McAfee commits to building a safer future as standalone company
Christopher Young, CEO, McAfee

McAfee commits to building a safer future as standalone company

McAfee, the globally trusted security provider, has announced that it has begun operating as a new standalone company.

As a standalone business, McAfee is one of the world’s largest pure-play cybersecurity firms. Built on the belief that ‘Together is Power’, the new McAfee will expand upon its leading security solutions platform to better enable customers to effectively identify and orchestrate responses to cyberthreats.

The launch of McAfee marks the closing of the previously announced investment by TPG and Intel Corporation (INTC) to establish a pure-play cybersecurity company with access to significant capital, operational and technology resources. Additionally, McAfee announced that leading private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo has joined, as a minority investor in the company, through an agreement with TPG. As previously announced, Intel is retaining a 49% equity stake in the new entity.

With the help of its new investment partners, McAfee will apply greater market focus, build its platform and target new financial, operational and technology investments to better address the cybersecurity market’s significant global growth opportunity. Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager Chris Young will lead the new McAfee as Chief Executive Officer. TPG Partner Bryan Taylor has been named Chairman of the Board.
“Cybersecurity is the greatest challenge of the connected age, weighing heavily on the minds of parents, executives and world leaders alike,” said Christopher Young, CEO of McAfee. “As a standalone company with a clear purpose, McAfee gains the agility to unite people, technology and organisations against our common adversaries and ensure our technology-driven future is safe.”

“We offer Chris Young and the McAfee team our full support as they establish themselves as one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity companies in the industry,” said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. “Security remains important to Intel, and in addition to our equity position and ongoing collaboration with McAfee, Intel will continue to integrate industry-leading security and privacy capabilities in our products from the cloud to billions of smart, connected computing devices.”

“Since its founding, McAfee has been dedicated to offering its customers industry-leading cybersecurity solutions,” said Bryan Taylor, Partner at TPG Capital and Chairman of the Board at McAfee. “Its ongoing commitment to product innovation, a rich partner ecosystem, and superior customer service has created a trusted brand that will thrive as a standalone entity. We look forward to working with the company and our partners to accelerate growth and continue building a leading cybersecurity platform that serves to protect customers in today’s changing environment.”
“McAfee is a global organisation with a 30-year history and a brand known the world over for innovation, trust and collaboration. Given our years of focus on the security software sector, we see great opportunity for McAfee to continue to advance and innovate,” said Seth Boro, a Managing Partner at Thoma Bravo. “Our deep sector knowledge and history of helping build successful businesses will be an asset to the company, and we look forward to working with the management team and our colleagues at TPG and Intel to guide McAfee through its next chapter of growth.”

The New McAfee
When asked what the new McAfee will mean for customers, Raj Samani, EMEA chief technology officer, McAfee commented: “McAfee will continue to be very focused on our customers. The strategy outlined at our annual security conference, FOCUS 16, will remain the same. We are focused on end-to-end solutions and pivoting to the cloud”
The company also outlined a new strategic vision, focused on innovation, trust, and collaboration.

Innovation
McAfee represents more than 7,500 of the industry’s most talented cybersecurity professionals, while holding more than 1,200 security technology patents and ongoing industry recognition for its products. McAfee is also home to McAfee Labs, one of the world’s leading sources for cyberthreat intelligence. McAfee’s people, technology and insights enable McAfee solutions to correlate real-world data collected from millions of sensors across key threat vectors and inform the next generations of McAfee product innovation.

Trust
From the moment the first worm was unleashed on the internet in 1988, to the massive 2016 Mirai distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the cybersecurity industry has witnessed exponential growth in the volume and variety of cyberthreats. For the last three decades, McAfee has earned the trust of consumers, businesses and governments by delivering practical solutions to address these threats. Today, McAfee’s award winning products and solutions today protect more than 74.9 million endpoints daily, including 87% of the world’s largest banks and Fortune 100 firms and more than 263 million consumer endpoints.

Collaboration
McAfee believes in the power of working together – only when people, technology and organisations work together can we become safer. The McAfee Security Innovation Alliance, the industry’s premier technology partnering program, boasts more than 135 partners globally. Over the past year, more than 30 partners have integrated, or planned integrations, with the McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL), the industry-endorsed communication fabric providing real-time interaction between applications.

David Small, Vice President, Channels, EMEA, McAfee assured that their partner relations will remain unaffected: “At our global partner summit last November, we were very transparent and laid out expectations for our channel program compliance all the way through 2018. As such, our partners know what we expect from them for the rest of this year in order to achieve specific levels in 2018. So while the move to McAfee is extremely exciting for us, from a partner perspective, nothing changes and it really is business as usual. We will continue to invest in our partners and enable them across the solution set. Also, as announced at the partner conference last November, we will require our partners in the highest tier (Platinum) to add a service delivery specialisation. This essentially means that these partners will have the competence to implement our solutions in much the same way as our own professional services team would.”

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