McAfee FOCUS 2011: More Partner Programs, Security Offerings

My time here at the McAfee FOCUS 2011 Security Conference is just about over. I leave you with the details on two major McAfee announcements around partner profitability and network security before I pack up and hit Dallas for the 2011 Tigerpaw User Conference.

During FOCUS, McAfee Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels Alex Thurber outlined McAfee’s three pillars for helping partners succeed:

To that end, McAfee announced three new partner initiatives. The first expands the McAfee SecurityAlliance Partner Program to include a new McAfee Managed Security Service Partner (MSSP) Program, giving McAfee MSP partners greater control over what they sell, as they can now market and deploy their own branded solutions. McAfee also created an automatic monthly renewal system for its MSP partners to help increase their monthly revenue.

The second initiative focuses on the SMB sector. The SMB Acceleration Deal Registration Program gives SMBs a 25 percent increase in their profit margins and will accelerate the approval process of SMBs to four hours. “I am very, very excited about the opportunity we have with SMBs,” Thurber said, adding more than 1,000 SMBs have already signed up for the program.

Finally, McAfee made some changes to encourage partners to invest in training by creating the McAfee Accredited Channel Engineer (ACE) Program. Partners with ACE-certified engineers will receive:

The company will give rewards credits for the following year’s certification requirements to companies with certified engineers. Additionally, McAfee is rolling out a new learning management system that will be available to partners in 2012. Finally, McAfee has pushed re-certification back to 2013 for partners that were supposed to be up for re-certification in 2012 so that they can get used to the new partner changes.

Keep in mind, this was a security conference. So McAfee didn’t send us away without rolling out a new security solution, McAfee Deep Defender, developed with Intel, which can detect almost all kernel-mode malware, according to the two companies. McAfee Deep Defender is the first solution built on top of McAfee’s DeepSAFE Technology and features real-time monitoring and central management in tandem with the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) and protection against known and unknown threats to environments.

In case you missed it, here are some highlights from day one of McAfee Focus 2011. See you all in Texas.