Print.IT Reseller - issue 78

01732 759725 24 IT SERVICES Barracuda MSP has joined a select group of service providers chosen to support the development of Toshiba’s global managed IT services blueprint, Michelle Ryder spoke to Barracuda Vice President MSP International Sales, Jason Howells, to find out more about the move Barracuda to help Toshiba Tec expand managed security services and they don't have the answers to the questions that their customers are asking them. “They are having to turn to managed service providers and ask them to do more than perhaps what they're currently doing for them, particularly around security. I think being a security- centric MSP right now is extremely important. It’s important for prospecting and finding new customers, as well as for retaining your existing customers, because security has absolutely come to the fore,” he explained. “We've seen a lot of print companies that have been acquiring security-centric or security capable managed service providers, so that they can go and provide more services to their customers, and they've proven to be extremely successful. I think we will see more and more organisations looking to see how they can change their focus, how they can do more for their customers, how they can retain their customers, how they can find new customers, and we are well positioned to help them to do that,” Howells added. IT services blueprint Toshiba Canada previously worked with Barracuda to sell back-up solutions alongside its existing MFD provision. Impressed with both the success of this endeavour and the skill Barracuda demonstrated in this area, the Toshiba Canada team recommended Barracuda to the Toshiba headquarters in Japan. “This led to Toshiba reviewing its IT services globally,” explained Ben Gaston, Sales Director, Toshiba Tec. “A lot of regional teams weren’t ready to explore this straight away, but we in the UK certainly were. Barracuda was recommended to us from HQ, and will now be pivotal in helping us create the IT services blueprint that we will eventually take to Toshiba teams around the world.” He added: “Managed services have long been at the core of our offering, so it was a natural progression to move into managed IT services, a market which we are focussed on positively disrupting to offer real help to our customers. This extension to our portfolio was a logical progression in our aim to better support Barracuda Vice President MSP International Sales, Jason Howells, said digital transformation has accelerated in the current climate and that this has impacted across the business, and across all routes to market, whether it be MSPs, or at the end-user level. “Because we specialise in security, we have been very busy, largely driven by the wider adoption of Office 365 and moving applications to the public cloud – the shift has been phenomenal.” The pace and the speed that things have had to change has created opportunity for Barracuda. “There are a lot of organisations that are having to be agile, they're having to adapt, and they're having to think about new ways of doing things. It's almost been forced onto them, I guess, to a certain extent, because of the world that we live in right now. And the changes that we've all had to make,” he said. Security at the fore Howells believes that there’s opportunity where people don't have the expertise, Jason Howells continued...