The certified integration through the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance provides major new revenue opportunities and thought leadership advantages to joint McAfee and Digital Defense channel partners.
D.J. Long, vice president, strategic business development at McAfee
Today, security vendor Digital Defense is announcing the achievement of a certified technical integration between their Frontline Vulnerability Manager and the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator software, which adds Digital Defense’s broad vulnerability assessment capabilities to McAfee ePO.
Digital Defense focuses on vulnerability assessments, with their flagship product being Frontline Vulnerability Manager. It’s a space in the security market from which McAfee announced its withdrawal in 2015, end-of-lifing McAfee Vulnerability Manager 7.5. Full service support ends for that product on January 11, 2019.
“It was clear that McAfee Vulnerability Manager wasn’t going to be successful in the marketplace,” said D.J. Long, vice president, strategic business development at McAfee. “We were not selling it effectively, and thought that it wasn’t keeping pace with current offerings from other vendors. We didn’t think we could capture enough market share to increase the investment necessary to address this. We also exited other businesses at the same time, while at the same time increasing focus in areas where we were successful, which in retrospect was a very wise decision on our part.”
McAfee’s partnership with Digital Defense turns what had been an area of weakness into one of strength.
“While the industry as a whole has seen a steady evolution of these sorts of tools, Digital Defense in particular has leapt far beyond what we were doing,” Long stated. “We have relationships with other companies that provide a more narrow set of vulnerability assessment tools, but Digital Defense is extremely comprehensive and broad-based. They really embraced OpenDXL and have completed a certified integration with our McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. We think that our customers will welcome this.”
Strategic partnerships are a critical part of Digital Defense’s go-to-market strategy. This is, however, the first relationship they have entered into with a vendor like McAfee which has a broad range of security solutions and a large overall market share.
Rosanna Pellegrino, SVP of sales and business development at Digital Defense
“This was a decision that we made internally because of their platform and their willingness to let us integrate into their ecosystem,” said Rosanna Pellegrino, SVP of sales and business development at Digital Defense. “With their broad SIA [Security Innovation Alliance] and the openness of the DXL fabric, from a maturity perspective, they are far afield from any of their competitors. The maturity and direction of the SIA program made it easy to integrate and be part of that ecosystem. It’s a win for everybody, and an easy seamless process that they enable with their partnerships to the market. They are the first organization among this group of vendors that we wanted to go to market with.”
The integrated McAfee-Digital Defense solution eases the burdens associated with running multiple systems and simplifies the process of vulnerability and threat management. It provides accurate and comprehensive host identification capability, and policy orchestration that automates deployment of agents to unmanaged systems immediately upon detection. The connected ecosystem provides the capability to schedule a vulnerability scan using Frontline Vulnerability Manager directly from the McAfee ePO software.
“It takes a widely-embraced McAfee platform with a global organization and adds our platform capabilities to make things easy and seamless for the end user,” Pellegrino said. “It looks at the environment, vulnerabilities and hosts, and provides one platform to manage their environment.”
Long indicated that the SIA program facilitates effective collaborative go to market between McAfee and its strategic partners, which will help sell this joint solution.
“Our Go-to-Market with these partners is different from the normal, and is based on sales teaming,” he said. “When there are certified integrations between us, we are able to go to market collaboratively with them with the assistance of our sales organization. When either Digital Defense or ourselves identify an opportunity, we register it in our database, and our sales people can become involves in joint sales calls, webinars and other sales efforts. If a Digital Defense sales effort is successful, then we compensate the McAfee sales rep for what they did to close it for Digital Defense. Our SIA program facilitates this, and none of our competitors do anything like it.”
“Our top 10 largest partners are also McAfee partners,” Pellegrino pointed out. “They have been very excited about the integration, and our ability to go to market with the joint solution.”
“This gives McAfee partners the ability to call on their customers to promote Digital Defense, and creates new revenue opportunities for them,” Long said. “It broadens a range of solutions that can be promoted to their customers. It also reinforces that we are a full service solution provider with unified vertical applications that are differentiated and provide better security outcomes. So it enhances us from a thought leadership perspective, as well as providing new revenue opportunities.”
