(upbeat music)
>> Male Narrator: Live, from Orlando, Florida,
It's theCUBE,
covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity.
>> Good afternoon, everyone and welcome back
to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.
We are wrapping up three days of wall to wall coverage,
back to back interviews.
I'm your host, Rebecca Night,
alongside my co-host Stu Miniman.
We have saved the best for last.
We have BJ Jenkins, president and CEO
of Barracuda Networks.
Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thanks for having me.
I feel a lot of pressure now.
(laughter)
>> No, no, no. It's going to be great.
Why don't you start by Barracuda-
I think of that Heart song.
Tell our viewers a little bit about your business,
what you do.
>> Yeah, umm, Barracuda is a company
focused in the security industry
primarily on email security
and network and application security.
Uh, we have over two hundred and twenty thousand customers,
uh, since we were founded a little over fifteen years ago
and um, you know, we have a passion
for making our customers secure and safe
and being able to run their business.
And we're a great partner of Microsoft,
so, uh, they really help us drive our business.
>> Yeah so, so much to catch up BJ
since it's been many years
since you've been on the program.
You were new in the roll,
but let's start with that Microsoft relationship here.
We've been spending all week,
talking through all of the various environments.
Um, talk about a little bit about your joint customers,
the relationship and what's happening there.
>> Yeah, I joined Barracuda 7 years ago.
Yesterday was my anniversary, and um,
when I came into Barracuda, uh,
it was primarily at the time focused on uh
kind of small and mid-sized businesses.
And most of those businesses ran Microsoft Exchange
or ran some form of Microsoft applications
and really that was the start of our partnership
realizing how important Microsoft was.
And it's grown.
We were the first uh security company
to put our firewalls in Azure and that was over 5 years ago.
And I think being first with a partner like Microsoft
who was really at that point trying to catch up with Amazon
and you known Sauter was were starting
to drive the business in that direction.
Uh, it gave us a unique vantage point
in the partnership and it's grown from there.
We were uh the Azure Partner of the Year in 2016
across their business.
Um we do joint development with them.
We doing joint go to market activities
and when you look around and you see 30,000 customers here,
it's a it's a good place to focus for a company
like ourselves.
>> You know, well, the the the changes in Microsoft business
has had a ripple effect in the ecosystem.
Not only the launch of Azure, but I mean a big push.
Office 365. You talk about, there's got to be a difference
between rolling out exchange servers
and well it's it's all in the cloud
um, we known that customers still need to think strong
about security when they go to SaaS.
Um do your have your customers figured that out yet?
(laughter)
>> Yeah, I think um the same trends that played out on-prem
play out in the cloud.
Um, how am I going to secure my applications?
How am I going to secure my data?
My network?
Um, and then the individuals that are using that
cause at the end of the day
the individuals tend to be the weakest link
in the security chain.
And um, you know Mi- what I like is Microsoft
has done a really good job
improving their security posture.
The base level that they provide to their customers
every single day improves.
And our job is to innovate on top of that
and make them even safer.
And um Microsoft's position in the industry, too,
has been one where they want to be a ecosystem.
They want to partner with 3rd parties
to help their customers move from on-prem into Azure.
And they known they're not going to be able
to do it on their own, so uh they've upped their game.
We've got to up our game and we do it jointly
which is a nice thing.
I I I joke with people when I was at EMC
and I used to go to Redmond,
I'd go with battle armor on
cause it was not going to be a fun meeting.
Um, it was going to be
how Microsoft was going to hurt our business.
And now I go to Redmond
and you're embraced as a partner.
They want to understand what customers
and partners are thinking.
They jointly plan with you.
It's a completely different tone and tenor
which has been nice for us.
>> So, it is a scary world out there
and as we know that the threat environment is changing,
hackers are becoming more sophisticated.
I wonder if you could just set the scene for our viewers
and just talk about security challenges in general
and then we'll get into the specifics
of the new solutions that you've announced here.
