-business and enterprise product lines, said McAfee President Kevin Weiss. And plans call for McAfee to extend that functionality to Web browsers and online search engines, he said.

"SiteAdvisor is going to become part of everything we do," Weiss said.

This year, McAfee also aims to invest in channel training and certification programs for technical sales and support, Weiss said. "We plan to use technical support as a differentiator in the market," he added.

Weiss added that McAfee's sales to SMBs, which he defined as companies with one to 100 seats, could escalate 30 percent over the coming year. To fuel growth, the Santa Clara, Calif., company plans to boost its sales capacity and streamline renewal processes as a way to reduce costs for partners and enable them to focus on more pressing concerns, he said.

A pillar of McAfee's strategy for developing products that create opportunities for partners is its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), which now is used to manage more than 45 million enterprise systems, McAfee CTO Chris Bolin said. The ePO offering is part of McAfee Total Protection, a set of security solutions aimed at helping businesses oversee the protection of corporate assets via one management interface.

McAfee bolstered its capability to offer technology to proactively protect against threats with its fast integration of Entercept, which McAfee acquired in 2004, Bolin said. The Entercept software is designed to block buffer overflows.

"We will continue to develop proactive protections," Bolin said.

Managed services is another key area of focus, and Weiss said McAfee will continue to enable partners to remotely manage their customers’ security. Such services provide partners with recurring revenue streams and boost their profitability, since no upfront investment costs are necessary, he said.

Another big push is helping businesses identify critical threats, prioritize their security issues and adopt management tools to monitor their regulatory compliance, Bolin said. McAfee also plans to differentiate itself by embedding security knowledge and expertise into its technology, enabling it to address as many security issues as possible in one solution, Bolin said.

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