McAfee: Services opportunity for our partners is vast
New Intel Security Partner Program will put emphasis on post-sales support services
McAfee claims it has "only just scratched the surface" when it comes to equipping its resellers to exploit the $12bn (£7.5bn) services opportunity around its products.
Partner enablement around support and managed services will enjoy heavy emphasis in McAfee's new partner programme, which launches on 1 January under the Intel Security Partner Program banner.
Talking to CRN, David Small, vice president of channel and commercial business EMEA at the Intel-owned security vendor, admitted McAfee partners may have in the past had to leave valuable services opportunities on the table.
"One of the key messages in the new programme is around services capabilities," Small (pictured) said.
"[Until now] we have tended to focus on the front end of the process for partners, with extensive courses for sales and pre-sales and our ACE [accredited channel engineer] programme. But the back-end delivery piece – that's where we haven't really driven formal support for partners and that's what we are addressing now."
Small claimed the opportunity around security systems integration services is vast, citing figures from IDC pegging it as a $12bn market in 2015.
"Our best guess for the addressable market for our products is $18.5bn, so services are almost two thirds the size of the product opportunity," Small said.
Under the new programme, which replaces McAfee's current Security Alliance programme, partners can become Certified McAfee Security Specialists (CMSS) in eight areas of the vendor's portfolio. The four-day courses are designed to certify partners' post-sales expertise in areas such as next-generation firewalls, security information event management and encryption.
"We recognise the ability our partners have to drive support business for us and have barely scratched the surface," Small said.
At the same time, McAfee's MSP partner programme is also being introduced as a specialisation under the new partner programme, which will see partners rebranded as Platinum, Gold and Silver.