LAS VEGAS– McAfee has repackaged and re-priced several of its solutions for the channel.
Security solutions for mobility, apps, risk, real time, ePO, email, device control, firewall, encryption and end point will now be packaged together for the channel. They will also come with a new pricing structure, said Steve Redman, executive vice president of global sales for McAfee.
Redman admitted that one of the company’s biggest problems was that in the commercial market more than 68 per cent of deals went through the deal desk. “To me that’s not a company that is easy to do business with. Even for $50,000 deals we could not get the price right and we are sorry,” Redman told an audience of about 400 channel partners at the Focus conference, held here.
The solution is to this problem comes in a three part approach. The first is to repackage the solutions and price them accordingly for partner engagement. The second part is to provide simple implementation for partner deployment and thirdly position the solutions suites for advanced protection.
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Matthew Gyde, global general manager for security at Dimension Data, told CDN that this repackaging will drive new profits into the company’s business.
“This will enable us to go to clients with a new OPEX, utility style package and price, which is very important in the security space and what customers are asking for,” Gyde said.
Steve Duncan, vice president of security and strategy for solution provider Lumenate, said McAfee’s repackaging and pricing strategy was kept simple for the channel.
“I think McAfee bit the bullet a little bit here and sacrificed on the high end so that the channel can get a profitable program and it’s going to be a lot easier for the customers too because they no longer have to buy six or seven solutions,” Duncan said.
McAfee is also offering on-demand licensing for the OPEX model.
Redman added that competitors specifically Symantec, Kaspersky, Trend Micro and Sophos were beating McAfee in the marketplace even though they had comparable solutions because the company was unable to package the products correctly.
The only solution that will not be part of this package is the full disk encryption product.