McAfee Revamps Deal Registration to Include Fatter Margins

McAfee is giving its partner program some serious love with the latest enhancements to its deal registration program. Designed to boost margins and improve the time to deal-registration approval, the changes aim to reward partners for their loyalty and entice associate partners to move up to higher-tiered statuses. The VAR Guy spoke to Alex Thurber, senior vice president of worldwide channels at McAfee, about the news. Here’s the scoop …

The bottom line for the new registration program is your bottom line by rewarding partners for securing new business deals, according to McAfee. The program started as a pilot run, which, Thurber said, was “… an incredible success,” leading McAfee to roll it out globally. Subsequently, the new registration program is now fully available to all Elite, Premier and Select channel partners, with small parts of the program available to associate partners. Upper-tiered partners are eligible for up to 25 percent margin protection on registered deals, while associates are offered 10 percent.

Thurber sees this as a deep investment in McAfee’s own community and channel as McAfee looks to maintain a foothold in the security landscape. “It’s the largest investment McAfee has ever made in the channel,” said Thurber, adding the program fulfills a promise made at McAfee Partner Summit to provide “new opportunities for margin and profit.” Thurber said McAfee has also revamped the entire registration process to ensure partners are comfortable investing in the complete McAfee sales cycle. “We’re working around the ease of doing business too, [because] one of the things we’ve heard from our channel is that it was cumbersome [to register].” McAfee has strived to revamp the overall process of submitting a deal registration — the company recognizes partners’ efforts to generate new business is time-sensitive and they want to be protected from other partners “swooping in.”

The VAR Guy asked Thurber if he thinks McAfee will gain new partners from this revamped program. “We have about 22,000 partners, but most are transactional. We’re … concentrating on the partners who invest with us. We’re not looking at this point to bring in a whole lot of more partners, [but] it might help associate partners move up to Tiered or Elite,” Thurber said. Of those 22,000 partners, he added, about 600 of them around the world are higher-level partners, with roughly half of them in the United States.

Thurber noted the new registration program compliments McAfee’s latest SMB specialization. For more details on McAfee’s partner program, check out the details here, along with Thurber’s recent speed date with The VAR Guy discussing the future of McAfee.