Four things MSPs should know from Barracuda Discover23

The cybersecurity vendor celebrated 20 years in Dubrovnik, Croatia at its annual partner event last week

CRN was in attendance for Barracuda's Discover23 EMEA partner summit last week in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The security vendor hosted around 220 partners at its annual event as it celebrated its 20-year anniversary.

The conference showcased keynotes from Barracuda's top executives covering topics that are top of mind for channel partners currently.

CRN has highlighted the four biggest takeaways MSPs need to know about from Barracuda Discover23.

No more separate MSP and channel partner programmes

Probably the biggest announcement made during the event was that Barracuda is combining its MSP and channel partner programmes into one single system.

The unified programme will come into play during the second half of 2023 with the aim of recognising the "evolution and diversification" of partner business models.

Barracuda CEO Hatem Naguib told CRN that several years ago there was a much deeper distinction between a partner that identified as an MSP and one that did not.

Whereas today the distinction isn't as clear, he said, leading to Barracuda making extra efforts to acknowledge the difference.

"How do we do that in a way that clearly manages to articulate and identify where there are distinctions? Sameness is not the objective here," Naguib stated.

"There is a difference in a managed service that a customer needs, the types of use cases that they're delivering from a partner perspective, their expectations of us and our expectations of them are very different than if you're just taking the product and delivering it and adding on services.

"So identifying and articulating those distinctions, making sure that that programme reinforces behaviour that's positive for the partner and positive for us was part of that thinking that we went through."

Continue reading to find out where Barracuda is upping its investments for partners...

Four things MSPs should know from Barracuda Discover23

The cybersecurity vendor celebrated 20 years in Dubrovnik, Croatia at its annual partner event last week

Barracuda focusing on resource investment

At last year's Discover event, Naguib told partners he was aware Barracuda's MSP approach required "some refinement".

During his main stage keynote in Dubrovnik, Croatia, he admitted "Barracuda needed to improve in terms of how [it was] thinking about [its] channel."

He conceded to CRN that, Barracuda being a "channel-first company", a lot of its approaches are based on feedback from the channel.

With this in mind, the vendor has rejigged its investment strategy.

During his main stage keynote and in his sit down discussion with CRN, Naguib highlighted how Barracuda is ramping up the resources it is providing partners.

The vendor boss broke down the investments in channel resources into five key areas: Go-to-market, channel transformation, customer success, convergence and platform, and innovation.

Expanding on the first two areas which involves its partners, Naguib explained: "We have seen our go-to-market growth correlated with investments we've made.

"We added people in Europe, we added people in the US as the demand for the products continues to grow.

"But we also recognise that productivity is an important component of what we need to achieve, that you want to make sure that you're getting more out of the employees that we have.

"So we look to provide more tools, more investments in technology assets so customers are more productive, our channel is more productive and can achieve their goals.

"In the security space, there's always a shortage of resources, whether that's on the marketing side or on the technology side. And so we're making sure that we as a business are providing go-to-market investments in a way that's not just throwing people, but using them in a more productive way."

Naguib continued to lift the lid on his strategy around channel transformation and expanding MSP leverage.

"Leveraging the channel more effectively is also part of that productivity," he said.

"Barracuda has built its success because our technology has been differentiated, achieving the highest levels of efficacy but also because our relationship with the partners has been differentiated.

"Over the years having more than 10,000 active partners is a unique competitive mode that we've harnessed, leveraged, appreciated and want to continue to drive growth.

"So that channel component is a really important part of the growth strategy that we're trying to drive. What we do on the go-to-market from a productivity perspective is gained as part of the investment we do on them.

"So we're adding resources to make sure that we're helping our channel partners become more successful.

"We're adding those resources on the technical side as well as security solutions always require a technical investment as partners are always looking to make sure that they're capable and able to deliver the solutions that are necessary to be trusted advisors.

"But also for them to build add-on solutions correlated to providing those services."

Finally Naguib turned his attention to the MSPs, which he said Barracuda has historically operated in a more separate way from other channel partners.

However, following feedback, his company is now pursuing a more unified approach.

"Many of our partners have adopted MSPs as part of their portfolio, what they want to provide new customers. So we've enhanced our cooperation with partners so that they have optionality in terms of how they draw that. And that's reflected both in the go-to-market and the resources that we leverage and upcoming unification of the programmes so that people can see that as part of one unified approach."

Four things MSPs should know from Barracuda Discover23

The cybersecurity vendor celebrated 20 years in Dubrovnik, Croatia at its annual partner event last week

Barracuda not hitting the brakes on its recruitment drive

Barracuda's VP of worldwide partner ecosystems Jason Beal told CRN he was proud to share that the vendor is "continuing to hire and specifically within the channel", with multiple positions on a global channel level available.

Naguib shared this sense of pride in not being one of the almost countless tech companies that over-hired at extraordinary levels during Covid.

"We saw after the things started to normalise and it became difficult for them to kind of sustain that level of resources," Hatem commented on other vendors now cutting their workforces.

"The other thing that we saw in our business is that security challenges that occurred before Covid are happening at the same rate and higher after Covid.

"So our investment strategy correlated to make sure we're helping our customers through the security challenges. And as more customers became digital in their approach towards meeting their customers during Covid - because they had to implement new solutions, apply new SaaS applications - their security challenges increased which we wanted to meet.

"We always look to make sure that we're making investments correlated to an outcome that's best business, and ultimately for our customers."

Four things MSPs should know from Barracuda Discover23

The cybersecurity vendor celebrated 20 years in Dubrovnik, Croatia at its annual partner event last week

Partners consolidating their vendors

When CRN sat down with Barracuda's MSP expert Jason Howells, VP of MSP international sales, we picked his brain on what trends he is seeing in the space, revealing that are looking to trim their vendor partnerships.

"One of the biggest challenges MSPs have is the number of vendors that they have to work with. There's a real shift in vendor consolidation right now," Howells said.

"The number one rule for a vendor when working with an MSP is to try and make sure they make money and in order to make money they need to automate as much as they possibly can, and save time.

"So if they have to have several vendor relationships to be able to put a service offering together, that's quite time consuming.

"So there's a huge reset with partners thinking about how do they reduce the number of vendors they work with to get the maximum output."

Barracuda's boss also cast his view on this subject, stating it brings the vendor an opportunity around its security offering.

"More customers are now looking at platforms and consolidation as a key component for how they want to find their IT security strategies. This is coming because they don't have enough resources to manage individual niche products," Naguib said.

"But they also look to the consolidation as a budgeted concern in terms of how they can leverage multiple vendors together in order to match the security strategy that they need.

"Three quarters of companies are looking to consolidate their security vendors. Almost over half are looking at ten or less in terms of what they want to use.

"And an increase of SASE or secure access service edge, and XDR are really examples of where that consolidation comes to play."

He added: "Those types of solutions bring multiple use cases together and multiple individual vendors together to drive that consolidation.

"So proliferation of SaaS applications, the consolidation in the vendors, are really driving how we think about what our strategy needs to be going forward."