Gert Jan Schenk
President of EMEA Gert-Jan Schenk is President of EMEA at McAfee with 20 years of experience in global sales and ...
I’ve travelled quite a bit around the EMEA theatre over the last few weeks. My first destination was Istanbul with a very high level enterprise class event in partnership with IDC at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art). We had an exceptional private visit to the retrospective “Fifty years of modern walls” by the well-known contemporary artist Burhan Doğançay, I enjoyed meeting with some of our top clients. I also had a great lunch at the restaurant Vogue with a key Turkish business editor. There is no doubt that our McAfee location in Istanbul is what we can call an office with a view! I am impressed with this city and the innovative development plans of Turkish companies.
One of the things that really matters to me is our people. And when it happens that at two different events I hear some of our young and most talented pre-sales people telling customers that they wish McAfee to be the last company they work for because they cannot imagine a better place to work in the security area, I can tell you that this sounds like music to my ears. I can’t help but quote one of them: “ McAfee is the best company in the market, if you want to be in the security business, If you are with McAfee, you are at the top. I would not want to go elsewhere”. What a powerful message this is!
After Istanbul and a couple of worldwide management calls with the corporate team, I moved on to Marbella where we were having our EMEA Partner Summit. When I joined McAfee a year and half ago, one of my first objectives was to re-energize our Partners in EMEA. Having a summit together is part of that new drive and strategy. I was pleased to welcome with Joe Sexton, EVP Worldwide Sales, Gavin Struthers, SVP Channel Sales and David Small VP Channel & Commercial Sales – EMEA, about 100 of our key distributors and value added resellers. The location was absolutely fantastic. So was the program and the organisation. It was a world class event! On the first day, Gavin and David shared our worldwide & EMEA channel programs, I gave a business update on our strategy in EMEA, Philippe Adam, VP Marketing – EMEA, showed the new marketing resources we put at the disposal of our channels, Jorge Lang, Director Innovation & Solutions at Intel came to speak about their vision and their new generation of Ultrabooks, Jon Parkes, VP Pre Sales – EMEA highlighted our solution opportunity and eventually, Joe Sexton presented our value added Enterprise Security Platform (ESP). One of our Partners, Caretower, gave a keynote presentation about what it is like to work with McAfee. The second day was focused on breakout sessions and some quality time off. We also organized in parallel, a press and analyst summit. And the feedback I got from the journalists and analysts about our strategy and our channel programs was really positive, as were the articles which followed the press briefings and interviews. Moreover, all the customers and partners I met with were convinced of the benefits of our relationship with our mother company Intel and the joint innovative product roadmap we are developing together. One thing I noticed during this Partner Summit was how many people were connected and instantaneously tweeting the latest news from their smartphone as I did. By the way, you can also follow me via my twitter account : @GertJanSchenk.
To close the summit I held the EMEA management team meeting for 2013 planning. It was a good session and we see tremendous opportunities in EMEA.
In the last couple of weeks we also launched our McAfee Enhanced Cloud Security Platform which supports companies to face the challenge for cloud adoption via securing email, web and identity, important topics in fact. We welcomed some important customers to our EBC in Amsterdam where they could visualise the worldwide threat landscape and the latest McAfee demos.
Right now I am fully busy focused on the end of the quarter, making sure our teams get all the support they need. I am proud of being with McAfee but also to have such a great team in the theatre. There will be more to come soon here on my Blog and on Twitter.
Tags: Cybercrime, Network Security
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