McAfee bullish on India's channel market

LAS VEGAS, US: India's fast growing economy and its channel driven market perfectly suit McAfee's business model. With a wide portfolio of products, it aims at driving awareness and adoption to the existing programmes and being profitable with a small set of enterprise partners rather than indulging in mere expansion of the partner base. Speaking to CIOL at Focus 2012 in Las Vegas, Craig Nielsen, senior director, Channels and Alliances, APAC, explains how McAfee enables its partners to build their security posture and how the highest deal rate statistics for McAfee come out of SMBs in India.

EXCERPTS

CIOL: What is McAfee's Channel strategy for India and what are the driving forces?

Craig: Our channel strategy is about working with partners in relevant market place and making them incredibly profitable. To support this, we launched profitability Stack in July this year, which is industry's most comprehensive profitability programme where we provide additional margin for a wide range of partner inputs. We have deal registration for new businesses and we offer upgraded advantage through additional margin to those partners who have invested most with us.

CIOL: Other than that, what are the other incentives you provide partners. How does your reward model work?

Craig: Our partner programme works on Tiering model. We have Elite Partners as top tier, then we have Premier Partners and Associate Partners. Based on the certification, they can progress up the stack. As they work towards building McAfee's practices and brand, they will get better rewards. Over the past 18 months, the number of participants in rewards programme has gone up by 71 pc. We run a number of exciting promotions for our channels. We are constantly looking at providing tools to channels and having interesting and meaningful conversation with customers around a number of solutions on topic areas. We are confident that the Profitability Stack offers the best advantage to partners.

CIOL: There is so much happening in research and innovation. How are partners leveraging technology?

Craig: We have a programme called ACE (Accredited Channel Engineer), which is a sort of engineering programme. We go to the channel partner and provide them a comprehensive enablement programme to skill up their engineers. We train them as our engineers and that makes them effective in market place so they are able to consult customers and architect solutions. As an additional incentive, we offer them a rebate too.

CIOL: What is the future roadmap for channel partners for India?

Craig: We are focused on profitability with partners for enterprises and commercial establishments. We want to be more profitable with a small set of enterprise partners rather than having a wide partner base. We don't strategically just see a linear growth of partners, but there is a coverage opportunity in India with tier 2 cities. We are hopeful that the coverage model continues for the next three years. We are comfortable with our programmes. We are very clear that our Go To Market is 100 pc focused on channels. Our focus for future is driving awareness and adoption to the programmes rather than having more programmes.

CIOL: Could you explain McAfee's approach to SMBs in India?

Craig: SMBs have performed very well for us in India. Our some of the highest deal rate statistics come out of SMBs in India. We want to continue with that. We want to continue to provide incentives to Tier 1 and 2 channels to drive new businesses in SMB in India with some attractive programmes. We are happy that the distribution models are working well.

CIOL: There are different needs for large enterprises and SMBs, how do you deal with challenges associated with them?

Craig: There are security products for multiple vendors. Each of our products sit on separate database. The real opportunity for us in commercial enterprise is to sell our Security Connect vision to our customers. It is about how they can improve their security posture with our integrated system and secondly, with that sort of integration and common platform, you automate and you are operationally more effective, while reducing cost. That is a compelling story for security. In India, we are running some exciting SMB programs and promotions: SMB Deal Registrations, where partners can earn up to an extra 20-25% margin for registering new business McAfee Rewards, where partners can accrue points & claim various prizes just for selling McAfee solutions The Total Access Promotion - great pricing for a full suite of endpoint solutions. In addition, our distributor Reddington in conjunction with McAfee is implementing enablement and business development programs targeting the SMB channel in Pune, Hyderabad and Chenai.

CIOL: What is the edge you have over your competitors in the market?

Craig: In nutshell, McAfee has the largest portfolio across security segments. We are in most of the security leadership quadrants. There lies the differentiation. If you are looking at a security vendor who can provide you only end point solutions or only network, you will never get that integrated security posture.

CIOL: How are partners benefiting from Intel's acquisition of McAfee?

Craig: We are running as a standalone company. We collaborate with Intel's account teams on customers. Intel is successful from channel perspective and in SMB arena. That is an opportunity for us to drive some synergy in terms of Go To Market. They have been terrific in the way they have helped us in implementing Deepsafe technologies. Being part of Intel we are able to provide some important solutions through our Deepsafe technologies. CIOL: What are the pain points in dealing with channel partners? Craig: It is all about McAfee being relevant to the partner and the partner being relevant to us and the market. We want the partners to build up McAfee practices, but some partners just want transactional relationship with us, but that is not a pain point as we have separate programmes for that. Our social programme is perfect for partners who want to transact with us occasionally. It is a kind of relationship with partners. We develop territory or verticals together. I won't call it a pain point as different partners have different objectives.