SAN JOSE, Ca. – McAfee Inc. has announced the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance, a new program for technology companies who want to integrate with McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO). The program offers a set of tools designed to help integrate third-party applications with the company’s security and compliance risk management technology.

“Traditionally, security products have been designed to be point products that were deployed and implemented in organizations with little need for full time administration or integration between [them] but over the past number of years we’ve seen a much more hostile and active threat landscape,” said Kevin LeBlanc, director of product marketing, system security and data loss prevention with McAfee.

He added that when you think about the challenge of security risk management, it is a bigger problem than just McAfee.

“While McAfee has domain expertise in threat management solutions and risk and compliance solutions there are other elements of risk management and security risk management that fall outside our offerings that our partner community really adds value such as VPNs and other type of complementary technologies where customers have been struggling with ways to easily integrate all of these elements in their security environment,” said LeBlanc. “At the end of day, they want to get rid of siloed data and want correlated data, common management and common dissemination of information.”

The Security Innovation Alliance is a partner program for McAfee’s technology partners such as independent software vendors that are complimentary to McAfee products and security ecosystem. The program even supports products that are competitive to McAfee such as those from Symantec.

“We (and our technology partners) firmly believe that security compliance management should be easier to deploy and easier to integrate and manage in customer environments that is why we are providing a program, an open architecture through a certification program that will allow third party vendors to use API (Application Program Interface) and SDK (Software Development Kit) to leverage the management and the deployment platform of ePO to deliver additional value to customers,” LeBlanc said.

He added the reason why this is so important is that there is a strong customer base that McAfee’s partner community has already worked successfully with ePO. “Now we are allowing those partners to sell more than just McAfee product to leverage that management platform to provide further value to their customers.”

Brian Burke, a director with IDC, said that it was necessary for McAfee to develop the Security Innovation Alliance based on hearing about customer pain points

“In our recent security survey, we asked about security challenges over the next 12 months and number five on the list was the complexity of managing security point solutions,” said Burke. “This is a clear response to demand for integration between the various security technologies that they have already implemented.”

He added that he expects the other security vendors in the space to be moving towards offering more comprehensive management consoles.

“The ones we see out there are limited to vendor products but we are seeing a trend towards extending that capability to managing third party products as well. It is going to be where vendors everywhere are going to be positioning themselves for management dollars.”

In conjunction to the new Security Innovation Alliance, McAfee has also announced the availability of the shipping edition of version 4.0 of the company’s ePO, a beta version of which was announced back in June.

ePO 4.0 unites the management of network security, data security and end point security, including all of a company’s PCs and servers. ePO 4.0 works with both physical and virtual systems.

“This isn’t just an end point solution, but they are looking to use ePO to manage end point and network-based security solutions. That is another trend we are seeing, the ability to set policy and have a common management console for end point and network-base security solutions,” said Burke.

Version 4.0 of McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator is available now, at no extra costs to all current customers who have an existing maintenance contract and the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance is now open to new partners. For more information or to apply visit McAfee’s Web site .

This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnectIT.

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