Barracuda Networks’ Vice President of Channel for the Americas, Greg Saenz, has built an incredible reputation as a straight shooter in the IT channel. Whether he’s talking about industry trends, partner programs, or ways to sell security effectively, he’s great at helping people connect the dots.
At Kaseya Connect Global 2025, Saenz spoke with ChannelPro about his organization’s 2025 Emails Threat Report and ways that MSPs can grow in uncertain times.
Here are the highlights from that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
A Look at the Threat Landscape
Your New Threat Report Highlights HTML Attachment Risks: What Should MSPs Do Differently to Protect Their Clients?
Saenz: It all goes back to user training. Are you offering any sort of training as a service and user awareness training? That’s step one.
Next, is what are you using in your e-mail security stack to help extend your ability to review what’s coming in? We have [solutions] in our portfolio that will help scale an MSP’s ability to detect.
Ultimately it starts with end-user education and preventing people from clicking on the wrong things. Your ability to educate your customers gives you credibility. When you have credibility, it’s much easier to get them to sign up for your services.
Another important data point is that the number of organizations using authentication isn’t a very high percentage of organizations. It’s much easier to spoof emails that are not authenticated. DMARC is a great tool that MSPs can talk to their clients about implementing.
What Is a Threat That MSPs Might Not Be Thinking About Enough?
Saenz: Everybody’s looking for the next big problem. But email continues to be the number one threat vector. It’s no coincidence that we did the threat report on email. Beyond that, what data access do users have? Should the doctor at a five-person office access patient data from personal email?
We talk about ways to help MSPs deliver Zero Trust. A lot of small businesses still aren’t using two-factor authentication. That’s low-hanging fruit.
What Else in the Report Stood Out to You?
Saenz: The number of emails with malicious HTML that resulted in an account takeover was rather eye-opening. One in five, so 20% of organizations experience an account takeover every month, right? Think about what happens when an HTML file gets through. Somebody mistakenly clicks, credentials get harvested, and that turns into a compromised account.
Greg Saenz
How Is Barracuda Helping to Prevent Account Takeovers?
Saenz: We just released new account takeover prevention capabilities. Now, using machine learning, it can respond to account takeovers for you in real-time. That shortens the window to response for our customers and our partners. Those capabilities are part of our first two bundles, in our email product portfolio.
If 24% of all email is spam or malicious, MSPs need to ask themselves: Do I have the right tools in the toolbox to address it? We can provide more security capabilities and help them add margin without having to necessarily raise your prices exponentially.
What’s a Real-World Story of How Barracuda Stopped an Attack?
Saenz: Just recently, I was talking to an account rep about a partner’s experience with Barracuda. We helped stop the ransomware attack and supported them post-event. Part of the need is getting data to the insurance providers and were able to help with that.
Another example comes from one of our engineers. A partner was trialing our email security. During the demo, an account takeover was happening in real-time in the partner’s environment. Had we not been trialing the product, they would have experienced an account takeover themselves.
That was the a-ha moment. They realized, “If it can happen to me, it can happen to our customers.” Things like that happen every day.
How Is Barracuda Integrating AI Into Its Products and Partner Experience?
That account takeover capability is really leveraging AI to do that monitoring and form opinions before a human has to interact. In our SOC, we use AI to cut down the noise and identify the threats that actually need human intervention.
We’ve been leveraging AI for 6–7 years. We had one of the first email security products to leverage AI and machine learning to look for targeted spear phishing.
Internally, we’re using AI to enable our sales teams. We’re looking at ways to open that up to our channel to enable them as well.
Quality Partner Support
What Support Does Barracuda Offer to Partners?
Saenz: With our Partner Access Program, we have a lot of tools around marketing and go-to-market to fire that next customer. We do a lot of webinars and outreach to our partners.
We try to arm them with resources through our partner success program. The more they sell, the better it is for Barracuda. Campaign-in-a-box, co-branded webinars, collateral they can reuse. It’s definitely a place we continue to invest, both from a product marketing and general marketing standpoint.
As of last month, we now have a single partner portal. Prior to that, we still had an MSP partner portal and a sell-through partner portal. Now we have one. We’ve also consolidated our communication in newsletters. No more disparate messaging. Having consolidated, consistent messaging will benefit everybody.
Can MSPs Get MDF Support for Creative Marketing Efforts?
Saenz: We’ll entertain things. Obviously, the first question I’ll ask is: What’s the ROI? That’s what marketing is going to ask us. But yeah, there is an MDF component to our partner program and we’re looking to do more to expand that to MSPs.
Traditionally it’s been on our resale side, and as we brought the program together, that gives us more opportunity for MSPs. It is in the form of a credit. They can credit it back to their bill and their account. For some of the ones that require a check, we have ways to accommodate that. We want to entertain things that have good ROI and help us mutually grow.
What’s the Typical Journey Like for a New Barracuda Partner?
Saenz: From what I’ve seen in the last six months, we’re typically starting with a product. They want to replace a vendor or add something to their stack. Within the first two or three interactions, we’re talking. “Hey, you came to talk about this, what else are you doing?”
A partner will typically try the one thing they came for, and within three to six months, we usually see the adoption of an additional product. XDR seems to be the fast follow right now.
How Do You Define a “Successful” MSP Partner?
Saenz: Beyond just dollars, the partner billing the most is successful. But we’re really looking at the number of products partners are adopting. The stat I saw was 1.6 products on average. Can we get that to two or three?
The more invested across the portfolio [that an MSP is], the more successful the partnership. Whether it’s $2,000 a month or $100,000 a month—are we deeply partnered? That’s how we’re starting to evaluate success.
The State of the Channel
What Pain Points Are You Hearing From the Channel Right Now?
Saenz: When you’ve got a reseller channel and MSP channel, you have to field questions about what people see as competition. In actuality, it’s reframing the conversation of how we’re listening and delivering benefits for everybody.
[We are] continuing to refine our program to make sure we’re best aligned to our channel. A partner is a partner is a partner. The only difference is how they want to transact and what makes sense for their business. We want to make sure we’re best aligned to support that. That trickles down through support, marketing, etc.
We still have work to do in continuing to refine a unified message. When you talk to people at a conference like this, they’re always very understanding and they love being heard.
Given Economic Pressures, Is Now the Right Time for MSPs to Raise Their Rates?
Saenz: I don’t know if there’s ever a great time. I think what it boils down to is, are you able to provide valuable services? Be direct and ask if you are offering enough value to justify the price point.
If You Were a Small MSP Looking to Grow This Year, Where Would You Start?
Saenz: Consolidate with a vendor to make the relationship more profitable. Provide more value and consider raising your prices within reason. That’s an opportunity. Remember: the lack of IT resources will get worse and MSPs are well-positioned to benefit. So don’t take your foot off the gas when it comes to customer acquisition. Last thing: Partner with the right companies. We’re well-positioned to help partners continue to grow.
