Today we announced the launch of the Barracuda Partner Sales Engineer Community, an enablement and rewards program for value-added resellers, managed service providers (MSPs), distributors, systems integrators, and more. We also introduced enhancements to the Barracuda Partner Success Program that improve the partner experience, introduce new automation and self-service tools for increased productivity, and help uncover new business opportunities to drive revenue growth and boost profitability.
To help you get a better understanding of what’s new and how it can help you, we sat down to talk with David Hartman, Director of Global Enablement at Barracuda, and Alli Oneal, Senior Manager of Global Partner Programs and Partner Experience at Barracuda.
Q&A with David Hartman and Alli Oneal
What new enhancements to the overall Partner Success Program are you most excited about?
Alli: We’re excited to introduce another substantial update just seven months after our last update in March. Since we first introduced the Barracuda Partner Success Program in December 2023, it’s been our goal to continuously iterate on the program so we’re staying on top of industry trends and program trends and evolving our offerings.
In my role, I have a special interest in our partner experience, so some of the things I’m most excited about for this launch are related to partner automation tools available in our partner portal. We’re introducing two new dashboards on the partner portal, one for partners to monitor their overall program performance — what their total revenue to date is and how many certifications they’ve completed against their program level requirements — as well as a new dashboard for our premier level partners and our distributors that will allow them to see their quarterly rebate targets and their performance against the target. It’s an exciting step to give our partner sales teams that level of visibility in the partner portal.
What are the key themes for this update to the Partner Success Program?
Alli: These phase three enhancements that we’re releasing are centered around three key themes. First and foremost, we always say that enabling our partner technical contacts is a key foundational element for growing our partnership. So, the first theme is centered around enabling and rewarding our partner engineers with resources, programs, and tools.
The second theme is by opening up Barracuda Managed XDR for all partner types, we’re really unleashing this huge new sales opportunity for our resellers to be able to grow their business with Barracuda in that specific solution category.
And then finally, with the enhancements we’re making to the Partner Portal, we have a key theme around saving our partners time and simplifying the experience engaging with Barracuda through automation.
How do these new enhancements build on what we’ve done in the past?
Alli: Our main goal for the Partner Program is to continue to make it easy to partner with Barracuda, and these additional enhancements we’re making around automation and new resources available on the Partner Portal are all making that experience of partnering with Barracuda even easier. We’re continuing to evolve that mission of making it easy to partner with us.
Another core pillar of the program is designing it for the modern partner and building agility into the partner program. I think what we’re doing with unleashing the XDR opportunity for our resale partners is a great example of making it easy for the partner to serve their end user, depending on how they want to buy, regardless of route to market. If they want to buy XDR as a managed service, they can certainly do that. But if the partner needs to just resell XDR to their end user, they can do that as well.
What is unique about the new Barracuda Partner Sales Engineer Community? How will it help our partners?
David: While other rewards programs are focused on the partner organizations overall or their sales teams more generally, the Barracuda Partner Sales Engineer Community is geared toward the individual technical resources at our partners. This program rewards individuals for everything from technical training to running different scans and demos.
Our focus is to not only help them get skilled up more on the technical side, but also to incentivize them to take trainings that are cross-functional across multiple products. We’ve heard in the past that a lot of our partners are knowledgeable about one product but don’t necessarily know all the products that we have, and so we want to help them expand the depth and breadth of what they know about Barracuda products.
We also want to introduce them to our tools. We have scanning tools and demos that can be utilized to help them sell and position Barracuda solutions, and we also have sandboxes and other types of capabilities that they use. The program will reward them for trying those tools, so they know how they work and how to position them.
What do you hope partner sales engineers get out of the program?
David: We would like for them to see it as sort of a loyalty program that will help our partner sales engineers build technical excellence with Barracuda solutions, achieve enhanced sales capabilities, and participate in a supportive, collaborative community. They’ll earn rewards by completing different activities and gain points to move up to the Advanced Level for additional rewards. They’ll also get access to resources, such as hunter cards, that will help make it easy to explain a product to a customer —the capabilities and levels, as well as a competitive elevator pitch and an example of a win. We hope it will also help keep Barracuda top of mind for them.
What are your goals for the community?
Alli: We recognize what an important foundation it is for us to win the hearts and minds of our partner technical contacts. We want to have our partner technical contacts get their hands on the technology and get comfortable with it so they can start evangelizing that within their own customer communities and help us grow our mutual business. Ultimately, we’re looking to help support shared partner success by enabling those frontline technical resources with the latest and greatest tools, resources, sneak previews into roadmaps, and more.
Photo: GobMetha / Shutterstock
