Interaction -Murali Urs, Country Manager Barracuda Networks India

Channel world is going through a turmoil and is facing many challenges. Murali Urs, Country Manager Barracuda Networks India, discusses some of these issues.

What is the roadmap and strategy for channel partners to go forward?

Barracuda values partnerships of all types and we are a company dedicated to partners. We have built a sophisticated partner programme to help our partners to expand and grow the business and succeed together. Our channel partners have been the backbone of our growth and market reach. As we conduct 100% of our business through channel, our strategy and engagement models have been devised to suit the market conditions so that we add value to our partners business and help them address the changing market needs. Looking at the present scenario, our roadmap is to ensure that we stay relevant to the existing partners to augment our relationship with them. Meanwhile, we are always looking at new partnerships and alliances with whom we can add value to each other.

As the pandemic has changed consumer behaviour towards IT spending and contributed to accelerating cloud adoption, we at Barracuda have increased our focus on cloud solutions and continue to deliver innovative security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use. We provide a broad and growing portfolio of cloud-enabled security solutions across email, cloud, network and application to address the rising security concerns around public cloud and network security, and advanced email threats. Barracuda is helping our partners secure that journey from on-premises, physical environments to the public cloud by providing the solutions and support required.

We also focus on partner enablement to keep them up on the latest industry trends. We have a variety of resources and training available on our Partner portal and have increased our efforts in training our partners on our email, cloud, network and application security solutions via both pre-sales, post-sales, regular webinars and various marketing activities to increase our reach as well as emphasizing working with CSP and cloud-focused resellers. At the same time, we are investing in brand marketing to ensure our partners and customers know us and trust us. Through marketing and sales collaboration, we grow our businesses together with partners by generating qualified leads and deal registration.

In today's world of online platforms becoming the lifeline of the businesses, how can the channel partners survive and what is their utility?

The world operates around the old saying - change is the only thing constant. Channel partners too would always need to change their business focus and skill set with the fluctuating demands of the market and technology landscape. Their utility will continue to be there as long as they are adopting to the changing times to bring value to both vendors and customers. So, the need of the hour is to upskill, upgrade and upsell new solutions and technologies to their customers.

At Barracuda, we expect distributed enterprises and macro-level trends like digital transformation and leveraging of cloud services tend to increase in 2021. Meanwhile threats will continue to target the weakest link in the chain, which normally is the human element. Attackers will take advantages of the new reality and we should expect to continue to see a proliferation of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, ransomware, business email compromise (BEC) and malware-based attacks. Channel partners who are able to find a trusted security partner to help them protect their customers from threat vectors arising from email, public cloud, network and application and also support them to go to the market with innovative solutions will be in a better position for business growth.

How do you work with your channel partners in the current scenario to offer best suited solutions to organisations?

Barracuda has always been an early mover in understanding the market needs and this has been more profound in our cloud solutions. As the industry witness’s rapid adoption of cloud in large numbers, Barracuda cloud solutions that cut across email protection, application security and network security allow them to open new doors to existing customers and most importantly knock on new customers with our cloud-enabled solutions.

We continue to deliver innovation and introduce new security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use in addressing the changing market needs. As remote work is here to stay, cloud migrations are accelerating and traditional corporate perimeters have disappeared. Barracuda provides a broad and growing portfolio of cloud-enabled network and application security solutions. Recently Barracuda introduced Barracuda CloudGen Access, a Zero Trust solution enables secure, reliable and fast access to cloud or on-premises applications and workloads from any device and location. Together with the new Barracuda CloudGen WAN, the first global secure SD-WAN service built natively on Microsoft Azure, organisations can benefit from optimized network performance, security and minimized cost as they speed up public cloud adoption such as Microsoft Office 365 during the pandemic lockdown.

It is of paramount importance for organisations to protect their remote workforce. While email attack continues to be a major threat vector and the distracted remote workforce has created new attack surface for spear phishing, BEC and more, we offer Barracuda Total Email Protection which combines a complete email protection portfolio from detection, backup and security awareness training into a single bundle to protect users and data from email-borne threats. We also offer Barracuda CloudGen Firewall (CGF) to ensure that remote employees have what they need to securely access corporate resources; Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup to ensure that business data can be protected according to corporate policy; or Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service to protect E-commerce and other applications from DDoS and bot attacks. Barracuda offers solutions across email, cloud, network and application to help our channel partners in addressing different customers’ needs in the shift of working model and operation needs.

How do you support your partners in terms of IT and technical support?

Barracuda is a customer-centric and 100% channel-driven company. We invest a lot of time, effort and energy in training our partners on our solutions for both pre-sales and post-sales skill sets. Many of our partners are capable of supporting our products on their own, right from positioning, doing a Demo or a POC, to selling and supporting the customer post-sales. We offer incentive programs for their internal learnings or usage in their production networks, which helps them get used to the products even better.

Barracuda also has its own Technical Support Team based out of India. It is also accessible to our partners 24/7 worldwide for getting support for any of our products. We have over 350 people in support, 24x7 technical support available via phone, live chat, online portal and e-mail. We also offer Premium Support subscription service, which includes a dedicated Premium Support Manager and a team of highly skilled technical engineers provide fast solutions to high-priority support issues. We always connect our partners with our support professionals to provide technical support and it is not an Automated IVR System.