Barracuda Discover 23: Barracuda Teases New Unified Partner Program

BARRACUDA DISCOVER 23 — Barracuda has teased plans for a new partner program that will combine its VAR and MSP partners for the first time.

The program was previewed at the vendor’s European partner event, Barracuda Discover 23, in Dubrovnik, Croatia last week. While Barracuda didn’t reveal many details, the program will likely go live in September. Jason Beals, who took on the new role of global VP of channels six months ago, will lead the changes.

Currently the vendor has two partner tracks within the business — traditional “Core” resellers and MSPs.

Jason Howells, VP, managed service provider, international sales at the security giant, spoke to Channel Futures about the new program at Barracuda Discover.

Barracuda’s Jason Howells

“Our focus for the last 12 months, and with Jason Beal coming in and trying to join the dots, is on making sure that we have better collaboration internally. We’re going to market as Barracuda. It doesn’t matter how they want to procure it, how they want to manage it, how they want to use it. We just want to make sure that they know that there are options. We just want to be able to make sure that however people want to consume our products, they’ve got choices,” he said.

MSP Fastest-Growing Part of the Business

Howells said there is a “huge amount of focus” on the MSP segment — the fastest growing part of the business.

“We’re not going to build anything; we’re not going to market or do anything that doesn’t work for an MSP. The reason for that is because we’ve seen such growth in our business around the MSP channel. We’ve signed 700 new MSPs into our business over the last 12 months. That’s where the growth is in the business. That’s being driven from an end user level as well. The shortage of skills around cybersecurity is real. I’ve talked about it for years, but it’s making MSPs more relevant than they’ve ever been before. Particularly in the space that we work in, that midmarket down towards the SMB space.”

Howells said the new program is “the first step of trying to bring things together. It’s really important that the channel sees that the MSP market is part of our channel program. Right now, we’re at stage one.”

More Breadth, Depth to the New Program Revealed at Barracuda Discover

Howells also revealed that Barracuda wants to be more innovative in its engagement with partners.

“We don’t want it just to be ‘do X amount of revenue with us so you get these things from us.’ We want more breadth and depth. There will be tiers, but it won’t be just about that,” he said.

“There are other things that you want to add into the program that are going to have more value to partners,” Howells added. “An MSP doing $10,000 worth of annual recurring revenue is extremely important to our business. Just because they’re not necessarily seen as doing $1 million worth of annual contract. The way that our business works around MSP is we just keep consolidating more and more and more. That consumption gets bigger and bigger and bigger. We need to have a partner program that gives all of those partners an equal opportunity to get what they need from us to be successful. But it can’t just be driven by those kind of revenue numbers.”