Katie Bach takes the new position with the objective of expanding both partners and resources to drive MSP360 to its next phase of growth.
Katie Bach, MSP360’s global director of channel operations
MSP360, which has built itself out from a backup vendor to a broader provider of IT management solutions, particularly for MSPs, has announced the appointment of Katie Bach as the company’s first global director of channel operations.
While Bach came to MSP360 from PartnerEdge, a channel strategy and marketing consultancy, and has consulted for Presidio in the past, most of her time has been spent at larger vendors like Cisco, Sophos and Barracuda. MSP360 has ambitions to become a large platform player, but they are not there yet.
“They are on a hypergrowth track,” Bach said. “I firmly believe my experience helps develop a world class program, which our leadership team has made a top priority.”
MSP360 started out in 2008 as CloudBerry Lab, a pure-play backup provider. With the name change in 2019 came new leadership, and a shift in strategy, to build out the backup service with new capabilities, and to add complementary services in order to make the platform much fuller. This has included their own RMM.
“I was brought in to lead our next stage of growth, Bach said. “The objective is to add new partners and engagements to ensure we meet goals and business objectives, and take of the advantage of the fact that we are a full IT management platform today. MSPs can earn more with us than with any other vendor.”
Bach outlined the specifics of exactly what she will do.
“My primary focus will be improving Go to Market, planning, sales and enablement tools, to improve the quality of mindshare,” she said.
The Go-to-Market strategy is channel-first, and is channel as far as MSPs are concerned, although they have direct relationships with a small number of large vendors with different routes for market.
“Our platform was developed with a channel first approach, and it does not compete against MSPs,” Bach said. “Our marketing team develops thousands of qualified leads each quarter, which are passed on to channel partners. We do have direct relationships with vendors like NetApp, AWS and others, which makes it easier to do business with them in a storage-agnostic manner.”
Bach provided some insight to what MSP360 can be expected to do in the near future.
“Cybersecurity is a high priority, and there will be near-term announcements for enhancements to our platform,” she indicated
“We have a channel program and over 7000 partners – including MSPs, resellers, and distributors,” Bach added. “We will be rolling out more technical tools, along with sales, enablement, marketing and lead support. We approach partners with an all-in approach, and work with our top partners on Go-to-Market marketing.”
What’s upcoming here is new certification support for partners.
“We have identified certification levels for partners with performance requirements appropriate for each, for partners, and are putting a team together for PAMs [Partner Account Managers] that will focus on certifications,” Bach said. “This is something that we are in the process of putting in place right now.”
