McAfee vows to swell resellers' bottom lines with MEGA framework

McAfee has herded its channel "profitability" programmes into one mega global framework as it continues to court resellers.

The security giant has put six schemes – including deal registration, tiered pricing and rebates – into its Profitability Stack.

In a PR statement, McAfee senior veep of worldwide channels Gavin Struthers said the vendor had "made a huge leap forward by setting a new profitability standard in the security industry".

"We will continue to listen to our partners and aggressively evolve our channel programmes as part of our relentless pursuit to deliver unprecedented value to them," Struthers added.

If his comments sound like overkill – and they do – there is a good reason; the company has a chequered history in the market with resellers, said Andy Buss, services director at Freeform Dynamics.

He said McAfee "flip-flopped" between direct and indirect sales for the best part of a decade and resellers that invested time and money in the accreditations became disillusioned by the inconsistency.

The management team was overhauled last year. Gert Jan Shenk came on board as EMEA president from Juniper and revamped the channel team, also bringing across his channel general David Small.

The vendor is now 100 per cent indirect, said Buss, with direct sales fulfilled by channel "so there is less conflict" and there is also some predictability in upfront margins and a faster special bid process.

The latest programmatic changes are to hand resellers additional "front-end margin, back-end rebates or sales incentives for new or existing business, up-selling or cross-selling", said McAfee.

Through deal reg, the vendor is stumping up 25 per cent more margin on top of the standard sales margin for resellers that manage to win net new customers or those that flog suite upgrades. ®