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...
Highlights