Security vendor McAfee, now Intel Security, is expanding its effort into the managed services providers (MSP) community by offering, for the first time, hardware appliances in a pay-as-you-go financial model.
Company channel chief Gavin Struthers told CDN that his move is a shared-risk model with the company and the MSP in terms of changing the way compensation is handed out to McAfee’s sales force. In this model partner will not have to pay for the products up front and McAfee reps will be paid the same for sales on-premise and through an MSP.
“This is a powerful statement and a big investment for McAfee,” Struthers said.
According to him, McAfee is seeing increased demand for MSPs. Currently one in five customers are looking to engage with an MSP and the addressable market is reaching $13 billion and it’s double the growth of on-premise.
“Customers are going from capex to opex model and looking for predictable budgets. With all the escalating threats out there customers understand that they are unable to do it by themselves and there is an expertise gap in managing the complexity. Those are the drivers for this decision to expand the MSP program,” Struthers added.
The updated McAfee MSP Program will now include access to Next Generation Firewall, Enterprise Security Manager, Network Security Platform and Advanced Threat Defense. In addition, McAfee is expanding the number of software products available with its authentication solutions line to the MSP Program.
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The pay-as-you-go model will work this way. There will be a highly discounted hardware up front for partners. “This will take the sting away and lower the hardware appliance costs,” he said. From there they will be charged a monthly fee for using the device based on device capacity. MSPs will be asked to report the activity to McAfee each month and from there they will get paid.
MSP partners will then be certified tier one or two and own the license essentially becoming the McAfee customer.
McAfee also will provide reference designs and blueprints for faster implementation as well as an MSP calculator to establish pricing.
Struthers said that McAfee is in the midst of recruiting 140 new MSP partners in the last three quarters of which 20 are in Canada.