McAfee’s new UK channel chief has pledged to make the security vendor easier to do business with and is on the hunt for systems integration partners.

McAfee resellers are still reeling from the vendor’s decision to slash its channel account management team from eleven to just three last year (ChannelWeb, 17 March, 2008).

Former Novell channel boss Jill Henry, who has joined McAfee as UK and Ireland channel director, said she would build that team back up to eight and invest in more telephone and enablement support for partners.

“We are fully aware of the difficulties our partners have experienced and this is how we plan to fix it in Q4 and Q1,” Henry said.

Henry admitted many of McAfee’s 1,000 UK trading partners have a “hands-off” relationship with the vendor and the idea is to re-embed as many as possible.
But her role is also to establish local relationships with systems integrators and technology partners.

“In the UK it is one our sales goals to extend our footprint into the enterprise and the channel has a big part to play in that,” she said.

“We really need to expand our relationships with SIs to whom large customers outsource their IT and, until now, we have typically addressed them at a global or EMEA level.”

McAfee recently axed distributor Bell Micro as part of its strategy to focus on value-add distribution.

Henry said no further changes are planned, but that she would be looking for more “innovation” from remaining allies Ingram Micro, Computer 2000, Arc and Sphinx
in Q4.

Ash Hussain, managing director of McAfee Elite partner Axial Systems, welcomed the extra resources: “We have a fantastic account manager, but when he is away it impossible to get anything done.”