 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's live coverage of VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events, they strike the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, I'm Jordan Bikos, Dave Vellante from wikibon.org. Hi, buddy, Guy Souter is here. He is the general manager of Barracuda's storage business. Many of you don't know that Barracuda has a storage business, so Guy, welcome. Thank you, it's great to be here, Dave. Tell us about Barracuda's storage business. Yeah, that's a great point. We're obviously very well known for our security business. Yeah, absolutely. Barracuda's got an incredible brand and a lot of folks in the technology industry really know who we are and our story resonates with them in terms of creating easy to use, powerful solutions that are affordable. We've been in the storage business for five or six years now. We actually started in message archiving. So basically what happened at Barracuda was we had a lot of customers from our spam and virus firewall product that came to us and said, hey, you guys seem to be pretty good at email. We need to store all this email and there's no good solution to do it. Can you create a Barracuda-like product that would store our email? And so we developed the Barracuda Message Archiver and that was our first storage-based product and that got us into data protection. Once we started doing that, we realized that our customers have problems with other types of data other than email. And so we went into the backup space. We made two acquisitions in the backup space, one of which is where I came from and we created what is now our top selling product in the company, the Barracuda backup. So backup archiving. And our most recent addition is copy. Have you ever heard of copy from copy.com? I vaguely have heard of copy from copy.com but I couldn't say I've used it or... It's brand new, it was just released on the market in February. It's a file sync share service done by Barracuda, runs on Barracuda's cloud storage platform. So enterprise file sync. Well, it's also consumer and prosumer as well. So we're filling the whole gamut on that side. And really the strategy for us doing that was, we believe that where file sync share is going for corporations is something that needs to have a really great user experience. He's of, right. Okay, so this business is evolving. He started at the kernel of archiving, competing against some pretty established players. And you said about five years. So it was set around the time when the federal rules of civil procedure were kicking in and that was a critical capability. So where do you see taking this business? What's the vision that Barracuda has? Yeah, I know it's interesting. And if you look at archiving where it's the most regulatory kind of related business that we have at Barracuda, the truth is actually just as many customers come to us in our archiving business for storage optimization as they do for regulatory compliance. And that's because email storage is hard. And the volume of it is very, very large. And so one of the things that our archiver product can do is actually offload a lot of that storage from your primary email servers that are transactional, very expensive storage. But in terms of where we're taking the business, I think we've done a lot to bring data to the cloud. And the question that everybody has is kind of what now? Now that I've got my data in the cloud, what can I do with it? And that's the answer that we're really trying to find right now. I'm excited to this interview because I remember I interviewed Zach, Michael Peroni and Dean Draco back in 2005, I think. And I remember Zach's quote, we want to make the appliances, that back there was a spam firewall, as easy as buying a microwave oven. And on that mission, they've had a huge run. So watching their growth and watching you guys grow has been fantastic. And getting back in the storage business, you wish it's that easy now. So what are you guys doing now? Well, the market wants ease of use, we heard that. So that vision is fantastic. How do you get that done on that? I mean, that was an easy appliance, you plug it in, they didn't charge license fees, it was buy one product, that's it, that resonated with all the customers. What's the innovation now, now that you guys have got storage is complex, it's not as easy as plugging in a firewall? It's definitely complex on the back end, that's for sure. We work really hard to make it easy for our customers on the front end. It's a great point about the appliances. Barracuda is really built on shipping appliances and we were kind of at the forefront of that, at the edge of it, when that was the simple way to deploy technology. And when we went into the spam market or the web filtering market, it was companies that were selling software, where you had to buy your own hardware and you had to integrate it yourself and you had to manage a bunch of stuff to get the solution in place. Barracuda came in with an appliance that was just push button easy. But really that's about a deployment method, it's not necessarily about how do you solve problems. And today, a lot of our products involve the cloud as well. And so that's one of the ways that we're kind of addressing simplicity today. We use the cloud where it makes sense. Our backup products are a great example, we actually have an appliance, a near line kind of local store of your backup, but we also have the cloud fully integrated. Barracuda has its own cloud storage platform, which makes us unique in the market. And I think the innovations that are coming out today are really about doing the deployment method that makes sense for the customer and making sure that we work really, really hard to create the solution that's end to end all in one, solves the problem completely, isn't just a part of the answer. We do that in a way that can be set up quickly and you can get the value really quickly from. Yeah, I mean, I remember back in the day, Michael Prone was telling me, oh, you didn't have a lot of brand awareness, so he did something really innovative. He put the ads in the airports. Now, it's famous, you can't go in an airport without seeing a Barracuda logo, so you guys have crossed over the awareness issue. People know who you are now. Now, with BJ Jenkins on the team, you got an ex-guy who knows storage. How do you guys penetrate the awareness on storage? Just meat and potatoes, walking and tackling? You know, we've been doing marketing on our storage products now for