McAfee, part of Intel Security, said it will also consolidate its product competencies from the existing five to three: Endpoint Security, Network Security and Security Management.
McAfee will also change the name of its SecurityAlliance Program to Intel Security Partner Program.
These announcements were made at McAfee Fourth Annual Global Partner Summit where the company also outlined new channel initiative to help partners build profitable, sustainable security practices.
The new partner program allows partners to evolve their business models and adapt to the changing customer landscape.
To streamline training requirements, McAfee is removing the need for partners to complete Baseline Certifications and is expanding Continuing Education to give all partners the flexibility to earn credits for training that is most relevant to their business. This change results in an approximate 30 percent reduction in overall training requirements for McAfee Elite Partners.
The company also announced Managed Services Specialization, available January 1, 2015, which integrates the current Managed Service Provider Program into a specialization to streamline requirements and optimize benefits.
The Authorized Support Specialization, available Q2 2015, integrates the current McAfee Authorized Support Provider (MASP) Program into a specialization in an effort to scale the program by providing additional qualifying partners the opportunity to tap into this additional revenue stream.
“Together with our partners we have a massive opportunity to lead the security market transformation,” said Gavin Struthers, senior vice president of Worldwide Channel Operations at McAfee, part of Intel Security.
“In order to do so, we must ‘THINK BIG’ about how we partner together to protect our mutual customers as they embrace a new computing era and deal with today’s more sophisticated threat landscape.”
Continuing its partner enablement initiative, McAfee launched the new CloudRunner platform, a free on-demand platform that enables partners to access McAfee’s product portfolio via the cloud. With CloudRunner, partners can build a demo environment in an average of five minutes without the need to have an appliance, box or virtual machine set up in a customer’s environment, McAfee said.
CloudRunner will be available in early November and will include, McAfee Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), McAfee Endpoint, and McAfee Network Security Platform (NSP) environments.
In another initiative in this line, McAfee introduced post-sales services training and certifications, which include eight, four-day, instructor led Post-Sales Services Enablement, including NGFW, McAfee Security Information Event Management, McAfee e-Policy Orchestrator, NSP, McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention, McAfee Advanced Threat Defense, McAfee Drive Encryption, McAfee Application Control and McAfee Change Control.
Upon passing the associated exam, course participants are recognized as a Certified McAfee Security Specialist (CMSS), validating their installation, configuration, management and basic architecture knowledge.
McAfee also creates a service specialization built under the new partner program framework. It will also be the first McAfee Specialization that uses the CMSS certification as a core requirement. Available in the second half of 2015, the specialization will enable partners to more effectively deliver implementation services helping drive partner profitability and customer satisfaction.
To improve partner experience, the company announced the Partner 360 Dashboard that provides partners with a detailed analysis of their performance and profitability, allowing them to make better business decisions.
Partner 360 Dashboard provides a detailed view into approximately 10 different business indicators, including sales performance, rebate and marketing development funds. The platform will be piloted with a select group of North America partners in Q4 2014 with a broader roll out aimed for the first half of 2015.
With the motto, “Think Big, Win Big,” McAfee also launched a new marketing platform as part of the McAfee SMART marketing initiative to give partners the tools needed to run their own marketing activities including syndicated web content, email marketing, social media syndication and website analytics.
editor@infotechlead.com
