EXPERT SPEAK
MCAFEE’S EMEA PRESIDENT
ON PARTNERSHIPS, TRENDS
AND FUTURE GROWTH
At MPOWER Cybersecurity Summit,
Adam Philpott, President, EMEA McAfee,
talked to us about some of the key 2018
regional cybertrends, the importance of
the company’s channel partnerships and
its priorities for 2019.
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Can you tell us about McAfee’s
channel partnerships and the
importance of those to the business?
We [recently] had a partner day for the
EMEA region and had 250 partners there
which is significantly up from last year. I’ve
brought in a channel leader, Ed Baker, who
came in mid-way through the year.
I asked him to come in and just drastically
re-shape our channel strategy. And there’s a
myriad of things within that.
Some of the things within that, which
you wouldn’t necessarily consider, are our
culture. We need to have a much more
channel-centric, channel favourable culture,
because if we don’t build trust with the right
set of partners, they’re never going to be
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able to transact at the volumes required in
order to repilicably use their billable skills.
So it’s just going to be cost and then
loss of knowledge, cost and then loss of
knowledge rather than invest, re-use, re-use
– and that’s how they make profit.
For us, that also means our customers
get better outcomes and they’re not fully
dependent on our limited professional services
capacity. The partners have the capacity so
they get much better outcomes, quicker time
to value, less day two support cases etc.
Ed has come in to re-shape the strategy
and to simplify it, to focus it. To look at how it
integrates not just as a channel team but into
our sales organisation and the other functions
as well, so I think that’s really positive.
You can have a beautiful strategy but it’s
nothing without execution so for me FY 19 is
really about measuring that we’re doing the
stuff we say we’re going to do.
What will be the priorities for the
channel programme in 2019?
There will be three tiers of partners that
we really focus on. There will be global
service providers, we’ll have a small group
of those that are more global in nature and
that we invest time with, not just creating
managed services but in going to market on
managed services.
You see so many vendors which build a
managed service and they build it and think
that’s the finish line and it’s actually the