Barracuda’s Partner Success Program is not even a year old, but it’s on the third iteration with today’s launch of a Partner Sales Engineer Community as well as new automation and self-services tools.
The new Partner Sales Engineer Community is designed to provide more training and education around service delivery and “other parts of the portfolio that they may not be selling,” Barracuda’s Jason Beal, vice president of worldwide partner ecosystems, tells MSP Success.
The impetus for spinning out a Sales Engineer Community came directly from MSP partner feedback, according to Beal. He notes that MSP business owners recognize that this role is instrumental in designing customer solutions. “I’ve always said that you want to win the hearts and minds of the partner engineers first,” Beale says. “If they believe in your technology, if they have all of the tools and the enablement, [and] the training that they need to bring your technology to their customers or to their prospects, that’s where you’re going to win together.”
The Partner Sales Engineer Community provides access to training labs, scanning tools, and live Barracuda product demos and sandboxes. Partners’ sales engineers are also eligible for rewards, recognition, and benefits, and can collaborate with peers.
MSPs’ desire to empower their sales engineers is being driven by the trend to reduce the number of vendors they work with and go deeper with those vendors’ solutions to grow top-line revenue, Beale says. “If they shrink the number of vendors with whom they work, that means partners are going to look to grow the top line notably more. If they want to keep growing their overall business, they’re going to do a lot more business with those vendors and they want to go much deeper across the technology stack, sell more parts of the platform, deliver more services,” he explains.
Giving All Partners Access to Managed XDR
Enhancements to the Partner Success Program include making the Barracuda Managed XDR (Extended Detection and Response) available to all partners, as well as new certifications for Barracuda Managed XDR and updated certifications for other offerings (including Barracuda Email Protection and Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup).
In addition, a new demo page for partners provides simplified access to aid in sales opportunities. And two new dashboard modules enable partners to monitor program compliance with real-time visibility into revenue and certification achievements and renewals, as well as track performance against rebate targets.
These additions come on the heels of new features Barracuda rolled in March, including partner rebates for the first time. Although Barracuda has been what Beal calls “a channel-centric, channel-loyal company,” since its inception, its global partner program just launched in December of 2023. Since that time, “over 6,000 certifications have been achieved by our partners,” he says.
Beal adds that Barracuda’s partner program recognizes how the business model is changing for MSPs, driven by technology, M&A activity, and end customers wanting to procure, consume, and manage their technologies in a variety of ways. “We really are seeing partners asking, ‘Help me help make my business more agile. Help me to become hybrid. So that’s what’s really been the big driver in us investing so much in the program and now iterating it three times in a 10-month period.”
How Barracuda Is Responding To Profitability And Pricing Trends
MSP Success asked Beal if Barracuda has received any pressure from MSP partners to offer lower-priced bundles in response to other vendors’ push to lower the cost of goods sold, such as Kaseya with its Kaseya 365 bundle, ThreatLocker’s bundled offering, and more recently NinjaOne and HaloPSA’S bundle. “Partner profitability is paramount,” he says.
However, he adds, while pricing is important, it’s not the only factor when it comes to profitability. “We’ve done studies, and we’ve built a lot of enablement to help partners, to show that best-in-class Barracuda partners are generating five and a half X for every dollar of Barracuda sold.”
The other side of profitability is ease of doing business, he says. “If I can help improve their productivity, resource utilization, etc., that will also drive profitability. So pricing is a component, and we have an incredible … cybersecurity platform that’s competitively priced. We are very proud of the margins that partners make, but profitability is a much bigger piece than just pricing alone.”
That said, he notes that Barracuda recently reduced the list price of its cloud backup solutions. “So we’re always looking at the market pricing, competitive pricing, and customer budgets. And yeah, we’ve taken recent pricing actions to meet that, and we’ll continue to take those to help meet the needs of the market.”
Helping MSPs Protect Customers From Cyberthreats
Beal says Barracuda’s overarching goal is to help MSPs meet the needs of their end customers. “We absolutely see that the bad guys are democratizing their attacks,” says Beal. “They’re no longer solely focused on the largest enterprises or federal governments or big companies all around the world. Unfortunately, the bad guys are going after K through 12 schools, local credit unions, individual SMBs. That’s putting a tremendous amount of pressure on partners, who are the trusted advisors, who those small businesses lean on for their technology needs. So we want our partners to be successful … Helping them with not just prevention but response. That’s really the key driver, putting our partners in a position to help their end customers.”
