McAfee announced that it is participating in the VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative. As part of this initiative, McAfee is launching an enhanced channel partner offering to provide extra incentives to top SecurityAlliance partners who jointly sell McAfee security solutions with their VMware virtualization engagements.

The VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative is a co-marketing initiative that includes technology alliance partners from a broad range of technology sectors. These vendors have created custom VMware virtualization training and tools for channel partners, as well as financial incentives on the sale of their products combined with VMware solutions. These vendor incentives help provide additional profitability opportunities for vendor channel partners and reward partners for creating complete solutions for customers.

McAfee's new offering helps accelerate profitability for McAfee and VMware resellers through joint solution selling that capitalizes on the market opportunity for security solutions that support VMware virtualization.

"Customers are finding that by implementing security in a virtual environment, they can protect what they value at the same level, or higher, as their physical environment and simplify their deployment and upgrades," said Roger King, executive vice president of worldwide channel operations at McAfee. "Our best channel partners have discovered that selling VMware and McAfee solutions together accelerates the sales cycle to close virtualization projects. Our new virtualization program provides joint partners attractive financial incentives along with the tools they need to be successful selling solutions."

"We started the VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative to help our channel partners accelerate their profitability and to reward them for joint solution selling with our technology partners," said Steve Houck, vice president of worldwide channels at VMware. "Combining VMware's industry-leading virtualization platform with McAfee's pioneering products for enhanced virtualization security delivers increased value for our partners, and ultimately increased value for our customers."