This week at FOCUS, I’ve had an opportunity to speak with many customers, partners, and employees about the growth of the Security Innovation Alliance since we gathered at last year’s FOCUS. I’ve talked about how we’ve made some major strides across many areas: we’ve released multiple versions of our SDKs, introduced updated versions of our core products, increased the number of program partners, and added new avenues for cooperation with our partners and their sales teams. In comparison with last year, we have more than doubled the number of partners in the SIA. We have already signed more than 80 partners across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia, and 40 of these have integrations that have been inspected by McAfee. Our customers and channel partners can now rely on a partner ecosystem which delivers solutions that are far more comprehensive than any that can be obtained from any single security vendor.
On Tuesday we hosted our second annual SIA Developer Conference in Las Vegas, which was held in conjunction with FOCUS 09, McAfee’s user conference (more on that in a moment). As part of the Developer Conference, we awarded AirPatrol Corporation the “2009 SIA Most Innovative Partner.” We present this prestigious award annually to the SIA partner that most creatively leverages McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) software to deliver joint customer value. AirPatrol Corporation is leveraging the power of ePO through the integration of their Wireless Policy Manager, and we expect that our joint solution will stimulate powerful new workflows for security and compliance.

AirPatrol receives 2009 SIA Most Innovative Partner award from McAfee CEO, Dave DeWalt
FOCUS 09 was sponsored in part this year by more than 20 SIA partners who are showcasing completed or upcoming integrations. In yesterday’s SIA momentum press release, we announced that we’ve added many new partners to the program since our July 2009 announcement. The new Associate Partners include AirTight Networks, Allen Corp. of America, Buysec, Correlog, Courion, Damballa, Evidian, Hitachi, Liquid Machines, NSSPlus, Quest Software, Tier-3 and Validity. We also added eight new Technology Partners whose integration has been inspected by McAfee, including Absolute Identification, eIQnetworks, Guardium, HBGary, Intellitactics, Prevari, Triumfant and Verdiem. Finally, we added five partners to our Sales Teaming Program from our Technology Partner ranks, and we were pleased to advance Absolute Identification, ArcSight, eIQnetworks, Intellitactics and Verdiem to this level of partnership.
While I’m really excited about the growth we’ve delivered thus far, I am even more energized by the incremental possibilities that exist. Dave DeWalt, our President and CEO, talked about this during his keynote this morning: as we continue to interlock our own solutions with our partner solutions, from silicon to satellite, we are creating an infrastructure that can respond much more quickly to threats, irrespective of source, location of origin, or threat vector. I believe feeding the threat intelligence information that our existing and expanding partner base captures into McAfee’s already robust threat intelligence capabilities, will not only give us tremendous operational efficiencies, but will also vastly increase the visibility of new threats and the velocity with which we can remove them. And when our partners collect this more sophisticated information from our platforms, and continue to add their new information, we will benefit from a very interesting multiplier effect.
The Security Innovation Alliance is the leading open security platform in the industry and is proving its success in the development of interoperable security solutions. The threats are not standing still, and neither are we. We are always looking for new, innovative ways to help our customers solve ever-more complex problems. And by banding together with our world-class partners, we are leading the charge in helping to make our customers more secure.
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