McAfee Partners With Softek In Pushing Cloud Services

Softek said Tuesday that it would add McAfee's EMail Protection Service and Web Protection Service to its portfolio, distributing the products to resellers looking to sell cloud-based e-mail, Web security and e-mail archiving. The deal makes Softek a member of the McAfee PartnerFocus Program, which means the company will be responsible for signing, training and supporting resellers.

Softek takes Intel-owned McAfee back to four U.K. distributors, after dropping Exclusive Networks last year following a seven-month distribution review. Softek joins Arrow ECS, Ingram Micro and Compter 2000.

McAfee is using distributors to expand its cloud-based business among SMBs. Alex Thurber, senior vice president of worldwide channel operations for McAfee, said SMBs are a sweet spot because they have less money to spend than large corporations in battling security threats that are growing more sophisticated. Web-based security software managed by a third party gives SMBs the option of protection via monthly subscription.

"They (SMBs) are under the same amount of security threat as the largest enterprise ... but they can't possibly have the resources, and usually wouldn't have the capital expenditure budget, to provide that same level of security themselves," Thurber said in a recent interview.

McAfee launched the Managed Service Partner program in October to entice more resellers into selling McAfee cloud-based services. Thurber claims the managed services market overall is valued at $17 billion and growing 17 percent a year.

McAfee has 24,000 resellers and distributors, which account for 86 percent of sales. Thurber's goal is to up that number to more than 90 percent next year.