McAfee Enterprise Promotes Britt Norwood To Channel Chief

‘There’s a very large opportunity within the channel to really come in and support this mid-market business,’ says McAfee Enterprise commercial sales head Britt Norwood, who now has channel responsibilities.

McAfee Enterprise has expanded commercial sales leader Britt Norwood’s scope of responsibility to include global channels as the organization prepares to merge with FireEye.

The San Jose, Calif.-based platform security vendor tapped Norwood to replace Kathleen Curry, who left this month to become Amazon Web Services’ global head of strategic alliances. Curry spent the past 20 months in a dedicated global channel chief role, shepherding partners through the $4 billion sale of the enterprise business to Symphony Technology Group and subsequent merger with STG-owned FireEye.

But Norwood will wear two hats, leading both McAfee Enterprise’s 100-person channel sales team as well as its 125-person commercial sales organization, which is focused on clients with less than 5,000 employees. Norwood joined McAfee in July 2020 and this month became senior vice president of global channel and commercial, where he is reporting to President of Global Sales Adam Philpott.

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“The deeper we got into it, the synergies were there for combining channel and commercial under a single global leader,” Norwood told CRN exclusively.

Norwood will in the coming months be focused on integrating the McAfee Enterprise and FireEye channel organizations as well as creating more opportunities for solution providers to deliver professional, managed and consulting services. FireEye’s channel organization is led today by veteran Americas channel chief Chris Carter, who reports to Senior Vice President of Americas Pat Sheridan.

Norwood said he’s worked closely with Carter to formulate a strategy for consolidating the two channel organizations, though no decisions have been made about who will lead the combined channel business. The integration is expected to take place over the first half of 2022, starting with an integrated partner portal with a common look and feel for all partners and culminating in a unified partner program.

McAfee Enterprise’s North American channel business is being led by Natalie Tomlin and Guran Green, with Green focused on public sector partners and Tomlin assisting enterprise and commercial partners. The company’s Americas channel business was for many years led by Ken McCray, who left McAfee earlier this year. More than 90 percent of McAfee Enterprise’s business goes through the channel.

“We’re at a great point of acceleration for the company,” Norwood said. “We’re going to get closer to the customer side of it.”

Norwood wants to empower partners around services delivery to ensure customers are successfully deploying the McAfee Enterprise technology they’ve purchased. He wants to ensure the company has robust documentation in place to help partners install, manage and monitor McAfee Enterprise tools, as well as give solution providers more visibility into the company’s product roadmap and key investments.

From upfront selling to onboarding to lifecycle management, Norwood said he wants to make it simpler for more partners to be profitable wrapping services around McAfee Enterprise. And as the FireEye and McAfee Enterprise product portfolios are pulled together around focus areas like XDR and SASE, he said there’s going to be opportunities for solution providers to serve customers in new and meaningful ways.

“There’s a very large opportunity within the channel to really come in and support this mid-market business,” Norwood said.

Having both McAfee Enterprise’s commercial and channel organizations under Norwood should allow them to work together more seamlessly and better understand the customer needs coming through the pipeline, according to Matt Beale, partner at Chicago-based W. Capra Consulting Group. And unifying the messaging around McAfee’s products should help them gain traction with customers, Beale said.

Beale would like to see McAfee Enterprise refine its pricing models and offers for commercial customers to help W. Capra expand its strategic advisory services beyond the enterprise and into the commercial space. Beale praised Norwood for being a “straight shooter” who keeps his word when it comes to promised investments or enhancements, which makes it easier for W. Capra to prepare for the future.

“The key to McAfee’s success is the partner relationships,” Beale said. “Key partners like ourselves getting more focus would go a long way toward hitting this out of the park.”