'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.