McAfee FOCUS Day 1: Intel, McAfee Talk Channel, Innovation

Five to Thrive: McAfee Co-President Mike DeCesare identified five ways McAfee and Intel are going to help their channel partners accelerate their businesses:  McAfee profitability programs, technical enablement, focused partner engagement, improved channel collaboration and marketing leads.

Why Intel Bought McAfee: Intel Senior Vice President Renee J. James gave some insight into why Intel decided to buy McAfee in August 2010 for more than $7 billion. Intel surveyed its partners and customers and found that overwhelmingly, security was their  No. 1 priority. Moreover, security was one of the only features that customers in every segment said they were willing to pay more for, even through an economic recession. So why McAfee? “We feel very confident that McAfee was the best-positioned company at the cloud and platform level to begin to solve security in a different way,” James said. “McAfee’s mission is to improve the security of the world, and Intel shares that mission.”

Hands-off SMBs, Enterprise: Before a hall full of Intel and McAfee partners, executives from both companies reiterated their plan to get out of the sales game in the SMB and enterprise sectors. Instead, McAfee and Intel want the two markets to be 100 percent channel-driven.

McAfee to Stand Alone: James and McAfee Executive Vice President of Global Sales Joe Sexton stressed the need to integrate more Intel and McAfee solutions to solve security issues while allowing McAfee to grow as its own company. “People ask what we’re going to do with [McAfee]. The answer is nothing,” James said. “We are going to keep them a stand-alone company. We will work with them to invest in their future product line based on where we think the future of security is going to go.” He noted the two companies don’t even have very much overlap among their partner communities. Meanwhile, Sexton described the Intel and McAfee “1+1 =3” vision, meaning  combining McAfee and Intel solutions to create “McAfee 3.0, a game-changer in the security industry.”

Product Announcements: Intel and McAfee teased that day two of the conference will feature two new security solution announcements. No details were given, but there was a lot of talk about mobile devices and hardware-software combined solutions. We’ll see if that was an indication of what is to come during day two.