McAfee: 575,000 SaaS Security Customers?

Updated: Feb. 23, 2010: A little bit of Tuesday morning chatter: Security software veteran McAfee’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings apparently have hit a major milestone at 575,000 users. Much of the growth was organic. But a good portion of it involved a key acquisition — MX Logic. Here’s the scoop, along with a look at the competitive landscape.

In 2009, McAfee acquired cloud-based security provider MX Logic, which added to their SaaS security tally and bolstered the overall McAfee Total Protection Service offering. That said, the better part of nearly 600,000 users is nothing to scoff at.

Still, there’s plenty of competition on multiple fronts.

• Symantec expects to generate more than $1 billion annually from SaaS and cloud services within the next few years, according to CEO Enrique Salem.
• Trend Micro recently rebranded its Worry-Free security efforts, and the company is working closely with SaaS-centric managed services providers through groups like HTG.
• Sophos is preparing some MSP-centric partner program efforts (details expected in April 2010 or so).
• Kaspersky Labs is building some recurring revenue programs of its own.
• And Websense this week launched a Managed Security Service Provider partner program.

Still, McAfee insists it’s leading the SaaS security market.

“With the industry’s broadest portfolio of massively scalable and multi-tenant security solutions and our ability to let users choose between SaaS, on-premise or a combination of both, we simply believe that nobody can serve the dynamic security needs of customers better than McAfee,” said Marc Olesen, senior vice president and general manager, McAfee Software-as-a-Service, in a prepared statement.

In related news, McAfee announced that it now supports enforced Transport Layer Security (TLS) for SaaS e-mail, integration with Outlook 2003/2007 for SaaS e-mail archiving, and more supported languages.

Stay Tuned

Separately, we’re hearing chatter about PC vendors rethinking their security software partnerships. Speculation abounds that HP is going to stop bundling their Symantec Norton Antivirus with new PCs in favor of McAfee’s offerings. Plus, we expect Lenovo to make a security move with a key software — Lenovo, perhaps? — within the next few days. We’ll be back with more details soon.

Additional reporting by Joe Panettieri.