McAfee Inc. (NYSE: MFE) and CommVault (MASDAQ: CVLT), together announced last month their strategic worldwide partnership, announcing that by early next year, the two company’s products will be integrated into McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) software management platform.
Joe Gottlieb, vice-president of corporate strategy at McAfee, said the company’s partnership with CommVault is part of its overall plan of being able to use its existing solution technologies and functionality to extend outwards into adjacent and new categories.
“Our overall strategy is to take our best of breed capabilities that end-customers are already familiar with and find practical integrations that make sense and are more valuable in use-case scenarios for our customers.”
McAfee’s ePO security risk management platform is an endpoint and security compliance solution that allows end-users to manage compliance, software and appliances. By early next year, ePO will see CommVault’s Simpana software integrated into it, providing customers with backup, replication, archive, storage resource management and search functionalities. Gottlieb refers to ePO as the company’s “special sauce” and most “sticky” architectural product.
Once the integration is complete, Gottlieb says both companies will be tapping into their joint customer bases to get “stickier” with existing channel partners.
“We’ll look at common channel partners and ultimately as we get closer, there’s the potential of channel recruitment to further expand,” he said. “If partners are selling both CommVault and McAfee products, they can easily sell ePO.”
For channel partners, Gottlieb says the integration of CommVault’s Simpana software into ePO will open up plenty of opportunities for increasing adoption rates and driving sales. Especially in areas such as the notebook space, he says McAfee sees synergies with its solutions with capabilities that enforce things such as data protection, data management and data loss prevention. The integration will enable ePO to become a data and security management solution.
“The value proposition to the channel is to help them leverage McAfee’s market presence to do more solution and thematic solution selling,” Gottlieb said. “Being able to promote a pair of products in the context of one solution is something the channel can get excited about.”
As for whether or not training and incentives for the newly integrated ePO will be available in the New Year, Gottlieb says there’s nothing planned as of yet.
“This is more of a crawl, don’t run approach,” he said. “We want to first equip our sales teams and our partners to give them a heads up to let them know what we’ve done and what we’ll have.”
