From portfolio to platform: Barracuda turns 20

2003 marked the start of an incredible journey for Barracuda Networks. What began as a humble team of six working out of a small office in Los Gatos, California, has since grown into a global force of security and protection. Barracuda has changed so much in the past 20 years that we can’t possibly cover it all here, but we can summarize it as a customer-driven journey of innovation from product portfolio to security and data protection platform.

Let’s start with the day we launched the Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall. This purpose-built appliance would perform the spam and virus filtering and reduce the workload of the email server. This product was available in three models with optional Energize Updates. By the end of 2004, we had introduced two new models of the Barracuda Spam Firewall, won nine industry awards, and we were serving 11,900 customers ranging from small and mid-sized companies to large enterprises and internet service providers (ISPs). In just over a year, Barracuda Networks had established itself as a dominant force in the worldwide anti-spam market.

Zack Levow and Denis Kieft with the first Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall shipment.

Over the next fifteen years we sharpened our focus on security and data protection while expanding our deployment options to include virtual machines, public cloud instances, and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Along the way we became the first and only Microsoft Azure Certified security solution provider, and we were named Microsoft Azure Certified ISV Partner of the Year. We were the first company to integrate an artificial intelligence (AI) anti-phishing defense into an email security portfolio, and we won several awards for our channel programs, customer support, and tech innovations. 

The last five years of our journey have been even more exciting. We were first to market with a cloud-native SD-WAN built on the Microsoft Global Network. We’ve helped customers deploy a secure network edge with our Zero Trust Access and SASE solutions, and we’ve made significant enhancements to our application protection solutions.

Today we remain the only company to offer email, network, and application security alongside secure data protection. We continue to search for the latest threats and mount a fierce defense against them, wherever those threats are in the cloud, in the data center, or in the inbox.

Join us throughout the year as we celebrate our 20^th anniversary. We’ll take a closer look at the development of our products and solutions, including our new XDR platform and SOC, and we’ll announce some exciting developments. Barracuda CTO Fleming Shi will be with us to share his philosophy of security and proactive defense. It’s going to be a great year.