‘Channel is the security architecture for McAfee customers’

Girish Gargeshwari, Director - Sales for Commercial & SMB business, India, McAfee while giving a brief about the current security industry in India also recounts the channel eco-system that exists for McAfee today and how it stands as a pillar of strength in serving the ever-growing security needs of McAfee’s customers - 
 

The ever evolving dynamics of the security landscape is providing McAfee with challenges as well as opportunities. This is further driving the security company to innovate and create solutions for both enterprises and consumers. Today, the fact remains that more and more organizations are accessing customer’s data and the risk of a cyber attack is more prevalent. 

“In the recent times, we have witnessed a heightened increase in the awareness levels across enterprises and the same can be corroborated with the appointment of Gulshan Rai as the first chief of cybersecurity, a post created to address the growing e-threats in the country. Awareness prompts readiness and owning this onus has been a major imperative for McAfee,” says Girish Gargeshwari, Director - Sales for Commercial & SMB business, India, McAfee while setting the context for the discussion. 

The security industry is one of the most fragmented of any in IT and no one provider delivers the entire threat defense lifecycle. McAfee’s strategy is however to create an integrated security system that automates the threat defense lifecycle so that customers can address more threats faster with fewer resources. With Digital India initiative, Smart Cities, Aadhar programme and proliferation of e-wallets, India is one of the key markets where McAfee feels it can make a big difference. 

“We believe that there’s power in working together with people, products and solutions, organizations and industries working together. In line with our ‘Together is Power’ approach, McAfee aims to build a diversified defense across protection, detection and correction and leverage best-of-breed technologies without exorbitant complexity. 

McAfee has also officially acquired Skyhigh Networks, the leader in the cloud access security broker category (CASB) market. The acquisition aims to accelerate McAfee’s innovation and growth as a company, singularly focused on being the preferred cybersecurity partner for customers. “Through our collaborations with players like Cisco and IBM Security throughout the security industry, we further aim to close information gaps, breaking silos and providing the visibility we need to protect our most important assets from cybercriminals,” asserts Girish.

Go-to-market strategy...
McAfee considers channel as the security architecture for their customers. Its 3 key channel priorities will be - Strategic Engagement, Mutual Growth and Profitability, and Better Customer Outcomes. Its strategy is to continue to go deeper and align with fewer select set of partners who have the capabilities its customers are looking for. “We will drive mutual growth and profitability through stronger account engagement, where we engage earlier and more often with our partners,” says Girish.

The McAfee Security Innovation Alliance (SIA) technology partnering program comprises more than 150 vendor security partners who deliver tightly integrated, differentiated and lab-tested solutions that help customers address all stages of the threat defense lifecycle by enhancing, augmenting, strengthening and broadening the core functionality of McAfee products. 

“From a sales perspective, we look forward to leading a market shift in security from ‘conspicuous consumption’ to more service oriented engagements with strategic partnerships. India is one of the fastest growing businesses in APAC for McAfee and we are always working on awareness and moving to readiness with the help of our partner community,” he says. 

McAfee is tailoring partner programs with distributors across APAC and India, to provide benefits to partners by adding value to their security stack of products, solutions and services. 

“Today most of the customers have a common problem where they are making continuous investments in security technologies, but the results may not match up to the expectation of the desired outcome. As we stay very close to our researchers, we learn about new customer trends which in turn help us in strategizing. For instance, our customers are interested in a layered security approach, which means using multiple security controls to protect against threats. Also on the channels side, The Service Delivery Specialization is the best way for McAfee partners to differentiate themselves from the competition and demonstrate they have the capability and capacity to deploy services for McAfee products,” points out Girish. 

McAfee is thus well positioned to be #1 security player to serve the Indian market. It also looks forward to broadening its tier-2 partner play in the market.