McAfee exec suggests channel should be "less promiscuous"

Dim view taken of vendor-agnosticity by channel chief in global security ranks

McAfee says one key to growing its business with customers is to get three or more of its products installed -- with a top global exec arguing further that the channel now has an opportunity to be "less promiscuous".

Speaking at McAfee's third-annual SecurityAlliance Partner Summit in Las Vegas yesterday, the vendor's executive vice president of global sales Steve Redman, told partners that the company has found that once its gets to three products with any given customer, its wallet share jumps eight times.

Eighty per cent of the company's top 1,000 customers have three or more products in their businesses, Redman said. That proportion plummets to just one per cent in the next 5,000 McAfee customers.

"We're kicking butt when the customers listens to our story of Security Connected, but it's not getting out enough," Redman said, calling on partners get up to speed on the company's complete strategy, and perhaps more importantly its components.

Since its purchase by Intel three years ago, the company has been focusing on its end-to-end message, Security Connected. But Redman expressed concern that in focusing on that message, partners were missing seeing the wood for the trees, particularly when it comes to hot, high-growth areas.

The executive pinned the growth in recent years of Kaspersky Lab in the endpoint market and Palo Alto Networks in the next-generation firewall in large part to the company's failure to communicate the value or the parts of its solution stack.

He said McAfee will work to remedy that deficiency, and outlined plans in various levels of completion to on-board acquisitions in situational awareness, next-generation firewall, advanced malware offerings, as well as its simplified lineup for endpoints, as areas of differentiation.

He called on partners to get to know what McAfee is doing in some of these higher-growth areas, areas where many partners may have turned to smaller, more specialised vendor partners to address customer pains.

"If there's a hot market out there, we're doing it internally as well," Redman told partners.

It was global channel chief Gavin Struthers who picked up on that same theme, telling partners: "You have an opportunity here to become less promiscuous."

The security space is a crowded one, to put it mildly, and Struthers made the pitch that partners would be better off aligning with McAfee's broader strategy and products than representing a handful of rivals, each in their own area of expertise.

"Customers want to see leaders with vision, and we've been talking about this Security Connected strategy for years now," Struthers told partners.

"You have an opportunity to built a more sustainable business with McAfee."

Struthers likened the multi-vendor approach for partners to the Vegas tactic of spreading bets on 14 or 15 different numbers on the roulette table. While it might keep you in the game, he suggested, it made it impossible to win big.

Instead, Struthers urged partners to "double down" on McAfee.

While Redman stressed the importance of cross-selling multiple McAfee products to customers, Struthers added the idea of cross-selling through up-selling.

Struthers said that about half the time a McAfee customer comes up for renewal, the company and its partners are able to introduce a new product from the security vendor into that customer.

He called on partners to do more, and to think broader, looking ways to move McAfee products into adjacent opportunities, including securing databases and virtualised environments.

Mobility is also a top opportunity, now that its Enterprise Mobility Manager (EMM) is fully integrated with its ePolicy Orchestrator(ePO) management software.

"You could do a lot of things in mobile device management, but what you really want to do is secure those devices cross-platform, and we do that with EMM," Struthers said. "For ePO customers, it's a no brainer."

Struthers told partners to also use renewal cycles as opportunities to go after competitive displacement opportunities.

Right now, priorities identified by the channel chief included moving customers of Google now-defunct Postini email security product to McAfee's SaaS mail security offering, and moving customers of Symantec's end-of-life security infrastructure and event management (SIEM) over to McAfee -- rather than going to Symantec's own managed service offering.

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