UPDATE: Channel SVP David Roberts Leaves McAfee

In an interview with VARBusiness, Jim Lewandowski, McAfee’s executive vice president of the Americas, said Roberts' departure was a direct result of all he had accomplished with McAfee's channel program.

“As it happens from time to time, when you have strong people, they can have other opportunities that tend to draw them away,” he said. He would not comment on the unnamed opportunity; as of press time, Roberts had not returned a call seeking comment.

The move comes just one week before McAfee’s partner conference is set to convene in Las Vegas, and just two weeks after VARBusiness awarded the company’s partner program a five-star rating and named Roberts one of its top 100 channel executives.

Lewandowski said the agenda for next week's partner event would remain unchanged.

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“As the head of the Americas, we'd planned for me to be the host anyway,” he said, adding that “for the foreseeable future” Roberts' team would report to him.

McAfee has no timeline to find a replacement for Roberts, but the search will cover internal and external candidates, Lewandow added.

“We're fortunate that the size of our channel organization is about four times what it was when Dave joined us, so we have some possible candidates,” he said.

Lewandowski doesn't expect Roberts' departure to disrupt the momentum the company has built recently.

“We're thankful for the work Dave did, but we feel we have a strong program that can't be attributed to any one individual,” he said.

Roberts joined McAfee from Corel in July 2004, and also previously held executive positions at Microsoft, General Dynamics and NEC. He oversaw the evolution from a struggling would-be channel company to one that last year booked 89 percent of U.S. revenue through the channel and 94 percent or greater in all its overseas markets. The program now has more than 2,200 partners and has begun an aggressive expansion beyond the enterprise into the SMB market.