Barracuda Insiders Remain Bullish
In addition to meeting MySQL, I toured five other up-and-coming companies today. My most animated chat occured at Barracuda Networks’ offices, where I met Ezra Hookano, VP of sales, North America, and Stephen Pao, VP of product management.
I know plenty of people who love their jobs–but Pao takes the cake. The guy talks about anti-spam appliances the way Jim Cramer talks about stocks. Everything about Pao’s tone is upbeat and bullish.
Still, Barracuda faces challenges. Expanding from the anti-spam market into anti-spyware has required some adjustments. Alas, most companies don’t know they have spyware problems. Customers do, however, realize they need content-filtering solutions to ensure employees visit only approved Web sites. Barracuda has therefore repositioned and rebranded its spyware firewall appliance as a content-filtering appliance.