McAfee is bringing in the 20’s with a bang.
On January 1, 2020, it will kick off its new partner program, MPact, which will let partners define who they want to be, indicated the company’s head of channel sales and operations, Americas, Ken McCray,
The old program, he explained, required partners to cross-train on the full McAfee portfolio. While he still recommends this approach, it will no longer be a requirement.
“If a partner is very good at networking, we want them to follow our network path, if a partner is good at cloud, we want them to invest in cloud with us, ” he said. “We still want our partners to embrace our entire platform, but the previous program would make them step out of their comfort zone. And in some instances, partners didn’t have that type of talent on staff to go to endpoint, or to go to cloud or network. And we put them in a position where they felt challenged by the program. I feel that we’ve cleaned that up and if the partners want to stay in their normal swim lane, they can do that.”
To get partners started, a new portal will launch around mid-December.
Along with the new portal will come new training that is still under development, with an emphasis on virtual training. McCray said he’s working with the product team to bring virtual training on demand to partners, so if necessary someone about to walk into a meeting could watch a quick subject matter video to brush up. He’s also assigned a staffer to the product team so they can bring information to partners in real time.
In Canada, he said, partners are ahead of the U.S. in managed services. Bryan Rutledge, regional vice-president and country manager in Canada, said that McAfee has done a lot of work to build that MSP program with partners in Canada. However, one opportunity that hasn’t so far reached its potential is cloud security, and he’d like partners to realize it.
“I’d like to see the partner community embrace cloud security,” he said.
McCray said that partners with established managed services businesses will find a variety of ways to help customers with their security posture through Mvision EDR, Mvision Insight, and Mvision Investigator.
His 2020 vision for partners is clear: Think McAfee for on and off-prem security needs.
“What I want to do with our partners is I want to refine their approach to McAfee,” he said. “We hear it a lot at trade shows – ‘ I didn’t know McAfee had that, I didn’t know McAfee did that’. So our vision now is focused on moving people’s perception to the reality of who McAfee is going forward. I think we started that with the device, the cloud strategy. But now we need partners to embrace that with their current McAfee customers.
“It will just be the channel program catching up with the new corporate strategy.”