Reseller, MSP, Services Merged: Structural Risks and Rewards in Barracuda’s Program – Michelle Hodges

Dave Sobel (0:00)

Dave Sobel here, reporting from the floor of ChannelCon. We'll be sitting down with Michelle Hodges, the SVP of Global Channels and Alliances at Barracuda. One quick disclosure, Barracuda briefed us back in May, and we published an independent strategy review that they did a fact check on, but all the analysis is ours. Now, Michelle came to Barracuda in May of 2025 from Ivanti. Before that, GitLab, Gigamon, Riverbed, Appdiel, Intel, VMware, and Microsoft. That's nine partner programs, 15 months rebuilding this one. Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Hodges (0:33)

Thank you so much for having me, Dave.

Dave Sobel (0:34)

Now, you unified the Reseller, MSP, and Services programs into one partner success program, and you've added it to it all this past year, most recently on July 22nd. Walk me through what a partner now has that they didn't have before.

Michelle Hodges (0:51)

Wow, how much time do you got?

It's been a pretty exciting year. So, yeah, we unified not only the program, but also the portal. Partners used to have seven locations that they had to access, seven logins. Now, there's one single area. It's a unified program that treats a partner as a partner and not as a type, right? Understanding that customer choice is king. A customer might want to buy monthly, they might want to buy annually, they might need a little bit of professional services and some managed services. Allowing for customer choice to reign, a single unified reimagined partner experience, but then also then letting the partner differentiate and get down to the persona level on how are they delivering our solutions to the customer. There's a lot in there. There is.

Dave Sobel (1:41)

Let's make that tangible for a partner today. What's a major actionable item that they could take advantage of right now?

Michelle Hodges (1:47)

I have to tell them to go to the new portal, get logged in, re-opt in, all of those things.

But there's a lot, right? So our incentives are continually, every quarter I'm refining and updating our incentives to make it more profitable to grow with Barracuda across the entire customer lifecycle. So not only at the point of transaction, but at the point of growth or cross-sell, identifying new logos. We'll have gamification and increased programs coming out as well. We've completely reimagined our enablement. Some of our certifications were more than two years old. So we've relaunched our certifications as the Barracuda 1 certification, starting from a platform level and then allowing the partner to specialize down into products. We're layering on top of that the Barracuda Mastery Program, which is a badging program, certainly focused on products to go very, very deep to allow partners to differentiate themselves. But we, of course, will be adding AI badging and compliance badging. I think it's really important that with all the MSPs that we speak to, we can give a point of view on operationally what MSPs should be thinking about, but also how our products will help expand their AI portfolio. Then I don't know that we worry enough about compliance and how quickly that's going to come at us with the rise of AI. So we have completely rebuilt our trust center and want to give the ability for our partners to profit from that. Engagement is a big part of the program. I don't know how much you know about Barracuda, but part of, I can't exactly say I'm transforming Barracuda's partner program because it's a very loyal, legendary, long-standing channel. We've got great partners who and we've had a profitable program. As I said earlier, it's more about re-imagining that partner experience. But part of what makes us great is what we call the Cuda culture and our partnering culture, really based on trust, based on personal relationships.

So we want to take advantage of that. Showing up at more events like these as well as investing in our own events. We've got a secured series in most major cities throughout the year. We have two partner summits a year and then we run monthly co-sell. So in-person co-sell sessions that are powered by digital sales rooms and loaded up with not only call scripts but email scripts, go-to-market campaigns, propensity data, etc.

And then also what we call Growcell, which is custom for the MSP where we bring our security practice along, focused on the MSP to look at their reference architecture, help them understand where they can consolidate their tool sprawl, and identify growth for their customers. The next area is around partner success.

So it's one thing to add and grow to your business, but it's also reducing churn and keeping those customers and making them successful. So why not take all those great tools that we have in customer success and turn them to the MSP so that we can help them know where they're winning, but also give them early signals around churn. So invest it heavily in a partner success team and tools to help them go there.