McAfee Seeking 'ACE' Partners To Drive Technical Pre-Sales Efforts

On Tuesday at McAfee's annual Partner Summit, McAfee announced the global launch of its ACE program, which stands for Accredited Channel Engineer. As McAfee's top pre-sales certification, ACE is designed to get partners more involved with pre-sales activity and technical discussions with customers, Alex Thurber, McAfee's senior vice president of worldwide channel operations, told attendees.

"This isn't just about building an artificial environment for security engineers. We want you to be seen by our field sales teams as the equivalent of the McAfee security engineers," Thurber said. "By this time next year, every McAfee Elite partner should have at least one ACE on staff."

Becoming an ACE is no walk in the park: It's an advanced program that requires partners to undergo a significant amount of training. But in return for their investment, ACE partners will gain elevated status within the McAfee partner program that could lead to additional business opportunities, Thurber said.

"You're going to be out with our field. When one of your security engineers becomes an ACE, we'll notify our field team that they have a new resource," he said. "This will help in pre-sales, as your security engineer will be looking across at the technical person from the customer and will help close the deal."

McAfee also launched its Authorized Support Provider program, which reflects the vendor's desire to get partners more involved in post-sales discussions with their customers. Under the program, McAfee trains partners to handle first- and second-level support calls from customers, and shows them when to escalate calls to McAfee's third-level support engineers.

The Authorized Support Provider is now open to McAfee's Elite partners, and the eight partners around the world that took part in the program pilot have seen a 43 percent increase in bookings and increased customer satisfaction, according to Thurber.

"For partners, the competitive advantage is not just selling McAfee solutions, but also maintaining the relationship with the customer for post-sales," he said.

Also new is the Managed Service Partner (MSP) program, in which VARs can sell McAfee powered services under their own brand and become more acquainted with what Thurber described as "the joys of monthly recurring revenue".

McAfee is providing detailed training for the MSP program, and partners will be required to meet higher booking figures and sales and technical requirements, Thurber said.

McAfee also kicked off a pilot of its SaaS Monthly Specialization, which is intended to help partners make the transition to the recurring revenue model and stems from technology gained from McAfee's 2009 acquisition of SaaS vendor MX Logic.

Under the SaaS Monthly Specialization, which is currently open only to U.S. partners, VARs will sell services, McAfee's distributor partners will handle billing and McAfee will handle service delivery, Thurber said.

"I know how important SaaS is to your business model, particularly in the SMB," he said. "Today, we have the infrastructure to truly support security-as-a-service."

Meanwhile, over the course of the past year McAfee has transitioned from two different e-learning systems to one, and that's making it easier for partners obtain and renew technical certifications, Thurber said. Instead of on-site training, McAfee is now providing partners with credits they can use to renew their technical certifications on their own.

In the past, "It drove me crazy that we would be pulling your resources out of the field just to re-train," Thurber said. "We're using that credits based approach to ensure that you'll have the flexibility to get your people certified in a way that fits your business model."

McAfee also tossed partners a bone by extending all of their technical certifications that were set to expire in 2012 until 2013. Unsurprisingly, Thurber's announcement of this elicited an enthusiastic response from partners at the event.