Barracuda is merging its MSP and channel partner programmes.
The outfit’s VP of partner ecosystems Jason Beal said many vendors in the industry had legacy programmes that were tailored to a resale business.
Using diversified partner models enabled the creation of a global programme that recognised partners who are reselling technology and providing professional services, those that are serve up managed services or co-managed models.
Barracuda wanted to update the programme to recognise this diversification of its business models, he said.
Another reason for the change was because modern buyers, have different needs and preferences for how they decide on technology, how they consume it, and how they pay.
“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,”
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,” Beal said.
Beal said that partner economics had changed.
“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. Now 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,” he said.
Beal said he wanted partners to sell more, generate more dollars of Barracuda sold, and capture much more of that economic opportunity around those products.
