'I'd love to get us to a billion dollars' - Barracuda CEO
BJ Jenkins on leading a company in the fast-paced cybersecurity world, cultivating a family-like work culture, and what partners can expect from this year's upcoming conference
"There's a family feel to our work culture," claimed Barracuda CEO BJ Jenkins. The chief exec is proud of the environment he has helped cultivate in his six and a half years heading the email security vendor.
Employee kinship is important to the success of the company, according to Jenkins, who speaks proudly of the education and support that employees are given by Barracuda.
"We've grown to over half a billion in billings on a run-rate basis, but we've managed to keep a smaller feel about us," he told CRN.
"It's a very nimble workplace; people work together and there are deep relationships between people here and we try to drive that culturally.
"For many of our workers, this is their first job in technology and we invest a lot in training and development and I think that drives the closeness that we have."
Jenkins comes from a family of teachers - a career he believes he would have followed had he not gone into computer programming - and he believes that the recipe for Barracuda's success is active engagement and interest in employees' professional development.
"People are the most important part of this business and I think that the biggest part of my job is finding ways to engage and motivate them to make them feel impactful and loved for the work that they do," he said.
This close culture has not changed since private equity house Thoma Bravo reeled Barracuda in from the stock market in 2017.
Since that takeover, Barracuda laid out a road map to being a $1bn company in five years, as well as a mission to grow organically and acquisitively.
In the past 14 months, the vendor has acquired Sonian, Phishline and most recently Managed Workplace RMM.
The latter is a remote monitoring and management (RMM) business unit bought from Avast. The deal includes Barracuda offering Avast's Business CloudCare, Management Console and Antivirus Security Solutions which integrate with Managed Workplace.
Managed Workplace was netted to help MSPs that lack the resources to easily manage the day-to-day security of their customers' devices, and Jenkins said that it will help to grow the vendor's MSP business, as well as overall scaling the business up.
"We are focused on the email security market and network and applications security market and so we've been looking at technologies that would improve our offerings in those areas and things that help us expand our presence around the world," he said.
"Managed Workplace, for example, had a tremendous number of partners in Germany, Eastern Europe and Australia and so it is helping us expand in those key geographical areas and giving us a great product and feature expansion in our focus areas.
"We look at product and geographical area expansion when considering acquisitions and are on the lookout for more."
Embracing the new
Barracuda was recently hailed by Canalys as one of the leading cybersecurity vendors in the public cloud marketplace, with the analyst lauding it for the way it has embraced new deployment models.
This was an endorsement of the company's efforts in the networking and applications security application space, according to Jenkins.
"More than five years ago, we started investing in this area and so we were the first in Microsoft Azure for next-generation firewalls and web application firewalls and we were the first to bring a metered billing approach to that market," he said.
"It has been a continual investment for us and is a large and growing part of our business. We have deep relationships with both Microsoft and Amazon, and that Canalys report was a validation of the investments we've made and continue to make to serve our customers."
This success derives from Jenkins' focus on ensuring that Barracuda's workers are invested in its customers' journeys - which is one of the biggest lessons he has learned in his time at the organisation.
"The thing I try to drive for our people is to focus on our customers and get better every day," he said.
"Part of our values is focusing on those customers and understanding their pain points. We view it as our mission to really protect them.
"When you come into your first CEO role there's a lot to learn, and then you marry that with how fast cybersecurity moves - the outside world doesn't wait for you to learn."
Partner prospects
The CEO is gearing up for the vendor's annual EMEA partner event, which will be held in Marbella, and he said that partners can expect to hear more about its new products, including one targeted at the public cloud.
"We have a new product we'll be launching at the conference that will give partners the opportunity to grow their business in the public cloud," he said.
Partners will also hear about a new feature of Sentinel - its artificial intelligence-based email protection product - which helps IT departments identify and immediately remediate spearphishing attacks on customers.
"We think this is highly differentiated and helps IT departments that are strained to deal with email attacks and it's exciting for our partners to bring this value to their customers," Jenkins said.
"At this conference, they'll obviously get the business update and strategy from us, but we have two unique product offerings that will help them grow their business in the coming year with us."
Having led Barracuda for over half a decade, Jenkins has no plans to slow down and he said he hopes to be in the driving seat for a while longer.
"I'd like to make it at least 10 years here, if not longer, as long as they'd let me," he laughed. "I'd love to get us to $1bn, which lines up with that 10-year mark."