four or five years, you know, a lot of marketing, because that's what Barracuda does. And the funny thing about it is, as you talk to people, they're like, hey, I just saw the first Barracuda backup ad, that's great, now you guys are advertising it. They're like, that has been there for four years. But you definitely have this issue where people know us for our legacy and our heritage and what we are, and that's great. We're a security company, we care a lot about security, we care a lot about privacy, but sometimes when you see the Barracuda logo, you think security, oh, I know those guys, that's great. Like in the airports, right? Yeah, well, it started as a gimmick, really actually worked out well for the company. I know he always buys that at the inventory, but you guys are known for bulletproof, rock solid products. That's right. And it gets harder when you get into the software to find data center, what are you guys doing to keep up? What's the key strategy for you guys on the product side? Same strategy, is it more software, more management? The key strategy is just really just solving our customers' problems in the easiest way possible. That's the key strategy, and whether that's software design networking or through a combination of a virtualization platform that we have out there, or if it's hybrid cloud with appliance attached to it, or if it's pure cloud like copy, that doesn't really matter to us as much as defining what the problem is the customer has. With copy, it's Dropbox, and everybody having their data up in the cloud, but the company having no control over it, right? Defining what the problem is, the biggest problem that our customers have and finding a solution that's really easy. You know, on the storage awareness question, just to loop back to that one, I think we've made some headway. You know, our bear could have backups the top selling product in the company now. Storage is a third of our business, and we just hired BJ Jenkins. So we're getting people's attention, we're getting there. I mean, if you always make it easy for people to buy, you make it product solid, you can do well. Yeah. Right, that's kind of always been kind of the philosophy. Well, congratulations, it's great to have you on theCUBE, Dave, do you have anything else? Well, so I just wanted to follow up on the comments on backup just in general. I mean, it's not the sexiest part of the business, but it's a lucrative one. It's insurance, right? And to your earlier point, I think you were alluding to trying to get more value out of that backup. So my question is, how do you see that evolving and what role will you guys play there? That's a great question. I'll give you two specific examples from today. You know, we're here sharing our cloud-evolved story with our folks at the show. And really, that's about on the backup side. It's something we call Live Boot, Cloud Live Boot, which lets you take your VM backups that you have sent up to our cloud storage and boot them directly on our compute. So you can use our hypervisors up in the cloud, boot for recovery, boot for testing, whatever you want to do. And now you don't only have a repository of that stuff archived in the cloud for data protection, but you've also got a recovery story there as well. Another example is integration with copy that we have with backup. So you can actually take your data that you've backed up with our Barracuda backup products, and you can restore it to copy. So you can imagine if the hurricane comes rolling through and wipes out your entire location, you can just take that data that's critically important to run your business, restore it to your copy account, share it with the people that you're working with and be back up and running. Okay, but you're essentially describing, if I get it, an environment where you're leveraging that data as a sort of a major source of the data in multiple places. And I'll call it a single source, if you will. And so that seems like a good vision, one where you've got a main copy, a gold copy, if you will, of the data, and you're leveraging it for archive, maybe even for populating data warehouses down the road. Is that the direction that you're going in, or am I reading too much into this? No, I mean, I think we're going in multiple directions across the company because we cross a lot of different categories. But specifically in storage, I think the direction that we're going is making your data active. So the stuff that you've got that's archived, making it searchable, taking the stuff that you have that's backed up and making it something that you can take action with and you can get value out of. This is value, right? Exactly, yeah. And with copy, it's about collaboration. It's about sharing, collaboration and giving companies away, it's just like Skype, you know, back in the day, when Skype came out, everybody blocked it, right? Because that was the answer. But the truth is, users were using Skype because it made their lives better, right? So blocking it was the worst idea. You know, so it's the same kind of thing with File Sync Share right now. Everybody's blocking it, but really there's a reason that the user want to use it. It makes them more powerful, more efficient. You know, and so what we need to do as barracudas to provide a service that gives the users what they want, which is very important to us, why we spend so much time on the design of it, give the users what they want, something that they can approach and adopt, but also give the companies the control that they need and the security and peace of mind that their data say. Interesting, under the radar twist on the old business. Yeah, great. Guy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Say hi to the folks over at Barracuda, Guy and Zach. I know Dean has kind of moved on. Yeah, we still talk. We compete on the number of laps we swim now, so we just send numbers back and forth. I'm in contact with them, and I will definitely give you regards. Yeah, I just want to say, a big fan of Barracuda, again, self-funded founder, founder-funded, massive growth, great vision, great team, congratulations, and now you've got BJ, great executive from EMC, great score, and I follow Michael's Facebook, I see all this water skiing up in the Delta. Michael, shout out to Michael Peroni. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. The network's inside theCUBE. I'm going to make a move in the storage space, and if they do, it's going to be dangerous, so we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.