“Barracuda Offers Industry-leading, Efficient and Cost-effective Solutions”

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Barracuda’s customer-centric business model focuses on delivering high-value, subscription-based IT solutions that provide end-to-end network and data security. In an interaction with NCN, Murali Urs, Country Manager, Barracuda Networks, India shares about about the security market and Barracuda’s channel programme. Excerpts of the interview:

What are the trends driving the security market today?
Security has become a major point of discussion throughout the entire IT landscape in recent years, as high-profile breaches have impacted popular brands with vast resources, proving any business can fall to cyber criminals. A recent Gartner report indicated that IT technologies and trends are influencing the security landscape in 2014. Organizations today cannot approach security thru simple traditional methods. There are too many data end-points to shore up and too many threats to defend against. Cyber criminals are constantly changing their methods, so it is crucial that firms keep up at all times. This is where Barracuda Steps in.

How Barracuda is simplifying IT for the enterprises through ‘easy to use’ and ‘easy to configure’ solutions? Please elaborate it?
Barracuda Networks offers industry-leading solutions designed to solve IT problems – efficiently and cost effectively – while maintaining a high level of customer support and satisfaction. Our products span three distinct markets, including: content security,  networking and application delivery, as well as data storage, protection and disaster recovery. Our goal is to simplify IT for our customers.

What are the key focus areas of Barracuda Networks?
While we maintain a strong heritage in email and web security appliances, our award-winning portfolio includes more than a dozen purpose-built solutions that support literally every aspect of the network – providing organizations of all sizes with true end-to-end protection that can be deployed in hardware, virtual, cloud and mixed form factors.

How do you engage with both key sets of channel partners – security and storage – at sync?
Barracuda engages with all its partners from different lines, as we believe that every partner is part of our business. Each partner has a role to play in the market.  We would like to approach the market with different kinds of partners as we want to increase our reach and scope into the market.  Barracuda eco-system ensures high growth of its partners through its dynamic sales-driven model. Barracuda strong ecosystem offers tremendous value to its partners through its world class support & services – Our channel partners are highly important to us and specifically in Asia Pacific as we try to transact all of our business through the channel.

Could you describe your customer-centric business model?
arracuda’s customer-centric business model focuses on delivering high-value, subscription-based IT solutions that provide end-to-end network and data security. Barracuda continues to gain wide acclaim from customers, media, and analysts by offering exceptional customer service, top-notch products, and engaging partner programs.

What progress has Barracuda made in terms of activities and business in the last year and the quarter that has just ended?
Our financial year is from March to February, and Barracuda has grown double digit figures in the last year and we have more than doubled our customer and partner base in India. We are seeing a very aggressive growth on all fronts and we are focused on taking it to higher ground from here. We have appointed Redington, one of the largest IT distributors in India, as our National distributor. As a part of this alliance Redington will be distributing the complete Barracuda product portfolio through its network. This partnership will help Barracuda leverage the strong reseller base of Redington to expand its customer solutions and reach in India.

What new products or solution are you planning to launch in India?
Due to the growing security and storage market growth opportunity in India, we launch all new products in line with the global launches and makes announcements as and when they come. Just last week, we announced the latest release of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, version 7.9. This new version extends Microsoft Azure support with automated provisioning and configuration, enabling customers to take advantage of the dynamic, elastic nature of the cloud.

How do you keep your channels informed and updated?
The channel is one of the key pillars of Barracuda’s strategy for India that help support the customer’s product, services, and support needs. Channels are closest to customers and help us get a better appreciation of customer challenges and their requirements. We are committed to helping our partner ecosystem evolve in keeping with the changing customer needs and technology trends. We have a deep understanding of the challenges that the ecosystem faces, and equip our partners to survive the change in technology paradigms.

Being a country manager, what are your future plans?
Our future plan for Barracuda is to continue building the Barracuda brand, end customer market and the channel community. We also want to continue building a team to focus on a hybrid model which will work with the partners and with end customers. Going forward our focus will be on to sell strategic solutions like WAF, Message Archiving and Next Generation Firewall to large enterprise businesses. We want to power out channel community even further.

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