>> Yeah, it's threats come from everywhere
and I think it's hard to boil it down
and make it simple at times.
But one of the stories I tell investors and customers
about how fast the world is changing
uh when I came onboard CEOs are obviously targets
for hackers and the types of phish emails
I would get at that point,
um and they would be very obvious.
I've gone by BJ my entire life.
On the website, it says William Jenkins,
and so the phishing emails would come in
and say to Dave Faugno,
Hey, can you wire money here? William.
Right? And so there was just base level intelligence.
Nowadays, they use LinkedIn,
they use F- they create social graphs,
they study your communication forms,
they look, they know how you're organized.
And they target the people, it will have,
I always sign my emails best comma BJ.
The best phish emails have that in there.
They've discovered that.
They've incorporated that.
They so the just the level of intelligence
the sophistication of what hackers do today
has exponentially changed and, you know,
we're fortunate you can, we have more computing power,
we have more artificial intelligence
that we can apply to stop them
but the game just keeps getting escalated
and it's uh it's why the security industry has been strong.
It's why there are so many companies out there.
We've got to keep getting better.
Um, but it it's a scary world.
It's it's you know, you can never never rest
and never think you're ahead.
You always got to keep attacking it.
>> Uh so BJ uh you had a number of announcements,
uh Barracuda did, uh not nearly as many as Microsoft did
uh but uh give us the highlights if you would.
>> Yeah um, so a number number of things announced here.
Um, first we're part of the MISA,
the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association
so we're proud to be a part of that at launch.
Um, we announced uh the cloud application platform
security platform and the big announcement for us
around that was our launch of Waf as a service
uh that's run on Azure
And uh we've always had a strong application approach.
We've got integrated bot detection, DDOS,
uh the OOS top 20 are all incorporated into our platform.
What we've done is really leveraged Microsoft skill
to run a very easy, simple to deploy
uh web application security platform
that takes advantage of Microsoft scale and resiliency
and brings that to our customers.
Uh we did a study, you known only ten percent
of the websites in the world today are protected.
So, 90% of the websites and web applications
in the world today run unprotected.
We think this is a great way to go out
and um help protect more of those.
And then finally um you known we announced
Microsoft announced their V WAN solution
and we have done joint development with them.
We'll continue to innovate here
but we announced obviously our solution that we'll run
uh with Microsoft's V WAN.
We're the only ones who can provide a customer really
with multiple links, run on Microsoft backbone,
they can really run their data center
now that corporate data center out of Azure
uh we give them traffic prioritization,
fail over resiliency that customer's need
when they're making those types of decisions.
So there's more than that
but that was a lot of good stuff for us.
(laughter)
We're excited about it.
>> What does the recent announcement that Microsoft
has won the Jedi Contract
does that have any impact on Barracuda's business?
Is that- ?
>> Well, I think anytime Microsoft wins business
it's a good thing
because we're partnering with them.
That contract is so big
and uh has a lot of different elements
and and certainly security is a part of it
so we think there's aspects where we can play.
I I did here I think um Oracle was suing
and I think AW- so this may have a lot of legs
before it becomes real
but it I uh
I think it continues to show
that customers want to utilize um
the skill, breadth, and depth of solutions
that the cloud companies are bringing
and you known we view that as opportunity
because security is an important element
to making that work for those customers.
>> All right, so BJ, want to put aside the Microsoft stuff
for a second here.
Since last we talked, uh you know Barracuda's gone private
and the security industry feels
like it its just growing so fast
you know, I every week we're getting approached
by you know new startups, heavy investment,
and the like uh give us a little bit about your position
as a CEO in this space
and you know would love a little bit
and know what happened a few years back
um but going private when so many companies have.
>> Yeah, there, you know obviously there's a lot
of funded companies in the security market.
You know we were in a-
we had been public for for four years um
a company that had been around 15 years.
We were a profitable security company too.
We were unique.
