 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 Knight, 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. 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, 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. We have over 220,000 customers since we were founded a little over 15 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 in Microsoft, so 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 role, but let's start with that Microsoft relationship here. We've been spending all week talking through all of the various environments. Talk a little bit about your joint customers, the relationship and what's happening there. Yeah, I joined Barracuda seven years ago yesterday. It was my anniversary. And when I came into Barracuda, it was primarily at the time focused on 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 security company to put our firewalls in Azure, and that was over five 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 Satya was starting to drive the business in that direction, gave us a unique vantage point in the partnership. And it's grown from there. We were the Azure partner of the year in 2016 across our business. We do joint development with them. We do joint go-to-market activities. And when you look around, you see 30,000 customers here. It's a good place to focus for a company like ourselves. You know, well, 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 all in the cloud. We know that customers still need to think that it's strong about security when they go to SaaS. Do you, if your customers figured that out yet? Yeah, I think the same trends that played out on PRAM 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, because at the end of the day, the individuals tend to be the weakest link in the security chain. And, you know, 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 an ecosystem. They want to partner with third parties to help their customers move from on PRAM into Azure. And they know they're not going to be able to do it on their own. So they've upped their game, we've got up our game and we do it jointly, which is a nice thing. I joke with people when I was at EMC and I used to go to Redmond, I'd go with battle armor on because 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. When I came on board CEOs are obviously targets for hackers and the types of phishing 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 Fogno, hey, can you wire money here? William, right? And so there was just base level intelligence. Nowadays they use LinkedIn, 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 phishing males have that in there. They've discovered that, they've incorporated that. So just a level of intelligence, the sophistication of what hackers do today has exponentially changed. And we're fortunate we have more computing power, we have more artificial intelligence so we can apply to stop them but the game just keeps getting escalated. And it's why the security industry has been strong. It's why there's so many companies out there. We got to keep getting better. But it's a scary world. It's, you can never rest and never think you're ahead. You always got to keep attacking it. So BJ you had a number of announcements Barracuda did, not nearly as many as Microsoft did but give us the highlights if you would. Yeah, so a number of things announced here. First we're part of MISA, the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association. So we're proud to be a part of that at launch. We announced the cloud application platform, security platform and the big announcement for us around that was our launch of WAF as a service that's run on Azure. And we've always had a strong application approach. We've got integrated bot detection, DDoS, the OWASP top 20 are all incorporated into our platform. What we've done is really leveraged Microsoft scale to run a very easy, simple to deploy web application security platform that takes advantage of Microsoft scale and resiliency and brings that to our customers. We did a study, you know, only 10% 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 know, we announced Microsoft announcer VWAN solution and we have done joint development with them. We'll continue to innovate here, but we announced obviously our solution that will run with Microsoft's VWAN. 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, their corporate data center out of Azure. We give them traffic prioritization, failover resiliency that customers 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. 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 has a lot of different elements and certainly security is a part of it. So we think there's aspects where we can play. I did hear, I think Oracle was suing and I think AWS, so this may have a lot of links before it becomes real, but I think it continues to show that customers want to utilize the scale, breadth and depth of solutions that the cloud companies are bringing. And we view that as opportunity because security is an important element to making that work for those customers. So, BJ, I want to put aside the Microsoft stuff for a second here. Since last we talked, Barracuda's gone private and the security industry feels like it's just growing so fast. Every week we're getting approached by new startups, heavy investment and the like. Give us a little bit about your position as a CEO in the space and love a little bit. I know it happened a few years back, but going private when so many companies have. Yeah, obviously there's a lot of funded companies in the security market. We had been public for four years, a company that'd 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 kind of low double digits with profitability. But there were investments that needed to be made in the business. We were running our transaction system on code the founder wrote. So there were investments we really needed to make to go from the 400, 500 million mark to a billion mark. And so going private with a partner like Tomobravo who really understands this industry has allowed us to reset the strategy and focus on the highest growth areas for us, which are email and network and application security. They've helped us. We've invested over 20 million in internal systems, modern systems, Salesforce, NetSuite, that we think give us the foundational elements to scale to a billion dollars. And they combine that with operational expertise that they bring in to help us get more customers to the 220,000. One of the other interesting things for us too is while we have 220,000 customers, we have 50 of the Fortune 100. We have 250 of the Fortune 1000. And 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 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've focused on areas that we think are the highest priority to our customers. Yeah, BJ, also we talked about there's so many startups in this space out there. The profile of security keeps getting raised. Pac Elsinger of VMware, pounding the table saying that security needs to do over. He just purchased Carbon Black, Boston based company that was public. You know, I 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 how do you look at that landscape? Yeah, you know, 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 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 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 certainly that's been a trend we've been on in terms of integrating our solutions, making them easier to deploy 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, there will be consolidation over time. You know, I've seen a map, I think there's 3,000 security companies in all different segments that won't last forever and 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 were getting asked were not the best questions but you do have people who understand this industry and you can look at regulations like GDPR, California's coming out, 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 where 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. B.J., we did save the best for last. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. That was terrific. It's always great seeing you. Sorry, it took so long. I'm Rebecca Knifer, 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.