FireEye McAfee Enterprise XDR Business Renamed Trellix

‘We really believe a lot of the things we’re doing are very different from what either of the companies have done in the past. We think there‘s a new way to represent where we’re going,’ CEO Bryan Palma tells CRN.

FireEye and McAfee Enterprise have renamed their XDR business Trellix as the organization integrates its combined capabilities in the endpoint, network, and security operations spaces.

The San Jose, Calif.-based business is owned by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) and was formed by combining STG’s $4 billion purchase of McAfee Enterprise in July with its $1.2 billion acquisition of FireEye in October. STG also purchased rights to the FireEye name, but CEO Bryan Palma said the company opted to adopt a new name that’s more reflective of where the company wants to go.

“We really believe a lot of the things we’re doing are very different from what either of the companies have done in the past,” Palma told CRN. “We think there’s a new way to represent where we’re going as an XDR business.”

[Related: McAfee Enterprise Promotes Britt Norwood To Channel Chief]

Trellix is one of the two companies that’s being formed from the combination of FireEye and McAfee Enterprise. The other company will feature McAfee Enterprise’s Secure Service Edge (SSE) technology, including the cloud access security broker (CASB) tool McAfee got from its $590 million buy of Skyhigh Networks in 2018 as well as secure web gateway (SWG) and zero trust network access (ZTNA) assets.

“These are both very robust, competitive markets,” said Palma (pictured above). “So being able to get the focus we need, being able to get the investment, and being able to solve those two use cases for our customers is really the focus. And I think this [forming two separate companies] helps us do that.”

The McAfee Enterprise SSE business has not formally unveiled its name or company CEO. Trellix will be the significantly larger of the two businesses, with between 4,000 and 4,500 employees and $1.7 billion in annual sales, Palma told CRN. The combined FireEye McAfee Enterprise organization employed approximately 5,000 people as of October 2021 and generated $1.89 billion of revenue in 2020.

The SSE business will leverage an OEM relationship to access data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities that were historically part of McAfee Enterprise but are now housed within Trellix, Palma said. The move to split FireEye McAfee Enterprise into two companies is similar to what STG has done following its buy of RSA Security, where it has created four separate companies: Archer; NetWitness; Outseer; and SecurID.

At Trellix, Palma has spent the past few months bringing together adjacent and overlapping capabilities in the endpoint, network, and security operations spaces. The endpoint capabilities have been largely complementary, Palma said, with McAfee Enterprise historically focused on preventing endpoint attacks using antivirus software while FireEye specialized in detecting and responding to endpoint intrusions.

On the security operations side, Palma said FireEye Helix’s cloud-native capabilities are important in supporting Security Operations Centers (SOCs) but reiterated that McAfee’s Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) SIEM tool won’t be retired or phased out. It’s important for Trellix to meet customers where they are and support their technology needs regardless of if they’re in the cloud or on-premises, Palma said.

As for network security, Palma said Trellix plans to bundle FireEye’s MVX sandboxing engine and McAfee Enterprise’s intrusion prevention system (IPS) capabilities and sell those to customers together. Trellix will pursue a lighter network security integration since the capabilities are complementary rather than overlapping, and the firm will instead focus on making FireEye’s detection engine available in the cloud.

“Extended detection response (XDR) is going to be the predominant way customers think about architecture over the next five-to-ten years. We feel like we‘re well-positioned,” Palma said. “Most of our competitors have point solutions; they only have small pieces of the puzzle.”

Palma said he’s still deciding who will lead the technology and research and development units at Trellix, but on the go-to-market side has named McAfee EMEA leader Adam Philpott as chief revenue officer and tasked him with bringing together the FireEye and McAfee Enterprise sales teams. Britt Norwood is Trellix’s global channel chief and will integrate the two channel teams together in the first half of 2022.

“We are going to go big on the channel,” Palma said. “With our size, we want to make our channel programs as lucrative and as aggressive for the channel as possible.”

The name Trellix may sound familiar to those in the tech industry. In 1995, tech entrepreneur Dan Bricklin founded Concord, Mass.-based software firm Trellix, which focused the management of corporate intranets and later personal websites. The company was later acquired by Interland, which shut down the Trellix unit in 2004. Bricklin is currently the chief technology officer of mobile app development firm Alpha Software, based in Burlington, Mass.