Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 22 | Page 52

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. C 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 52 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