We weren't the high flyer growth
but we were growing you know kind of low double digits
with profitability
but there were investments that needed to be made
in the business uh we were running
our transaction system on code the founder wrote.
Um so there were investments we really needed to make
to go from you know the 400 500 million mark
to a billion mark and so going private
with a partner like Thoma Bravo um
who really understand this industry
has allowed us to reset the strategy and focus on
uh the highest growth areas for us
which are email and network application security.
Um, they've helped us.
We've invested over 20 million in internal systems.
Um, modern systems, Sales Force, Net Suite
uh that we think give us the foundational elements
to scale to a billion dollars
and um you know they combine that with operational expertise
that they bring in to help us get more customers
than the 220,000.
Um, one of the other interesting things for us too
is um well we have 220,000 customers,
we have 50 of the Fortune 100.
We have 250 of the Fortune 1000.
And as the move- as customers have moved to cloud,
our solutions have become more relevant
for customers of scale.
And so they've given us the backing really
to make that transition into that
so uh I like not having to go
on public conference calls every quarter.
That's been a really nice thing.
Um, but they've been a great partner for us
so we've I think-
What you can think of us is we focused on areas
that we think are the highest priority to our customers.
>> You know uh it it BJ, it also we talked about
there's so many startups in the space out there.
The profile of security keeps getting raised uh you know
Pat Gelsinger of Vmward pounding the table
saying that security needs a do-over.
He just purchased Carbon Black, a uh you know
Boston based uh company that was public.
Um, he you know I've talked to my friends
that have been deep in the security industry
and they scoff a little bit about you know
we've been doing this for a long time.
Barracuda's a company that has been around
for quite a number of years.
How's the industry doing? what do we need to do better?
And uh how do you look at that landscape?
>> Yeah, I you known I love Pat's energy and vigor
but there's no silver bullet
that's going to solve every problem out there.
I do think uh where the industry is getting better
is, one, on sharing information.
You can see alliances, associations that have been formed
um you know even with the cloud providers,
we're actively sharing information
and sharing of that information
will make more robust solutions first.
Um, second, you're seeing vendors go more towards platform
where they're offering a larger so the quality
of solutions are getting better
and I do think there's consolidation happening
where there there are going to be certain segments
of the market
where you don't need 15 solutions.
You really need one from a particular player.
So I think you'll see more consolidation occur around that.
And you know certainly that's been a trend we've been on
in terms of integrating our solutions,
making them easier to ploy and use for the customers.
And then you know I think the last part of this
is regulation is really it's still behind
but it's finally catching up
and there's an interest in it.
And I think in partnership with the industry
we can get our customers in a better position
a better security posture,
so you know I um there will be consolidation
over time. Uh you know,
I've seen a map.
I think there's 3000 security companies
in all different segments.
That won't last forever and uh it'll get easier
for customers over time is my belief.
>> So with regulation do you want to work in partnership
with regulators?
I mean how do you, to help them understand the industry,
first of all, and understand the dangers and the risks,
I mean how do you see the future of regulation
for this industry?
>> First of all, there's a large education process
for legislators in general.
You have to look no further
than when Mark Zuckerberg got questioned by congress,
and the questions he was getting asked
were not the best questions.
But, you do have people who understand this industry
and you can look at regulations like GDPR,
you know California is coming out with dat privacy law now,
and they're never perfect
but they're good foundational elements
to start.
And they're helping customers get more aware
of what they have to do to be secure
and they're helping us explain to customers
the things you can do to be
in a better security posture.
And so there's a continuum around this.
We're in the early days.
There's still a lot of education that has to go on.
But when you see legislation start getting passed,
it's a good step in the right direction
in my estimation.
>> BJ, we did save the best for last.
Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
That was terrific.
>> Thank you. It's always great seeing you.
Sorry it took so long.
>> No.
(laughter)
I'm Rebecca Night with Stu Miniman.
That wraps up three days of coverage
at Microsoft Ignite at theCUBE.
Thank you so much for tuning in
and we will see you next time.
(upbeat music).