Barracuda Networks Inc. has changed the name of its Intronis MSP Solutions by Barracuda unit to Barracuda MSP and added enhanced support for Barracuda solutions to its ECHOplatform management portal.
ECHOplatform was one of multiple products Campbell, Calif.-based Barracuda acquired in September 2015 when it purchased Intronis Inc., of Chelmsford, Mass., for an undisclosed sum to jumpstart its entry into the managed services market. Intronis subsequently re-launched as Intronis MSP Solutions by Barracuda in March of the following year.
Re-branding that unit Barracuda MSP now signals a “doubling down” of Barracuda’s commitment to managed service providers and also allows the vendor to take advantage of its stronger brand equity relative to Intronis outside the U.S., according to Neal Bradbury, senior director of business development for Barracuda MSP.
“We found that going to market as Barracuda actually has much more name recognition and that brand stands out internationally a little bit more,” he says. Barracuda does not currently plan to rename its Intronis Backup product, Bradbury adds, making that system the last part of Barracuda’s business to bear the Intronis moniker.
Barracuda has been rolling out MSP-oriented versions of its products with subscription pricing since it unveiled the Intronis MSP Solutions name. The extensions to ECHOplatform announced today, which quietly started going live last month, allow MSPs to provision and activate not only Intronis products but Barracuda Backup appliances, the Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 suite that reached market in January of last year, and Barracuda Email Security products through the same interface as well.
Significantly, users will also enjoy unified invoicing for all those systems through ECHOplatform.
“The Barracuda direct business and Barracuda MSP division have prior to this point been doing independent billing for Barracuda versus Intronis products,” Bradbury says. “Now we’re bringing all that together on one single monthly bill for all the products offered by Barracuda and Barracuda MSP together.”
Other Barracuda products will join the ones available now on ECHOplatform in the future, according to Christopher Crellin, senior director of product management for Barracuda MSP.
“This is the big initial first step,” he says. “There’s a lot more to come.”
In a further consolidation of Barracuda’s direct and MSP businesses, users now have single sign-on access to the same solutions they provision and bill for through ECHOplatform on the Barracuda Cloud Control administration console too.
Also debuting today are two new online information resources for MSPs from Barracuda. The first, called smarterMSP.com, provides news on trends and opportunities in the managed services space, as well as tips and tricks for operating more profitably. The second, named Ready, Set, Managed!, offers tutorials and other interactive materials designed to help newcomers to managed services get a practice off the ground.
“They go at their own pace, and basically at the end of it they should be comfortable starting their first managed service,” Bradbury says.
There are roughly 2,400 active MSP partners doing business with Barracuda MSP at present.
