Moving Away from Legacy McAfee, FireEye

Trellix has been operating two different partner programs, one for McAfee and the other for FireEye. The new program finally ends that separation, Norwood said.

“Obviously the brand is living security and we’re thinking of this in a very different way,” he said. “The other thing is from the very top levels inside of Trellix, our CEO and CRO, they’re committed to the channel. They’ve seen the channel be a successful business they can build a practice on. So we looked at what we inherited and we absolutely pivoted, and we wanted it to go away. So we really scrapped the old program and this is all new and with a completely different focus. We want to get the right partners, and that’s the right thing for our customers. But in order to get them, we had to make it profitable and fair, and that’s what they’re asking for. So yeah, we’ve pretty much scrapped everything that existed before.”

Starting next month, Trellix will initiate a notification period that the McAfee and FireEye programs will be tapering off at the end of 90 days, Norwood said. And then it will invite the partners to join with where they fit into the new program.

“There’ll be three categories: growth, momentum and collaborate,” he said. “And they’ll be invited to whichever one of those categories makes sense. Partners who want to do business with us will absolutely be invited. So we’ll keep everybody who’s active with us today. We’re not like throwing people out of the program. I don’t want that to be the understanding. But there will probably be people that are still registered with us that don’t want to really do business with us. They’ve registered for a deal or two like five years ago. We’re going to clean that up. Then the program will go live in Q1 of next year.”