Security vendor Barracuda has named Jason Beal its first vice president of worldwide partner ecosystems.
Beal, a veteran of Ingram Micro and Palo Alto Networks who was senior vice president of global channel and partner ecosystems at AvePoint, a data management solutions provider for Microsoft 365, until earlier this year, now serves as a liaison between the partner community and his new employer.
“We’ve seen that different partner business models need different things from their partnerships as far as enablement tools,” Beal says. “We have the opportunity here in a channel leadership role to provide those tools, those strategies, those programs to the partners to meet their needs so that they can meet their customer needs.”
The diversity and complexity of the channel landscape, Beal continues, make having someone in a role like his more urgent.
“There’s been this proliferation of different partner types,” he notes, ranging from old-school resellers and integrators to MSPs, cloud consultants, DevOps specialists, and beyond. Accelerating merger and acquisition activity is giving rise to larger firms with unique requirements of their own, Beal adds.
“The channel and its numbers are always evolving across the globe. We welcome opportunities to work with partners of all shapes and sizes to help meet their customers cybersecurity and data protection needs,” he says.
Beal also plans to cultivate relationships with other players in the channel ecosystem that work both with Barracuda itself and with its partners.
“There are opportunities for the company to do more through distribution, to do more through the emergence of these B2B cloud marketplaces, and to do more with the public cloud hyperscalers, and continue to accelerate our partnerships with AWS and Microsoft,” he says.
Other opportunities Beal plans to investigate in the months ahead include updating Barracuda’s partner program. “As the end customers have so many different ways that they are being influenced to buy technology and then consume that technology, we need to make sure that our partners have the right programs to meet the needs of their customers,” he says.
That’s especially true for managed service providers, Beal continues. “The breadth of our MSP partners is expanding. The business that we do with them continues to grow,” he says. “MSPs are gaining more and more share of end user spend due to the challenge of IT complexity and lack of cybersecurity talent, so absolutely, Barracuda continues to invest and accelerate in the MSP partner community.”
The company has been investing in the channel more generally since being acquired from equity investor Thoma Bravo by fellow private equity house KKR in a deal announced in April and completed in August, according to Beal. “I’m a quick example of that,” he notes. “We will in the near term be adding more channel resource to support our teams around the globe.”
