A Golden Triangle for McAfee EMEA

You have not heard from me for a while. And unfortunately, there was a good reason for that. I broke my shoulder by skiing. It was in fact a stupid accident but that’s what most accidents are stupid aren’t they? So the last couple of weeks were no big fun for me. But I must say that I am nicely surprised to see how fast I am recovering.  The fact that we have a lot of exciting things going on at the moment in EMEA is certainly contributing to that fast recovery. Just before my accident I traveled to Miami with my entire EMEA Sale crew to attend our Worldwide Sales Kick off. It was an amazing event. Our corporate executives, Mike DeCesare, Todd Gebhart, Joe Sexton, David Milam, Stuart McLure, Michael Fey, they were all there to share with us McAfee’s vision and global strategy:

• Making Mobilie Security Mainstream
• Offering Security Connected Solution to our Enterprise, Public Sector & Service Provider customers
• Developing Commercial & SMB through selected channels.
• Leveraging the McAfee Intel relationship

Regarding Intel, Renée James SVP and general manager of the Software and Services Group at Intel and chairman at McAfee made us the pleasure to come. Renée walked us through the Intel vision and explained us coming projects and developments involving McAfee and  Wind River to address the challenges of securing 50 Billion connected devices in 2020  I presented twice during the Sales Kick Off. One presentation was a keynote where I introduced the best way to deliver our security connected corporate pitch. The other one was at our EMEA Breakout session with all our EMEA Sales folks. I shared our 2011 results and accomplishments with particular good outcomes in areas such as Network Security, Content Security and McAfee Portfolio. I recognized our top performing regions and encouraged the others to enter the race and surpass our 2011 performers.  And last but not least, I gave direction and goals for 2012, the most important year ever. Our Golden Triangle with our three magic P’s for People, Partners and Portfolio is the McAfee EMEA symbol and mantra for 2012.

P of People is at the top of our Golden Triangle because at first a company is not about the best product or solutions, it’s about the best people, they are the ones who will make it happen. We will reward our top performers; develop our talents, hire the best people in the market and offer a true career path. You don’t come to McAfee for a job, you come for a career.

We will continue to strengthen our existing relationship with our existing partners while recruiting new partners for some of our specific markets. Our objective is to ensure profitability, predictability and ease to do business.

By portfolio we mean bringing and proofing the full McAfee value to our customers. In fact, while preparing the corporate pitch, it astounded me to see again the unique value we bring to our customers through our holistic Security Connected Solution.  We offer end point , network  and information security, with integrated management including situation & event management, and the power of the most comprehensive threat intelligence in the market : Global Threat Intelligence (GTI).

Q1 was really busy. Back to our number one priority, people, we conducted our MyVoice Employee Survey on a worldwide basis. In EMEA, I was satisfied by our high response rate which testifies of people’s commitment in EMEA.  We took part at three major trade shows :

• RSA Conference  in San Francisco with our CTO Stuart McClure  as Keynote speaker.
• Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where we announced important new features for our Enteprise Mobile Management (EMM) platform such as Expanded Data Security, Application Security and Ease of Administration.  Mobile devices are predicted to be the new malware frontier. At McAfee, we enable our customers, thanks to ePO and GTI, to bring mobile devices in their existing infrastructure and therefore preserve their investments.
• Cebit in Hannover, a true success for our German and Central European team with over 30 press interviews, the most visited stand of the Security Hall and a visit for a demonstration of the EU Commissioner Neelie Kroess.

We released three major publications :

• The Cyberdefense report which McAfee asked the Security & Defense Agenda (SDA), an independent think-tank to produce. The report stack ranks the degree to which governments are prepared to withstand cyber-attacks. The report was presented in Washington and in Brussels before a panel of 200 experts and professionals. The report reveals major challenges in Cyber Readiness. It appears that Finland, Israel and Sweden Lead the Pack in terms of protection.
• Our Q4 2011Threat Report, revealed that malware surpassed the company’s estimate of 75 millions unique malware samples last year. Mobile malware continued to increase and recorded its busiest year to date.
• And finally, in the recently published State of Security white paper, McAfee explains that to protection of information assets in a highly regulated world where the corporate infrastructure expands beyond the traditional network perimeter can only be done on the basis of a sound and structured Strategic Security Plan (SSP). McAfee’s SSP is considered as a standard in the industry

We also had a lot of interesting customer and partner visits at our Executive Briefing Center in Amsterdam. The threat landscape and new demonstrations impressed our visitors. We organized there an Analyst Summit with ten analysts coming from all over Europe.  I was pleased to see the very positive feedback we got from these analysts regarding our strategy in EMEA and our Security Connected approach.

My next couple of weeks is really packed. I, my EMEA management team and our entire sales forces are determined to successfully close Q1 2012. It is like a race; it’s competitive, challenging, high energy demanding and adrenaline rushing. No doubt I like it!

Tags: Cybercrime, mobile security, Network Security