Go deeper, McAfee asks distributors

Security giant set to use distributor review to spread account coverage to every UK partne

Jill Henry: The intent is to form deeper partnerships with the chosen distributors

McAfee has pledged to ex­tend account coverage to every single UK partner following the conclusion of its distributor review process.

The security vendor laun­ch­ed a distribution rationalisation process in January and is still consi­dering responses from eight candidates.

Part of the plan is to en­courage distributors to deve­lop smaller partners that are currently unmanaged.

Jill Henry, UK and Ireland channel director at McAfee, said the richness and variety of entries, coupled with the firm’s desire to replicate the pro­cess in mainland Eur­ope, prompted the vendor to hire an external consultancy to help with the judging.

The eight firms – thought to include incumbents Ing­ram Micro, Computer 2000, Arc and Sphinx, as well as Bell and Arrow ECS – will hear back in the first week of July.

“The intent is to form deeper partnerships with the chosen distributors so they can help resellers grow their McAfee business,” said Henry.

McAfee’s top 25 partners are currently account managed by the UK team with the next 100 handled by inside channel account managers based in Ireland. The vendor has traditionally taken a more hands-off approach with its base of about 1,000 smaller trading partners.

But Henry said: “We are getting distributors to be more active with all the trading partners and aim to achieve full coverage of the trading partner community by the end of the year.”

Mark Hatton, chief executive of Sphinx, said: “If you go through a review, it is worth ensuring you end up with the right distributors. What McAfee is doing is in line with what it said it would do at the start of the process.”