McAfee Boosts Margins 25 Percent Under New Deal Registration Program

The deal registration program is one of the first signs that McAfee is willing to flex its financial muscle under the umbrella of $44 billion parent company Intel.

McAfee unveiled the new deal registration program to solution providers at CRN parent Everything Channel's XChange Conference in Denver this week.

McAfee Senior Vice President Worldwide Channels Alex Thurber called the new program a "game changer" for security solution providers.

"This is a huge deal," said Thurber in an interview with CRN. "Partners sell what they can make money on. At the end of the day it is the sales guy, the feet on the street, who help drive brand and product preference. And 99 percent of the time they are paid on margin. We just drastically increased their opportunity to make money."

Thurber said the new deal registration program represents a huge new investment by McAfee. In fact, Thurber called it the largest investment for partner profitability in the "company's history." He said the program is a sign that McAfee will continue to aggressively "evolve" partner program incentives under Intel.

The deal registration programs comes nearly six months after Intel finalized its $7.78 billion acquisition of McAfee, which is being run as a subsidiary of Intel. Some solution providers believe the Intel-McAfee union has the potential to solve once and for all the security problems plaguing PCs and other devices powered by Intel processors.

Thurber says one problem that could be solved with Intel and McAfee working together is to reduce energy consumption costs by using existing chip technology to turn a PC on during off hours for security updates. Intel's current Sandy Bridge processors have wake on signal technology.

"Today everybody has to leave their PC on at night to get it updated," Thurber said, speaking about the potential for the Intel-McAfee marriage. "That is a pain. What if we were able to properly implement existing features in the chips like in the middle of the night we wake up the PC, we update it and then we shut it back down again. That would be kind of a logical thing to look at with existing technology."

The McAfee deal registration program was finalized after a pilot program that showed dramatic gains in sales for participating partners. "The pilot blew everybody away," said Thurber.

Accuvant, one of the leading security solution providers in the country, was one of the companies that saw increased sales under the deal registration pilot program, said Thurber.

The 25 percent margin boost applies to Elite, Premier and Select channel partners on new registered deals and up to ten percent on upgrades for various McAfee solution suites.

McAfee said Associate partners can also take advantage of a limited version of the program with up to ten percent margin protection.

McAfee is promising a 48 hour turnaround on accepting or denying deal registration requests by partners.