Jason Howells is the VP of international sales at Barracuda MSP. Jason previously worked for companies such as Tech Data (Computer 2000), McAfee and founding VAR Secure Networks, before becoming Regional Sales Director at Barracuda Networks in 2011.
Jason has over thirty years of sales and management experience, building business', sales teams, channel development and driving profitable growth in IT security and data protection. He is responsible for MSP revenues and business strategy internationally at Barracuda Networks.
Number of years in current role:
4
Number of years in current company:
13
Number of years involved in indirect/channel sales:
31
Reports to:
Patrick O'Donnell SVP MSP Sales
Number of employees in channel organisation:
Declined to disclose
What percentage of overall sales come through the channel?
Declined to disclose.
What is your personal channel philosophy?
With more than 30 years' experience in the channel, my personal philosophy is all about partnerships. Our channel ecosystem is amazing when there are true partnerships developed from being curious, understanding roles and responsibilities and working together to maximise combined outcomes.
Building trust, setting expectations, and working with integrity and transparency are vital to success. Partnerships need to evolve with time and all parties need to deliver on their agreed responsibilities. I believe we have a responsibility to build and develop products and services that allow our partners to be consistently relevant to their customers and their needs.
What were your biggest personal channel accomplishments over the past year?
The last 12 months has seen continued growth in our "managed" business, with international reach achieving the highest year over year growth in revenue and increasing our channel ecosystem. The focus and investment in MSP partner acquisition, helping MSPs on their cybersecurity journeys, has proven to be the right strategy.
What were your organisation's biggest channel accomplishments over the past year?
Our partner organisation achieved success in 2023 by expanding channel resources to enhance the overall partner experience. This included growing the channel ecosystem teams with an increased focus on providing advanced technical education and training for our channel partners.
Our managed partners celebrated with another MSP Day event, hosted by Barracuda, in what has now grown to be a global event kicking off in Australia before handing the baton to EMEA and then the US. We hosted another very successful EMEA partner event in Croatia, May 2023, with the aim of further developing deep partnerships with around 250 partners.
Another significant accomplishment for our channel team was the refresh and relaunch of our partner program, which harmonised our programme into one that will be the same anywhere in the world and across all our major channel motions: MSP, reseller, and marketplaces.
The new partner programme reduces complexity, supports them more proactively and in alignment with their evolving business models, and addresses evolving customer needs in terms of how they want to buy and use cybersecurity technologies.
Barracuda also added resources and new tools to help drive stronger relationships with our alliance partners, particularly hyper-scalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
What areas would you like to see your channel partners invest in in 2024?
I'd like to see our partners improving their success through the breadth of our security portfolio offering more complex solutions and services. Utilising our extended detection and response services through our 24/7 mature SOC will help them accelerate sales and better meet their customers' security and technology needs.
Channel partners must also invest in customer success and customer lifecycle management to improve customer retention. There is a very visible shift to managed services to stay relevant to customer needs, so channel partners need to continue to expand their managed services portfolio and increase their investments in sales and technical training.
What will be the biggest challenges facing your partners in 2024?
In times of macroeconomic pressure, achieving growth can be challenging. According to Gartner's recent forecast on IT spending, economic and geopolitical uncertainties will reduce spending in companies with fewer than 250 employees.
These uncertainties, along with talent shortages, the constantly evolving threat landscape, and increasing ransomware attacks, will pose significant challenges for channel partners in 2024. The moving target of cyber insurance will be another challenge in the year ahead as policies become more expensive and more difficult to get. It's crucial to enable partners with playbooks that help them design, build, and deploy successful outcomes for our mutual customers.
In what ways do you use your role as Channel Chief to build equity and inclusion?
Visibly, diversity is not limited to gender or age, disability, and ethnicity. It reached further horizons such as marital status, sexual orientation, political credence, and much more. As a channel chief sales, you must revisit your organisational moral principles to examine if DEI is a part of your everyday set of values.
You must also ensure that employees understand why a cultural, impartial, and inclusive team performs much better and is beneficial to the organisation. Truly 'leaning in' - working with people that bring themselves in their entirety to their workplace, every day - is how the channel thrives.
Describe how your use of market development funds (MDF) is changing this year?
Our goal is to develop marketing strategies that enable our partners to drive customer demand. As a valuable component of our partner program, our MDF programme, in conjunction with our partner marketing activities, is designed to assist our partners in generating leads and growing bookings.
It also provides an avenue to increase brand visibility and awareness. Partners can gain a competitive edge by utilising MDF to develop innovative marketing initiatives.
What will be your biggest channel priorities for 2024?
In 2024, we plan to improve partner technical skills, increase the amount of net new accounts coming through partners and encourage partners to sell a broader part of our portfolio.