Monday Morning Impact – November 3

Barracuda Networks, a Campbell, California-based cybersecurity company, has announced an agreement with Capchase, a New York-based vendor financing company, to deliver a new financing program that offers Barracuda customers flexible payment options for multi-year contracts, while ensuring resellers and distributors receive full payment upfront.

“We are removing any financial friction from the purchasing process and empowering customers to invest in critical security solutions with greater flexibility, while ensuring our partners benefit from immediate and predictable payment,” said Geoff Waters, Chief Revenue Officer at Barracuda.

Barracuda Financial Services is designed to deliver greater payment flexibility for buyers, accelerated payouts for partners and reduced operational overhead. Customers can spread payments across their preferred schedule. Resellers and distributors can also benefit from full upfront payment without any changes to their existing quoting or billing workflows.

The service embeds digital payment links directly into sales processes, enabling faster deal closure. Pre-qualification and approval processes run behind the scenes.

“Traditional financing solutions were built for a different era,” said Miguel Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Capchase. “Barracuda Financial Services exemplifies our vision of true embedded vendor financing – delivering buyer approvals in advance, transparent terms and seamless, branded partner experiences that match the speed of modern sales cycles.”

Barracuda Financial Services is available now through Barracuda’s global reseller and distributor network in select markets. Partners can request financing options through their Barracuda representative, with real-time approvals powered by Capchase’s automated underwriting platform.

Channel Impact^®
This new financing program provides customers flexible payment options for multi-year contracts and upfront payment for resellers and distributors, accelerating partner payouts and potentially reducing operational overhead.

San Francisco-based Dialpad has launched its new Agentic AI Platform, enabling businesses to build autonomous voice- and text-based AI agents that understand complex requests, reason through multi-step tasks, and execute them end-to-end across existing systems.

The platform automates customer functions such as scheduling, order lookups, lead qualification, and account management. The system utilizes autonomous agents that communicate via text or voice, and engage resolution.

“Customer service has been operating on autopilot for years. We built the override,” said Craig Walker, CEO and Founder of Dialpad. “Instead of using AI to deflect customers, we’re using it to solve their problems – quickly, accurately, and naturally.”

Dialpad’s Agentic AI replaces passive retrieval, and promises resolution of up to 70% of customer requests ranging from authentication and refunds to scheduling and order management.

The platform’s model-mix architecture selects the optimal balance of speed and sophistication for each task, leveraging Dialpad’s proprietary AI models alongside various LLMs. Conversations transfer with context when human expertise is needed.

“You can’t stress the importance of the AI agent-human agent relationship enough when it comes to optimizing customer service,” said Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst at Metrigy. “The trick for CX leaders will be knowing when humans should take the lead, and vice versa. For that, they’ll need to regularly monitor performance and adjust along the way.”

Channel Impact^®
According to the company, early adopters in healthcare, retail, real estate, recruiting, automotive, and legal services are already realizing faster resolutions, lower costs, and higher customer satisfaction. Partners pursuing these vertical markets should take note.