Barracuda looks to new CRO to share best practices

Barracuda is looking to identify and share best practice from different parts of the globe across its channel.

The security player recently appointed Chris Ross to the position of chief revenue officer (CRO), with a brief to look at what was happening in its routes to market and find lessons that would improve life for partners.

Ross has been with the supplier since 2015, and has been senior vice-president of international sales, looking after things in EMEA and APAC, for the past seven years. He therefore understands the firm’s channel and the challenges it’s trying to help customers solve. However, he had not been exposed to the full partner base before, and is starting to get to grips with some of the regions that were previously outside of his remit.

“I’m obviously aware of the business and the people, but [this role involves] getting my arms around the whole global business as opposed to just the international focus I had previously,” said Ross.

“There’s a lot happening in EMEA and APAC that we don’t do in the Americas, and a lot happening in the Americas that we don’t do internationally,” he said. “Part of creating this global role was to see how we can leverage the best practices happening in different regions.”

Ross said the plan would be to “pull the best bits together to get our go to market even better than it has been so far”, adding that there’s plenty of opportunity. 

He has recently returned from a visit to Barracuda’s US offices, and already has some ideas that could benefit UK partners. “We’ve got huge momentum in our channel,” said Ross. “We’re a channel-first company; our whole go to market is aligned around the channel. What we’ve got to do is make sure that as we tweak things and look at different things we can do, we just keep the momentum we’ve got in the channel.”