'Nobody buys on-prem software anymore' - Barracuda CEO Hatem Naguib

CPI attended Barracuda’s annual partner event in Greece to hear about the vendor’s strategy around beefing up its platform, and its growth road map for MSPs

CRN's sister publication Channel Partner Insight jetted off to cybersecurity vendor Barracuda's Discover22 EMEA partner conference this week in Athens, Greece.

The event hosted keynotes from a variety of Barracuda's top executives covering topics including Zero Trust, SASE, SD-WAN and more.

Its president and CEO Hatem Naguib also took to the stage to address its partners and allow a peek behind the curtain of Barracuda's upcoming channel strategy.

Here are four of the top takeaways from Naguib's keynote speech.

More platforming equals more managed services

Naguib hearkened back to when its now former owner, Thoma Bravo, snapped up the vendor in 2018. It was at a time when Barracuda recognised that the models it had built for customers to consume security needed to be changed to shift to more of a platform use case.

This led to Barracuda pivoting to platforming its products, both on the technology and selling side.

"Since last year, we've been focusing a lot of our energy on integrating these solutions and making them much more consumed by managed services," Naguib told the audience.

"We know and recognise that managed services are the future of where customers are going to be consuming. That's a rising tide. So our products being platformed and then our products being consolidated and integrated becomes a very important part of our strategy."

Naguib claimed the vendor's changes have been validated by the acceleration in digital transformation over the last two years.

"That digital transformation for our customers has made them recognise that the traditional security they've been using is not helping.

"So all of our customers, especially over the last two to three years have recognised that they need a much more elevated level of security. "

Barracuda Discover22 is the firm's first EMEA in-person conference since the global pandemic struck.

In the interim, Naguib said that the market has "fundamentally changed".

"Customer's environments have became far less centralised and far more distributed. Now they have to worry about cloud access, individuals being at home and having an online presence."

'Nobody buys on-prem software anymore': proliferation of SaaS and SASE

Part of this change has manifested itself in the proliferation of what is undeniably one of the most pernicious market impacts: ransomware.

Acknowledging the explosion in email ransomware attacks, Naguib also recognised other market trends that will remain for the "foreseeable future."

"Pre-Covid, everybody was looking at Office 365. And now everybody wants to take on a multitude of SaaS products in order to leverage workloads," he said.

"Nobody buys on-prem software anymore," he claimed.

"In fact, for many companies, the proliferation of SaaS software has become a real concern.

"We're going to see a proliferation of these SaaS products such as Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, Slack.

"And these are not just products that will solve productivity issues, there'll be a collaboration aspect to them, meaning they will be vulnerable to the same types of attacks that occur through email."

"We've also seen that the use cases that customers are using are starting to consolidate," Naguib continued.

He claimed what customers want now is security at the edge, linking back to his earlier comment on Barracuda's rise in platforms.

"So what does that mean? It means if it's at the branch, if it's at the individual, if it's access that needs to get controlled, there's a new context that's coming around called Secure Access Service Edge, which means that we can instantiate our security capabilities where they need to be controlled.

"Our customers want to consume that as a platform and we're seeing a huge adoption of these SASE use cases to drive our platform."

'I've been aware our MSP approach requires some refinement': Growth roadmap ahead

The vendor boss shared with partners its focus areas for the next few quarters, what will be of high importance and where it is prioritising.

Naguib says Barracuda is focused on growth, and pointed to where the vendor will have to invest in to drive it.

"Our investment in customer acquisition is not just a sales strategy," he revealed.

"Late last year we made a significant investment in a customer success organisation so that we now invest in when our customers purchase our product, that journey from the time that they buy all the way through the time they renew.

"This is an important aspect to make sure customers are leveraging the products, they're engaging with Barracuda and with the partner in such a way that gives us both an opportunity to ensure that customer not just renews, but upsells, cross sells, all the value added that you as a partner look for in a vendor as part of our customer success strategy," he stressed.

Naguib turned his attention to MSPs, promising to continue to invest in Barracuda's MSP model while addressing the growth pains partners have been expressing.

"I've been aware our MSP approach requires some refinement," he conceded.

"As the customers and the partners who have been adopting that, you have my commitment and the leadership teams' commitment that we will work through and make sure our MSP program is industry leading and meets the needs of our customers together in terms of how we want to do that."

Finally, Naguib outlined how Barracuda plans to continue to drive innovation and expand its product portfolio.

"We know that cybersecurity is a very dynamic environment and we want to make sure that we provide our customers with best in class advocacy and then we're going to help our customers through the next generation migration.

"Many of our customers are still sitting on platforms that manage towards their on-prem use cases, and we want to make sure we've helped them migrate to the next gen capabilities that Barracuda offers as a platform that is as easy as possible and work with you, our partners, to help that migration."

KKR $4bn takeover

Naguib made a point to address perhaps the elephant in the room - KKR's $4bn acquisition of Barracuda from Thoma Bravo.

Providing a few words on the feeling so far around the transaction that is yet to be completed, Naguib displayed confidence in the new private equity ownership.

"We've been private for four years under Thoma and we decided that we wanted to see if we could change ownership and so we put ourselves out to be sold.

"What we found with [KKR] is that they shared our values in terms of how they wanted to work with Barracuda.

"And as they looked to us and they wanted to invest in us, they said ‘the strategy that you're pursuing is clearly the strategy that we think is going to win.'

"They see a huge opportunity in cybersecurity in the SME space where there's a huge amount of whitespace.

"They think Barracuda has positioned itself well with its partner ecosystem, that the investments we made in the past to help you as partners to be successful is one of the strategic assets that's important to Barracuda and they want to make sure that we continue to invest in that," Naguib concluded.

Stay with CPI for more updates on the Barracuda Discover22 EMEA event from the partner perspective.