Keeping its core focus towards solving customer challenges, Barracuda Networks offers solutions designed to solve IT problems – efficiently and cost effectively – while maintaining a level of customer support and satisfaction.
The company’s products span in three distinct markets, including: 1) content security, 2) networking and application delivery, as well as 3) data storage, protection and disaster recovery. Murali Urs, Country Manager, Barracuda Networks, India speaks with ChannelDrive.in on the company’s current strategy to grow and its future plans for India.
What are the key priorities for Barracuda today? and how important is the Indian market for the company?
At Barracuda, we focus on 3 main priorities – Our products, our customers and our partners.
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.
At Barracuda, we focus on Customer’s needs and create innovative products that solve important needs of its customers – Our solutions help customers address security threats, improve network performance and protect and store their data.
Additionally, by combining our own award-winning technology with powerful open source software Barracuda Networks delivers easy-to-use, comprehensive and reliable solutions to our customers.
With respect to our partners, Barracuda eco-system ensures high growth of its partners through its high-velocity, primarily inside sales-driven model. The value to our partners comes from our world class support & services, along with a number of rich program offerings, benefits and services that help them add value to their businesses. We’re always looking to grow with channel partners committed to providing customers with world-class products, service and support. Specifically in Asia Pacific, we try to transact all of our business through the channel and therefore our channel partners are critical to our own growth.
India is a priority market for Barracuda Networks. 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.
Through this alliance Barracuda Networks would leverage Redington’s 33000+ partners across the country. The primary intent is to engage with new partners in larger cities as well as strengthening reach in high growth Tier – 2 and 3 regions. Barracuda’s product suite gives great ROI and TCO to customers who are cost conscious thereby making it ideally suited for the SME’s. The partnership with Redington is thereby aligned to the business focus of Barracuda to tap into these high priority regions.
What is the channel strategy that the company has for India?
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. We have a comprehensive channel program that empowers partners and offers a win-win situation to both Barracuda and partners.
How many channel partners work with Barracuda today?
Barracuda engages with all kinds of partners 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 address the market with all kinds of partners as we want to increase our reach into the market.
Barracuda eco-system supports partners’ growth through its high-velocity, primarily inside sales-driven model. . Also, Barracuda strong ecosystem offers tremendous value to its partners through its world class support & services – Our channel partners are critically important to us and specifically in Asia Pacific, we try to transact all of our business through the channel.
Traditionally there were different partners addressing security and storage. In modern IT infrastructure however- security, application delivery and data protection goes right across servers, storage and networking. Security and storage might look diverse but they are coming together which is great news for partners. Barracuda with over 12 products lines across networking content security, data protection and application delivery for all sizes of enterprise is in a perfect position to cater to enterprise partners dabbling in different technologies.
We engage with partners who are ready to invest into our business with their manpower, effort and time. We work with these partners closely to develop business plans, joint marketing plans and share leads. And with a support centre and a warehouse in India, we ensure quick customer service and immediate replacement where needed.
What are your expansion plans geographically and technologically?
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. India is a high potential market for the entire portfolio of products and we will continue to invest locally as the business grows.
Where is the big growth likely to come from?
For Barracuda, the growth is likely to come from the SME sector. This is the reason why we had appointed Redington as a national distributor for India. The alliance will help Barracuda to leverage Redington’s more than 33000 partners across the country to tap into our priority areas like the SME and strengthen its reach in non-metros. Additionally,Barracudas product suite gives great ROI and TCO to customers who are cost conscious thereby making it ideally suited for the SMEs.
