Barracuda looks for a long-term, profitable association with India

Murali Urs,
Country Manager,
Barracuda Networks, India

It has been some time now since Barracuda has set its foot in the Indian market, but the engagement has always been an on & off kind. However, the past 3 years has been significant and steady for Barracuda in the fact that some large installations and big customers have come to the company.
“We want to grow our business in India and have been fairly successful in doing that. We have framed an overall strategy for India for the next 2-3 years – that is to identify the right kind of partners, the right kind of geographies and fit the right technology. We have a large development centre based out of Bangalore. Development of 3 of our core technologies – web app firewall, app load balancer and Link Balancer happen out of this centre,” explains Murali Urs, Country Manager, Barracuda Networks, India.
Barracuda has 3 different streams of business – Security, Network Optimization and Back-up. There are 4 technologies that come under Security, namely content filter, email security, web app firewall and network security. Under Network optimization, there is link balancer and Application load balancing. Under Back-up, there are 3 core technologies - message archiving, Copy and SignNow. Copy and SignNow are technologies that are new to India but are picking up fast. While SignNow helps in eliminating paper work, Copy is designed for businesses of all sizes to provide the manageability, security, and storage needs without compromising the user experience.
“India market is very ideally positioned for what we want to do. We differ from the rest in 3 ways - we offer best of class products; different versions of the products whether it is hardware, cloud or virtual and thirdly we are very disruptive in our pricing model. Our portfolio helps the customer to grow with us,” asserts Murali.

Barracuda – A Channel-centric company…
Being a vertical independent organization, Barracuda sells infrastructure products which go to every kind of customers. However, finance/ IT-ITeS contribute the bigger chunk to its business. Barracuda in India is 100 % a Channel Company as it does not sell directly to any customer. From a market engagement standpoint, it has a hybrid model in which it engages with its customers, understand their problems, pitch its product and negotiate on the price front. But when it comes to completing the transaction, the channel comes into the picture.  Even a system integrator has to go through a distributor and cannot complete the transaction on his own.
Barracuda has 2 types of partners – partners who engage with the company and partners who do business. While partners engaging with Barracuda are around 20, partners who bring business to the company are around 45 -50. “Our partners generally take 2-3 orders in a quarter, vanish and then probably come back. But we are trying to changing that. If they are doing business with one customer they can also think of doing business with other customers simultaneously. This way even they remain profitable and can be in business throughout the year.” Murali further adds, “If you look at the whole range of our products, every technology we sell has multiple models available, which implies that our partners can go and sell it to any kind of customers. From a market standpoint our partners do not find any challenge in addressing any kind of customers.”
The company works with big SIs like Wipro, Dimension Data, HCL and mid-tier SIs like Frontier, Ricoh. It has recently roped in Redington as the National Distributor. “We expect Redington to bring in a lot of value to us; the biggest asset it has got is reach, both in terms of geography and number of partners. By associating with them, we hope to expand our reach to all the cities. Ideally this helps us in getting across to a lot of smaller cities where we were not present earlier,” says Murali.

Looking forward…
Barracuda has grown more than 200 % in manpower.  The India market contributes probably 10% of the total APJ business for Barracuda. India being a strategic market and also a large market for the company, it expects a huge investment coming in. “We have big plans in the pipeline. Our solutions are designed ideally to address the customers from B and class cities. We are poised to increase our standing in the APJ region as we go forward,” says a confident Murali.

samrita@varindia.com