Print.IT Reseller - issue 63

01732 759725 INTERVIEW 24 PrintIT Reseller caught up with Jason Howells, Director EMEA at Barracuda MSP One-to-one with Jason Howells platform which had a back-up product associated to it. At that time they were servicing around 2,500 MSPs with that back-up. We spent around $54m buying the platform and technology. That was our strategic investment in the MSP world – we didn’t just want to be a vendor that took our products and gave a monthly billing option. We wanted to be fully invested, have other tools that fully integrated with remote management and monitoring tools, and professional service optimisation tools that are the foundational technologies that MSPs need to run their businesses. We need to have integrations with those platforms, we wanted to be able to build- in Barracuda products that we felt were extremely relevant, particularly around security, to MSPs and their customers, and that was the start of our journey. Here we are now, three years on, and we have grown our international MSP partner base nearly 300 per cent over the past two years, and most importantly, the number of MSPs using multiple Barracuda solutions increased 34 per cent year-over-year, as of February 2019. PITR: Barracuda has expanded its MSP security offerings introducing Managed PhishLine, a service that helps MSPs provide sophisticated phishing simulation and security awareness training to their customers without creating added work for their techs and more recently, with the acquisition of Managed Workplace, the remote monitoring and management (RMM) product line of Avast. Where is the business’ key focus? JH: One of the first acquisitions that Thoma Bravo helped us to do once we became private was with Managed Workplace. That is purely for the MSP business in Barracuda and was a really interesting investment for us. It really showed the dedication that Thoma Bravo had, that Barracuda had, in continuing to invest in and develop the MSP business we have today. With the acquisition of Managed Workplace, we now have around 4,500 active MSPs across the globe. We are somewhere approaching 1,000 active partners (billing them monthly) outside of the US and Canada. That’s growing on a daily basis. In terms of our focus, one of the big focuses we have right now is email security and in particular phishing attacks. The difference with that is that for many, many years, people have been trying to protect themselves from malicious code that appears in email. You can put a whole lot of technology in front of it to detect malicious code, and you can block it and stop it. But with social engineering attacks, which these phishing attacks are – there’s no malicious code in the emails. PrintIT Reseller (PITR): Barracuda has been very successful building momentum in the MSP market, particularly around security offerings. Can you tell me a little bit about the company’s background? Jason Howells (JH): I think it’s important for people to recognise the machine that is Barracuda, and what’s behind our MSP business. Barracuda is 15 years old, we are about 1,500 employees across the world, we have offices in 15+ countries, and we’re focused on, and come from a security background. The first product we had was an email spam filter product. We’ve grown out from there. The key focus for us is around emails still, even after 15 years, it’s still front and centre. But also, networks and data applications, it’s all about trying to make sure those are secure. We’re owned by Thoma Bravo, they acquired us, took us from the public company we were about two years ago, back into a private company and that has helped fuel our growth. PITR: You run the MSP business at Barracuda, how did that part of the business come about? JH: As far back as 2014, most of our smaller customers (end-users), actually showed a desire to not actually own and manage their own Barracuda products. The back end of 2015 was Barracuda’s first strategic move into having a MSP business. It truly is a MSP, it’s not a partner program with a MSP offering to it. We have a dedicated team which I run outside of the US and Canada, and that came from an acquisition of a company called Intronis. They had built up a Continued... That was our strategic investment in the MSP world – we didn’t just want to be a vendor that took our products and gave a monthly billing option Barracuda : Managed PhishLine