Barracuda unifies partner programmes to recognise 'diversification' of partner business models
Reporting from Dubrovnik, Croatia for Barracuda’s annual partner summit, CRN catches up with worldwide partner ecosystems VP Jason Beal to hear more about the unification of the programmes
Barracuda is bringing together its MSP and channel partner programmes under one banner.
This unification of partner programmes was announced this week during Barracuda's annual partner summer, Discover23 held in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
To find out more about why Barracuda is making this major shift, which will come to fruition in the second half of 2023, CRN sat down with Jason Beal, vice president of worldwide partner ecosystems who told us more.
"There were a few drivers for the unification. One is recognising the diversification of partner business models," Beal told CRN.
"With a lot of vendors in the industry, their programmes are legacy programmes that are really only tailored to a resale business.
"Whereas, as partner business models have diversified we can create a global programme that recognises partners who are still reselling technology and doing professional services, those that are providing managed services or co-managed models and a lot of those that are helping their end customers with cloud consumption and cloud enablement.
"So we wanted to update the programme to recognise this diversification of our business models."
The Barracuda partner boss added that another reason for the change comes down to what he calls the "power of choice".
"Every day end customers, or what I call the modern buyer, have different needs and preferences for how they decide on technology, how they consume technology, and how they want to pay for technology.
"This requires this concept that we're coining as ‘partner agility'. Partners have always been agile, they've been able to stay abreast of technology, changes in technology trends for 20 years from selling printers and systems to selling networking and server storage to selling advanced enterprise software and cybersecurity and data protection today."
However, Beal explained this agility came about over the past few decades, and now partner agility is required on a day-to-day basis.
"Every day when they're working with different prospects or different customers, those modern buyers are saying they have different needs. They might want to do it as a pay as you go, they might want to get it out of the cloud, they might want to manage servers," he said.
"And so the modern partner needs to be agile to meet the needs of the modern buyer. So that's another big driver of creating a new global partner programme that will empower our partners and allow them to give this power of choice to their end customers."
And finally, Beal revealed the third driver was around a change in partner economics.
"Partners used to make a lot of their profit based on buying a technology, putting a markup on it and having a margin, then adding some professional services.
"Nowadays it's how do they take that dollar of cost of goods sold, and generate an economy from pre-sell services to post-sell services to managed services.
"So that's another driver for the programme is we want to design a programme that helps our partners to capture that multiplier. Sure we want them to sell more, we want to generate more dollars of Barracuda sold, but we want them to capture much more of that economic opportunity around those products that they're selling."
Continue reading to hear what challenges Barracuda's partners are facing, how the vendor is helping, and what message Beal wants partners to take away from Discover23...
Barracuda unifies partner programmes to recognise 'diversification' of partner business models
Reporting from Dubrovnik, Croatia for Barracuda’s annual partner summit, CRN catches up with worldwide partner ecosystems VP Jason Beal to hear more about the unification of the programmes
What challenges are partners currently facing?
Beyond increasing demand from customers, Beal stated that Barracuda's partners are also being tested by the significant tech skills gap.
"I always say there's this challenge of missed opportunity due to talent shortage.
"There's increasing end user demand for cyber defence, for data protection, for digital transformation, for office productivity software.
"They're able to help their end customers as customer demands continue to grow in our technology industry. But the challenge I hear is resource constraint.
"And they're trying to hire talent, they're trying to retain talent, and it's difficult for them to add talent on top of that in order to take advantage of this increasing market.
"I hear that from partners everyday.
"The second thing I hear from them is this anticipation around the changing needs and preferences, the changing demands of their end customers, being able to anticipate that."
Barracuda unifies partner programmes to recognise 'diversification' of partner business models
Reporting from Dubrovnik, Croatia for Barracuda’s annual partner summit, CRN catches up with worldwide partner ecosystems VP Jason Beal to hear more about the unification of the programmes
How is Barracuda helping partners?
Beal is a channel veteran, having worked with the likes of Ingram Micro, Palo Alto Networks and AvePoint in the past.
He explained his tenure has taught him that winning the hearts and minds of the partner engineers comes first.
"If you can do that, they're the ones that are recommending which products the sales team can sell. They're the ones that are designing the bill of materials, or that end user multi vendor solution," he said.
"So that's one of the drivers of one of my philosophies. I'm currently hiring for a role which is a global director of partner technical enablement who will assess our current curriculum, the content that we have for partner training and our certification tracks. We will certainly be providing more curriculum, providing a different way that we look at certifications and more competencies.
"Second, we'll have more partner tools that will help them to get their hands on our technology, demo that to the end customers and then to drive services around it."
Barracuda unifies partner programmes to recognise 'diversification' of partner business models
Reporting from Dubrovnik, Croatia for Barracuda’s annual partner summit, CRN catches up with worldwide partner ecosystems VP Jason Beal to hear more about the unification of the programmes
Barracuda continues to hire in the channel
During the keynote presentations on day one of the partner event, Barracuda announced it grew its EMEA headcount by 20 per cent last year.
Beal told CRN Barracuda plans to continue this momentum despite the ever growing list of vendors cutting their global workforces.
"Unfortunately in the industry today you have heard some news where companies are going in the opposite direction, and you've heard of some layoffs," Beal said.
"We can proudly share that Barracuda are continuing to hire and specifically within the channel. I have multiple positions on a global channel level."
Barracuda unifies partner programmes to recognise 'diversification' of partner business models
Reporting from Dubrovnik, Croatia for Barracuda’s annual partner summit, CRN catches up with worldwide partner ecosystems VP Jason Beal to hear more about the unification of the programmes
What does he want partners to take away from Discover23?
Barracuda Discover23 had around 220 delegates in attendance.
On what Beal wants these partners to take away from the vendor's annual partner conference, he said: "There is a billion dollar incremental opportunity on the table for partners, should they sell more of the Barracuda portfolio in different business models and then wrap services around everything that they're doing. That would be an incredible takeaway for them.
"Each partner might go back and make their own action plan and figure out one step and then the next step of what they're going to do from a product and a business model standpoint.
"If I could have them all walking away, saying, ‘boy, there's a huge opportunity for you financially with Barracuda and the ways that I can protect my customers and strengthen my kind of trusted advisory status with my end customers', I think we're all happy campers."