Q&A: McAfee CEO Dave Dewalt

ChannelWeb sat down with McAfee President and CEO Dave Dewalt at Interop Las Vegas 2008, to hear his thoughts on the economy, McAfee's growth and direction of the company's channel program.

You've been at McAfee a year. What have been some of the successes? How has the company changed in the last 12 months?

The biggest is that we've grown the company. An area where McAfee was growing in the midsingle digits, we're now growing at three, four, five times that. A lot of that has to do with having really good products -- the company has some great products. We also have a lot of the compliance issues behind the company, statements and things that cost the company a bit of money. So a lot of that's behind us and we've been able to open up a new chapter for the company. It's a growth year. We've brought new leadership into the company but also augmented the people who were already at the top.

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But it's changed a lot. I've enjoyed the security market tremendously. There's a little bit of the passion for the noble cause. Every day our engineers and our team are all trying to help these corporations. So it's a situation where you feel good because you help people with a problem. That's been sort of the eye opener to me. We actually really do have a company that helps catch bad guys. How many people can say that? We do.

What do you attribute that explosive growth to? And why was it in the single digits before?

A couple of factors. Certainly we've had a lot of reliance on really one product -- antivirus. So we have a great product, virus scan enterprise, virus scan. Our Total Protection Suites for consumer was largely antivirus. We've got a whole suite of products now that are best of breed, but in a suite. Some of those products include spyware. They include host intrusion and personal firewall. They also include network access control, now data loss prevention and encryption products all in one suite. That makes it more economic for customers to buy that suite than buying one product at a time. We've found that with the climate we're in, from an economy point of view, as well as the compliance atmosphere that people are in, we've got a good product for people to purchase and that's helped fuel our growth.

Probably another big one is that the emerging markets are really helping us. We get about 50 percent of our revenue internationally, and we get a lot of growth there. We've been growing consistently very high in the European, Latin American and Asian markets. And that continues to be a big driving force.

McAfee's focus seems to be moving toward combining products into an all-in-one suite. Do you see this as a trend? And if so, why?

I do. A lot of it is the hangover we've had from the last five years, where the prevailing wisdom was to put in as many point products as you could from as many vendors as you could because the concept was there that by putting in more, you've got more defenses. Somebody's got to find the problem if it's multiple vendors.

The reality now is we share research behind the scenes, even with competition. We've got consortiums to share research. If Symantec finds an outbreak and a problem, we share it and vice versa. These are the ways that have now have equaled the playing field. Companies will share research and it creates an environment where one product versus another isn't necessarily higher protection.

Also, people are much more conscious of cost now. It's just the reality of where we've been for the last six months. Companies are looking for ways to consolidate their costs while keeping high protection. It becomes a nice driver for McAfee and probably for other big companies too. Whenever you're in a more frugal time economically, it plays more to a suite and it plays more to a big company needs.

Do you see the enterprise embracing security suites in the same way that the mid-tier has?

Believe it or not, it's across all the segments. And that's what's got us growing much bigger than we were. We have developed a product family we call TOPS, it's Total Protection Suite. But the same core sets of products we've built for consumers, TOPS for consumer, goes TOPS for small business, TOPS for enterprise and TOPS for enterprise advance. Essentially the core is layered on with more products for a sophisticated company. But we have a suite from consumer on up.

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