Beal said that the creation of this global channel role – a first for Barracuda – shows their commitment to strengthening their channel further.
Jason Beal, Vice President, Worldwide Partner Ecosystems, Barracuda
Cybersecurity vendor Barracuda has announced the hire of Jason Beal as its new Vice President, Worldwide Partner Ecosystems. Beal comes with more than 20 years of channel leadership experience, including six and a half years in channel management roles at Palo Alto Networks, and nine and a half years at distributor Ingram Micro. Most recently he was at Microsoft-focused ISV AvePoint for a year and a half, where he was senior vice president of global channel and partner ecosystems.
Beal is the first person appointed to this newly-created senior position.
“This is a new role, which represents yet a further commitment by Barracuda to the channel,” Beal told ChannelBuzz. “Previously, channel management was done in theatre and local relationships partnered with local sales organization. The creation of this global role represents an acceleration in the channel.”
Beal is being tasked with leading global channel strategy and development with a strong focus on driving growth across the Barracuda global partner ecosystem.
“The global channel ecosystem is being transformed,” Beal said. “The end customer is being influenced to consume techs in so many ways. Barracuda needs to provide them with choice. These partner models of the future are evolving so fast to meet this demand. We need to provide enablement and programs for different partner models, whether they are high velocity resellers, MSPs, born in the cloud partners, services and consulting partners or DevOps partners.”
Beal said that this is not a sore spot as he takes over, and that Barracuda is providing enablement to this broad range of partner types today.
“Barracuda has had a ton of enablement, and we have had specialized resources and teams to enable those partners,” Beal indicated. “Neal Bradbury focused on MSPs, so we have lots of enablement for them. But we have broad enablement across the tracks.”
Barracuda says Beal is being asked to build and grow a world class channel go-to-market strategy and partner program for their business, but he emphasized that channel commitment is already there.
“The partner ecosystem has been a strength since its inception,” he said. “It has been channel first and channel- centric, and we have had a strong leadership team and culture around the channel, focused on distributed use cases and the SMB and midmarket. That’s important because the bad actors are now targeting these areas as tools for the bad guys’ use have been democratized.”
That being said, Beal commented that there are areas where the partner ecosystem can be strengthened further.
“I see an opportunity to do more with our top partners, and also to expand our breadth across partner business models,” he said. “I would like to see greater share capture of these new cloud and B2B marketplaces. This includes both the big hyperscalers and we already have strong relationships with AWS and Azure, and the newer and growing clouds. I listen and learn and believe I can make this happen.”
Beal noted that 75% of companies have ensured a ransomware attack and that Barracuda’s leadership against all 13 threat vectors there is of major importance.
“There’s an opportunity to further help end customers solve three challenges around digital transformation, lack of cybersecurity talent, and SMB and midmarket vulnerability,” he said.
