Intel alarm bells for McAfee VARs

Anthony O'Mara looks at whether Intel's acquisition of McAfee means trouble for the security channel

O'Mara: How can a chipmaker, however large, serve the fast-moving security world?

Well, we didn’t see that one coming. Who knew the world’s largest chipmaker would want a piece of the security market? Intel’s proposed $7.7bn all-cash purchase of McAfee is the biggest in the chip giant’s 42-year history.

Intel offered a staggering 60 per cent premium on McAfee’s share price, so you can be sure the chipmaker means business. But they do not appear to have much in common, apart from their respective Santa Clara headquarters.

They do, however, claim to have been working in partnership on new technologies over the past few months.

Peel back the marketing speak and platitudes and you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is no product roadmap or channel strategy to speak of as yet.

McAfee is now fundamentally and crucially an Intel business, which could present some tricky challenges for channel partners.

Intel’s Paul Otellini has been reported as saying that he wants McAfee technology deeply integrated with Intel products.

If Intel starts making security-optimised chips that can help certain tasks run more efficiently, this is to be welcomed. Tasks such as deep packet inspection, encryption processing and file scanning could be particularly well served by such architecture and I believe it would be an easy sell to customers: you potentially get more security for the same resource allocation.

Yet of course only a tiny proportion of security tasks can be addressed at the chip level in this way. The rest are far too fluid and fast changing, needing to be addressed by a more agile, cloud-based strategy.

Chip manufacture moves so slowly that threats could morph into something new and possibly more dangerous before a chip could be designed and built to deal with them.

The strategy may also assume that customers run a uniform Intel-McAfee hardware estate. But enterprise systems are far from homogeneous. It also assumes a "McAfee Inside" policy would get the go-ahead from regulators, not a given considering Intel’s past wranglings with the European Commission and FTC.

Many partners make most if not all their revenue from services and support and rely on a good relationship with their vendor.

In my view, Intel will struggle to deal with end users – let alone a sales force of consultants – working with channel partners on the service side. McAfee has a strong business there and if Intel leaves it alone the channel should be happy.

But McAfee, even as a wholly owned subsidiary, will ultimately report to Intel’s software and services division.

I could argue that Intel’s investment is so great it will not want to rock the boat, but this kind of argument has rarely been borne out by the history of tech acquisitions.

One only needs to look at previous Intel acquisitions such as LANDesk – which was eventually dumped several years later – to feel nervous.

What about channel partners that bundle two or three security brands? It will be interesting to see what happens there. Might this flexibility be restricted in the new Intel-McAfee world?

Anthony O’Mara is a senior EMEA vice president at Trend Micro