Security solutions vendor McAfee is looking to recruit key resellers in SA in order to grow its market share in the SME and commercial space.
This was revealed by Chanel Homan, channel manager at McAfee SA, who points out that the channel is the most critical part of McAfee/Intel Securities' business as the company is a full channel organisation and does not do any direct business locally.
"The channel is an extension of our own team, be it sales or technical expertise, and together we offer strategic knowledge to the South African market on IT security solutions. They are our voice in the market and without the shared passion for McAfee solutions, we would not be as successful as we are today," says Homan.
She notes that the channel strategy for 2014 is to recruit few, but key, resellers to help the vendor grow the commercial and SME space as well as enable existing resellers to be more profitable and grow within their existing end-user accounts by providing in-depth McAfee sales and technical expertise.
According to Homan, one of the vendor's biggest aims is to enable its resellers technically to grow their profit by being the McAFee services arm into new and existing accounts which, in turn, help them grow their footprint and relationships with the clients and, most importantly, their margins.
She believes the biggest opportunity at the moment locally is the commercial and SME market.
"This market is relatively still untapped and, with the correct resellers and focus, can form quite a big portion of a reseller's monthly revenue."
Another big opportunity that McAfee is investing in heavily is the managed services provider space, Homan notes.
"We see a lot of big and some small clients opting for a more opex instead of a capex option when it comes to buying new kit or renewing. About 90% of our product stack is now available on the managed security service provider programme to end-users or resellers as our hardware was just added to the list at the end of February this year," she says.
Describing some challenges in managing the local channel, Homan says: "The main challenge, I would say, is that too many resellers are going after the same business in the market, when there is so much more new business to focus on in South Africa.
"Our McAfee Channel Profitability Stack programme has been designed to change that focus of all resellers on new business in the commercial and SME space with regards to more back-end rebate that can be earned by resellers on new business, more deal registration discounting will apply if they register a new opportunity and we drive our quarterly incentives with focus on new business within this space where the sales and technical guys at the resellers will benefit far more from it."
McAfee currently has more than 40 transacting resellers in SA ranging from big enterprise resellers to smaller SME resellers that the company is currently working with to grow their portfolio beyond the traditional AV.
"The aim is to grow these 40+ resellers to be sales and technically enabled to reach the next status level where they can start earning more rebates and incentives to invest back into the business to help grow their security team," Homan concludes.
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