McAfee Snags Ex-Apple Sales Exec To Be Global Channel Chief

Kathleen Curry has been tasked with bringing together McAfee’s channel, operations, alliances and OEM teams as well as expanding the company’s partner program initiatives to accommodate increased remote work.

McAfee has filled the global channel chief role after a nearly two-year vacancy with the hire of former Apple sales executive Kathleen Curry.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based platform security vendor has tasked Curry with bringing together McAfee’s channel, operations, alliances and OEM teams as well as expanding the company’s partner program initiatives to accommodate increased remote work as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. McAfee had operated without a global channel chief since Richard Steranka left the company in August 2018.

“I thrive off the opportunity to lead high-performing channel teams, and I am excited about the opportunity to join McAfee during such a pivotal moment of growth,” said Curry, senior vice president of global enterprise channels, OEM and strategic alliances, in a statement. “I’m passionate about building relationships and aligning channel systems to deliver unprecedented value to partners and customers alike.”

[Related: McAfee Push To Capture Elite MSPs Expands To U.S., Latin America]

McAfee didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional comment.

Curry most recently spent five-and-a-half years as a sales executive at Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple, where she was primarily responsible for global client development and the company’s Enterprise Design Lab, according to her LinkedIn page. She spent her first 14 months at Apple supporting global alliances.

Prior to joining Apple, Curry spent three-and-a-half years after global retail channels and North American retail and financial services channels for Atlanta-based retail software giant NCR Corp. Before that, Curry spend more than seven years in the channel organization of Chicago-based Motorola, rising up the ranks to lead the communication behemoth’s enterprise channel sales in North America.

“Kathleen’s experience leading mobile transformation initiatives comes at an invaluable time as we look to support our partners who are quickly mobilizing remote sales teams as our traditional ways of working and selling moves digital,” Ken McCray, McAfee’s head of Americas channel sales and operations, said in a statement.

McCray told CRN last year that McAfee plans to roll out a new partner program this year that’s laser-focused on providing relevant training and enablement around the company’s emerging technologies. The new program will be tightly aligned with McAfee’s sales engineering team to support training on emerging technologies like MVision Cloud, MVision EDR and MVision Insight, McAfee said at the time.

He also in January tasked the architect of the company’s Canadian MSP push with replicating his success in the United States and Latin America. McAfee had in three years built a $6 million Canadian MSP business essentially from scratch, and McCray asked Canadian Channel Director Ned D’Antonio to develop rules of engagement and compensation models to make that possible in the U.S.

Curry’s appointment comes two-and-a-half months after McAfee hired former BMC Software and Polycom top executive Peter Leav to serve as CEO. Leav replaced Chris Young, who had led the business since October 2014 and oversaw the practice’s spinout from Intel into a standalone company in April 2017.

McAfee faces an uncertain ownership future, with reports swirling for more than a year that TPG Capital was looking to cede its ownership stake. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that McAfee was looking at combining its own consumer business with the $2.41 billion pure consumer operation of NortonLifeLock. In that scenario, McAfee’s enterprise operation could end up with a different buyer.