'This is the official launch of our first truly global partner programme' - Barracuda's Jason Beal

The partner boss talks evolving partner models, the rise of marketplaces, and how the vendor continues to invest in the channel

Barracuda has officially unveiled its new global partner programme following the evolving procurement and consumption needs of partner customers.

The development of the programme was first announced in May at Barracuda Discover23 EMEA in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Now that the refreshed track has officially debuted, Jason Beal, VP of worldwide partner ecosystems at Barracuda speaks to CRN about what drove the revamp.

"This is the official launch of our first truly global partner programme," he says.

"It for the first time brings in all routes to market that the partners enjoy with Barracuda."

The new programme supports resell partners across multiple routes to market — resale, MSP, and marketplaces.

Beal explains the new programme is a result of partner feedback and how the partner business is changing.

"We are constantly listening to our partners. The voice of partners is critical. We iterated the programme throughout the year, specifically with our feedback and cooperation with our partner advisory boards.

"There were two primary drivers. One around diversification, where more and more partners have different business models.

"And then the parallel of that is this hybridity. Not only are there different business models and ways partners can go-to-market but more and more of them are hybrids.

"We see that within our own partner community. We have over 1,000 partners that are hybrid, meaning that they take our solutions to market in these different vehicles."

End customers increasingly have different needs and preferences for how they want to procure, consume and manage technologies, partners are telling Barracuda.

Beal claims this global programme will provide partners with agility and a "power of choice".

"That will only accelerate the modern buyers' preferences and demands on the channel partners to facilitate these different ways to procure, consume and manage technologies I think will only get worse, or get more intense in 2024."

Beal adds there was a third primary reason behind the programme which centres sound customer success.

"As we've gone to more of an as-a-service, and an industry that focuses on consumption. And as an industry and Barracuda we're pivoting more and more around product-led growth, that is a primary driver for customer success.

"Partners are at varying levels of maturity internally as far as their customer success organisation so we've architected the programme around customer success, and it's a way that we can work with our partners in a shared success model to help them to be able to deliver that customer success. To our mutual customers throughout their entire lifecycle."

How did Barracuda stand out in 2023?

One of the XDR vendor's top messages this year was its philosophy around partner empathy, which Beal claims turned out to be "a real differentiator".

"Partners are unfortunately used to working with some vendors who I accuse of being vendor myopic, when vendors only see the world through their walls, their products, their go-to-market, instead of putting themselves in their partner's shoes.

"So partner empathy is something I'm really proud of, and I believe is one of the reasons why this programme was designed with such positive feedback that we haven't just looked at it from our perspective."

Beal highlights Barracuda's investments with its alliance partners and the hyperscalers as another big move for the business this year.

"From a 'build with', a 'sell together' and then a 'transact on' perspective. We have more and more partners leaning into the marketplace opportunity.

"While partners are still at various levels of maturity with their marketplace business, we certainly see that there's been a big step forward this year. It's one of the reasons that for the first time we have built a marketplaces enablement track into the new partner programme and on the partner portal."

2024 strategy

Beal was adamant that Barracuda will not falter on its commitment to the channel next year.

"We enjoyed strong channel investments in 2023. I've been at the company just over a year now. And we architected a vision around a global channel strategy and organisation and the company that invested additional resources, no more important than partner technical enablement.

"Yesterday we had a new hire that started as a global director of partner technical enablement.

"So we'll continue to invest in partner technical capabilities. And that should fuel partners to be able to grow their business and grow our business.

"The channel is still an incredible growth vector for us."

Secondly, Barracuda sees ongoing vendor consolidation as an opportunity.

"We absolutely see this the realisation of the vendor consolidation or vendor rationalisation preference with both end customers and partners.

"There's too many point products. There's too many vendors in an end user or partner environment. They want to shrink those and so they want much more of a platform play.

"Barracuda has incredible technology on email security, network security, data security, cloud security, application security backup. So it's truly a platform play. It's a growth factor for us as more and more end customers and more and more partners choose to reduce the number of their suppliers and to do more around platform vendors like Barracuda."