McAfee picks six of the best for Tech xCelerate trial

Axial Systems and Sysec among half a dozen partners invited to take part in trial programme designed to boost uptake of NGF and SIEM wares

Six McAfee partners have been picked for a trial programme designed to boost uptake of the Intel-owned vendor's higher-growth technologies.

The Tech xCelerate scheme offers extra spiffs and market development funds (MDF) for partners who win projects for its next-generation firewall (NGF) and security information and event management (SIEM) wares.

McAfee bought NGF outfit Stonesoft last year and SIEM specialist NitroSecurity in 2011 and considers both technologies as high-growth areas.

The vendor was tight-lipped on the identity of the full line-up of trial partners but they include Axial Systems and Sysec.

Mike Simmonds, managing director of Axial Systems, said: "We are quite excited to have been picked out of the crowd as one of the leaders on this. It's probably because of our investment in Clearview, which means we are now top of their list of certified partners in the UK."

Cris Pikes, chief executive of Sysec, claimed his firm was the most highly decorated UK McAfee partner with 20 ACE certifications across 11 disciplines.

"McAfee is really looking for technical ability and a technical sale on both these products," he said. "This programme sorts the wheat from the chaff and raises the bar around accreditation as you have to have the capacity to implement it, not just do the pre-sales.

Rob Percy, EMEA channel programmes manager at McAfee, confirmed that Tech xCelerate is one of a number of new channel initiatives in trial, another being McAfee post-sales technical enablement, where partners are trained on delivery and implementation.

"To guarantee the feasibility of a new channel initiative, each programme we develop is first trialled with a limited number of partners before being considered ready for further roll-out. The ‘Tech xCelerate' initiative is one such example of this process," Percy said.