Barracuda Networks continues its work to “win the hearts and minds” of partner sales engineers by launching a  new Partner Sales Engineer Community under its Partner Success Program.

Jason Beal, Barracuda’s vice president of worldwide partner ecosystems, said that although SEs play a key role in working with clients and influencing sales and salespeople, they’re often a forgotten group regarding vendor attention, celebration and rewards.

“This is our first time working with a community like this, offering recognition, access and rewards for our partners’ sales engineers for all they do for us with our clients every day,” Beal said.

The community will serve as a hub for training labs, scanning tools, product demos and sandboxes, opportunities to collaborate and commune with their peers in the channel, and a rewards program. Beal said shortly that Barracuda may offer SE Community members exclusive seatings or events at its regular roadshows and will run raffles and give them giveaways.

“We asked ourselves what the best way to recognize the engineers is and allow them to shine for all they do for us,” Beal said.

Partner SEs can apply online for membership; their profile will include details on their advanced certifications.

The company also announced a significant expansion of its Barracuda Managed XDR SOC-as-a-Service offering. Previously available only to MSP partners, Managed XDR will now be available to all the company’s partners. In doing so, Beal said Barracuda is opening up a vast opportunity to its partners.

“We look at data in terms of a total addressable market of $3 billion for SOC-as-a-Service, and it’s a greenfield opportunity for most of our partners to offer this 24 by seven by 365 level of service,” Beal said. “In the last six months, talking to partners, I keep hearing that end-user budgets are getting released now for XDR or SOC-as-a-Service.”

Beal said that while much of the opportunity is greenfield, Managed XDR can be configured to determine what roles the partner’s resources play and which are handled by Managed XDR.

As it expands the partner opportunity around the product, Barracuda has also introduced the first three Managed XDR certifications for partners, introducing new certifications around selling Managed XDR and foundational and advanced technical certifications.

The company also added two new dashboards to help partners monitor partner program compliance regarding revenue, certifications, and renewals and track partner performance against rebate targets.

The changes are the third major addition to the Barracuda Partner Success Program launched late last year. Beal said the program reflects the reality that partners are looking to consolidate the number of security vendors they work with and, in turn, are looking for security vendors who can and will go deeper with them.

“We’ve responded to this trend around vendor consolidation,” Beal said. “If they want to go deeper, and need to go deeper for their customers, sell more services and sell across the platform, we’ll give them the tools, the scanners, the demos and labs they need. We need to do all that to help them drive their business and be successful with this vendor consolidation strategy.”