McAfee bullish on growth

By Alex Kayle for Trellix
Johannesburg, 07 Apr 2009

Security solution giant McAfee has appointed Jayson O'Reilly as the company's regional manager for Africa. O'Reilly says the company's business strategy for this year is to focus on channel and to aggressively expand into the continent.

In addition, McAfee is pushing its partner development model globally, which gives incentives to its partners to help them grow their businesses. O'Reilly says McAfee's business is growing significantly in SA, despite the economic crisis and companies' IT budgets being slashed. McAfee has localised its pricing and technical support to cut costs for its customers.

According to a McAfee research report, entitled: 'Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information', an average company has $12 million of sensitive information resting on their systems. Countries have varying standards and the world is in an economic crisis, so data loss has become an increasing problem.

Because of this, O'Reilly says, McAfee is driving its data protection solution. The company is working alongside analyst firms Forrester Research and Gartner to develop an investment calculator to show companies how security solutions can save them money.

Some of the biggest security challenges facing companies is the growing trend of organised crime syndicates using Trojans and advanced worms to search for and gain confidential and valuable information. In light of this, O'Reilly points out that companies can no longer sit back and consider their security as a simple perimeter, they need to implement an entire integrated solution.

Changing networks

O'Reilly says: “The business network has changed. With more mobile workforces in the industry, companies need to deal with securing laptops and mobile devices connecting with their networks. One of the biggest threats we're seeing at the moment is the Conficker virus, which continuously changes and updates itself when new anti-virus products come into the market.

“Hackers are getting clever. More people are taking advantage of the social networking sites and YouTubes of the world. You can even find Trojan programs for sale on the Internet, for a $100 000 you can purchase a whole package of Trojans. Phishing, we've found, is a big challenge for the banking environment. The economic crisis is driving threats, but there are good strategies in place for companies to prevent it in a structured away.”

Jan van Vliet, McAfee sales VP for emerging markets, says McAfee is significantly investing in the development of the emerging market: “From 1 January we have created a fourth region, which comprises East, Europe, Russia and Africa. We are targeting growth in the range of 50% in the emerging markets. In these economic times, we are the single largest security company and we are the most advanced solution in that it's all centrally managed and it delivers a huge cost saving point solution each with its own management centre. With central reporting and repository, we have shown customers that we can save them substantial amounts of money.”

Daan Jeroen Hakkert, McAfee director for channel for the EEMEA region, agrees with Van Vliet, seeing potential in the continent. He says McAfee is looking to considerably expand its channel base: “Education, visibility, and channel enablement is key to driving McAfee's solutions. We are listening to our customers and addressing the needs of the emerging market. Cyber threats are growing and we expect them to grow even more this year, because of the economic crisis, and we are committed to keep up with these growing threat trends.”