McAfee arms partners to go after SMB market

McAfee has announced a refreshed program to help resellers sell security solutions aimed directly at small and medium businesses.

Operating within the McAfee SecurityAlliance program, the SMB Specialisation program will help partners sell tailored security solutions to companies with under 250 staff, a market the vendor said is worth $7 billion.

The solutions encompass security for email, web, data and endpoints.

McAfee said SMB Specialisation would also help partners to become more profitable via increased opportunities to register deals while gaining access to a comprehensive range of enablement tools, turnkey marketing solutions and dedicated resources. 

“The growing SMB space offers attractive cross-sell, up-sell, and service revenue opportunities for our partners,” said Gavin Struthers, McAfee’s Asia Pacific director of channels.

“With the McAfee SMB Specialisation—the most robust program to sell security to the SMB customer, partners can simplify and accelerate their success in the SMB space.” 

The SMB specialisation program is backed up by McAfee’s partner acceleration resource centre, which provides McAfee SMB partners with 24/7 access to important information to help them drive SMB business.

It also provides partners with marketing materials and third party marketing platform as well as important information on SMBs including product overviews, product briefings, tutorials, best practices, sales tools, and marketing campaigns. 

McAfee has also announced more rewards and margin programs, deal registration through distribution and a rebate for SMB deals for the company’s SecurityAlliance Associate partners.

Emphasising its commitment to the small end of the market, McAfee has created the new role of Asia Pacific SMB sales manager, to be filled by former-Microsoft employee Robbie Upcroft.

“The SMB customer wants a local reseller to act as their trusted security advisor and who knows their unique business needs," Struthers said.

McAfee made no mention of plans to enable McAfee partners to embed security solutions into Intel chips or motherboards, one of the stated ambitions when the chip giant announced its acquisition of the security company a year ago.