Fresh-Faced McAfee Renews Its Channel Vows

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With a new channel chief freshly poached from Cisco Systems and new programs aimed at keeping its sales reps from stepping on partners' toes, McAfee says the coming year will give VARs a chance to see how a healthy channel program is supposed to work.

At McAfee's Focus '09 conference in Las Vegas Tuesday, Alex Thurber, senior vice president of worldwide channels and a former 10-year Cisco channel veteran, told a room full of 300 partners that McAfee is aware that its channel program has frustrated VARs, from both a technical and conflict standpoint. In the coming year, Thurber said, McAfee will launch new initiatives aimed at ironing out these wrinkles.

"We have been way too hard to do business with in the past," said Thurber, explaining that some problems have stemmed from issues with integrating acquisitions, while others arose from glitches in McAfee's CRM system. "We will make it easier to do business with us."

McAfee has seen an inordinate amount of channel executive turnover in the past couple of years, and this has been a sore spot for VARs that are accustomed to channel stability and face-to-face interactions. But longstanding field sales behavior within McAfee has also posed problems for the channel.

To prevent McAfee's field sales staff from competing with partners, McAfee will pay its salespeople 10 percent more on deals in which a partner is involved from an early stage in the sales cycle. McAfee is also urging sales teams to look at every deal as one that's best handled indirectly, Thurber said.

Thurber's boss, Michael DeCesare, executive vice president of worldwide sales for McAfee, told Focus '09 attendees this step will go a long way toward fixing the problem. "We do think that will play a pretty big role in correcting some of the behavior issues we have seen out there," DeCesare said.

DeCesare also took time to enumerate the channel investments McAfee is making to improve partner enablement, revamp its MAX partner portal and CRM system, and devote more resources to lead development for the channel.

Partner enablement, another issue McAfee has wrestled with, will be augmented in the coming year by the hiring of 20 to 30 new channel staff. In addition to online courses for developers, McAfee will send trainers to partner facilities to offer face-to-face instruction, DeCesare said.

Getting McAfee VARs to diversify their security skill sets will enable them to deploy the full range of McAfee solutions, and DeCesare said this is one of McAfee's goals. "The challenge we have, and the reason we push you so aggressively, is that deals today involve multiple security areas like endpoint, network and encryption. But the channel ecosystem is still generally specialized in just one of those areas," said DeCesare.

McAfee's motivation -- one it shares with many IT vendors today -- comes from the growing realization that it's easier and makes better business sense to get different pieces of the technology pie from a single company when possible. "We hear from every CIO that they're tired of doing business with multiple vendors, and that they want to partner with a single company on deals," DeCesare said.

NEXT: McAfee's Channel Investments

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