McAfee names new channel chief 20 July, 2006 By Chris Talbot

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Dickison will report to Jim Lewandowski, executive vice president for the Americas at McAfee. According to the McAfee executives, the company isn't planning any changes in its channel strategy, so the appointment of Dickison won't mean any disruptions or upheavals in the way McAfee deals with the channel. As has been in the case, McAfee will continue to focus on improving partner profitability while also focusing on the SMB market and the continuing rollout of managed and hosted services partners can take to their customers, Dickison said.

"We'll continue to focus on partner profitability, enabling them to be successful with our solution with a variety of programs and tools, focus on the SMB market, and growth in SMB for both us and our solution providers, and a continuation of our service strategy that we've begun to articulate and roll out to our partner community," Dickison said.

Dickison joined McAfee about nine years ago, but he is a veteran of the IT industry, with more than 20 years of experience.

"We're almost exclusively a partner-driven company, so the person that leads that organization is obviously very important to our company," Lewandowski said.

He added, "When we were looking for someone to lead this important part of our business, we looked for someone who had knowledge of the direction of where we're going as a company."

While there are different ways to approach managing a company's channel business, Lewandowski said McAfee wasn't looking to change the way it does things. Instead, it was looking for someone who would be on board with the company's direction and initiatives, he said.

"We run this business in a very collaborative manner with the executives across our team. Dave has been very instrumental over the last few years," Lewandowski said. Dickison has been on the team that was organizing and shaping McAfee's channel strategy. He helped to put in place the programs McAfee now has for its partners, and he has also been involved in developing McAfee's partner base and working with those partners, he said.

Prior to taking on his new role, Dickison was the vice president of the systems business for North America at McAfee. In that role, he worked very closely with the existing channel team inside McAfee as well as had a high degree of interaction with McAfee's various channel partners, Dickison said.

"Over the last three years or so, McAfee has put a lot of effort into developing an extremely strong solution provider program," Dickison said. He described it as being in "excellent shape," so as he's entering his new role, Dickison's plan is continue moving ahead with the existing plans. There are currently no plans to change anything.

"What we believe is that we think the program, the plans that we have in place, are right on. We find there are constantly areas where our partners would like to us improve our execution on. And of course, you respond to market changes," Lewandowski said.