'We are now the only pure-play security vendor in the world'

During his recent visit to India to announce the availability of its global

partner program, the McAfee Security Alliance, Law Chee Keong, channels

director, Asia-Pacific spoke to Rajneesh De of Dataquest about McAfee's

positioning and the security trends emerging in enterprises. Excerpts:

How is McAfee positioning itself?



McAfee is positioning itself as a pure security software company. In fact,

it would not be an exaggeration to claim that we are globally the only pure-play

security vendor in the market today. Security software involves four domains,

gateway, perimeter, server, and desktop. Any pure-play security vendor today

needs to have a single console management to take care of the blended threats

facing organizations. Our ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) takes care of this.

We have hived off our networking business. In fact, the main purpose of

re-branding ourselves as McAfee from Network Associates was to avoid any

confusion and reiterate our positioning as a pure security vendor.

Is adoption of integrated security appliances happening at the cost of the

best-of-breed approach?



This depends on the vendor's interpretation of integrated security

appliances. What many enterprises are adopting today are different products

integrated into one suite. Best-of-breed approach is definitely not dead but

because of complexities involved in the integration issues, these organizations

are preferring the single-suite model. However, some vendors are calling these

solutions as integrated security appliances, though in most cases they do not

work well in certain functionalities.

Law Chee Keong

SMBs are increasingly opting for an integrated approach as that brings down

both their capex and opex. An integrated suite like McAfee's ePO Lite is an

ideal solution for these SMBs. Perhaps this explains why our SMB revenues are

growing faster-at 35%-than our enterprise revenue, which are at 25%.

How is Mcafee strengthening its distribution model in India and how would

it impact the current setup?



Like everywhere else in the world, in India too McAfee follows the 100%

indirect sales model. We are now bringing our global partner program, McAfee

Security Alliance, to India. This does not mean that we are discontinuing our

existing partners, but the whole network is now coming under a more planned

structure. While we have large distributors like Ingram Micro and Redington, our

Sis and resellers are being tiered into three levels, elite, premier, and

associate under this new program.

Currently, we have four national-level SI partners including Datacraft, CMC,

HCL, and SecureSynergy besides six partners each in north, south, and west

regions besides 300 plus resellers. Following the structured approach of McAfee

Security Alliance program, we intend to double both our national-level partners

and resellers, in less than a year.