(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, 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 , 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. , 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 , 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. 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 , we known that customers still need to think strong about security when they go to SaaS. do your have your customers figured that out yet? (laughter) Yeah, I think the same trends that played out on-prem play out in the cloud. , how am I going to secure my applications? How am I going to secure my data? My network? , 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 , 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 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. , 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, 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. , 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 nber of announcements, uh Barracuda did, uh not nearly as many as Microsoft did uh but uh give us the highlights if you would. Yeah , so a nber nber of things announced here. , first we're part of the MISA, the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association so we're proud to be a part of that at launch. , 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 help protect more of those. And then finally 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. , they've helped us. We've invested over 20 million in internal systems. , modern systems, Salesforce, NetSuite uh that we think give us the foundational elements to scale to a billion dollars and you know they combine that with operational expertise that they bring in to help us get more customers than the 220,000. , one of the other interesting things for us too is 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. , 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 VMware 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. , 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 nber 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 you know even with the cloud providers, we're actively sharing information and sharing of that information will make more robust solutions first. , 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 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 data 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).