2008 a Year to Remember (by Dave DeWalt)

2008 has been a banner year for McAfee and I’m very proud of what we have accomplished.  We have continued to fight for a noble cause: protecting our customers from the bad guys and looking for new ways to stay ahead.  There have been so many things to be proud of that it’s hard to know where to start, but here are a few corporate highlights.

We’ve continued to build our leadership through acquisitions and this year made two major additions to our portfolio.  We acquired Reconnex, a leader in the data protection market, which provided McAfee with unique technology that learns and adapts to automate the ongoing protection of data.

We also acquired Secure Computing, and in doing so became not only the undisputed leader in network security, but cemented our leadership as the world’s largest pure-play security provider.

On the product side, we’ve continued to innovate, announcing the world’s first unified approach to solving the complex Network Access Control (NAC) problem, linking endpoint and network security with access control and compliance, all centrally managed by McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator.

At the same time, we continued to establish ePO as a critical piece of security management architecture with more than 30 partners joining our Security Innovation Alliance.

We held our first-ever user conference, FOCUS 08, which was a smashing success with more than 1,200 attendees from 47 countries.  At the conference we announced major partnerships with HP, Intel and VMWare to deliver security with PC hardware, networking components and virtualization software.  We also unveiled a major initiative to fight cybercrime which will continue to guide our efforts throughout 2009.

We have been very fortunate this year and have worked hard to sell products even during challenging economic times.  We reported record revenue of $410 million for the third quarter of 2008, representing 27% growth year over year.  We’ve been successful this year, in part, because our customers recognize that security is not a luxury, and as the economy worsens it’s even more critical that they actively protect their information assets.

Finally, just this week, McAfee was listed on the S&P 500.  This is a significant achievement for our company, our employees, our customers and our shareholders.

We will continue working together to deliver even greater shareholder value in 2009.

Wishing everyone a happy and SAFE holiday season,

Dave

Tags: Dave DeWalt, dewalt