Insights for 2023 from Barracuda’s CRN Channel Chiefs

Today, CRN^®, a brand of The Channel Company, announced its 2023 Channel Chiefs list. Every year, this list honors the IT channel executives who work tirelessly to advance the channel agenda and deliver successful channel partner programs and strategies, and two Barracuda executives were recognized this year.

Chris Ross made the list for the first time after being promoted to Chief Revenue Officer in September, and Neal Bradbury, SVP, MSP Business, at Barracuda was named to the prestigious list for the 11^th year in a row!

The 2023 CRN Channel Chiefs were selected by the editorial staff based on their record of business innovation and dedication to the partner community. This year’s list represents the top IT executives responsible for building a robust channel ecosystem.

Check out the full list, including the responses for Chris and Neal. Here are a few of the insights they shared about the year ahead for channel partners:

Chris Ross, Chief Revenue Officer, Barracuda

In what area(s) would you most like to see your channel partners invest in 2023?

Partners need to continue to invest in their own business transformation and changing business models. Continued investment in specialization and training will be key to remaining competitive. Greater investment in expanding market reach and working with vendors with the right solutions that will provide them with support to build and expand net new customers will also be important.

What will be the biggest challenges facing your partners in 2023?

Lack of resources, recruiting, and supply chain remain top challenges. Partners need to adopt 'as-a-service' sales models and solutions to expand revenue from existing customers and increase net retention while driving the necessary transformational change in the business model. Developing and deploying a marketplace strategy to complement existing sales models will be key. Market predictions outline expectations that over 25% of B2B transactions will flow through a marketplace by the end of 2023 and continue to grow. This is driven by the convenience of self-service. Navigating the economic environment, along with supply chain shortages, will continue to be difficult.

Neal Bradbury, SVP, MSP Business

In what area(s) would you most like to see your channel partners invest in 2023?

Partners should invest in their ability to assess and improve the security postures of their customers (and their own businesses). This also means gaining visibility into their customers' environments, and vulnerabilities and threat activity occurring there. Ultimately, they also need to know how to identify a threat that requires a response and be able to respond effectively. Given that security expertise is scarce and difficult to retain, MSPs will need to determine whether it makes sense for them to build these capabilities in-house, or to engage a partner to help provide them.

MSPs are faced with the challenge of combining disparate security systems, processes, and talent to not only become secure but also operationally efficient. No standalone technology will check the box on security for a business. An MSP can set up all the alerts they want, but if there are too many and they don't know what to focus on, it could hurt rather than help. MSPs will need to find ways to centralize information, avoid alert fatigue, be more effective and efficient in their response to threats, and generally avoid becoming overwhelmed.