Backup Anytime

Barracuda Bitleap takeover

I have been a satisfied Barracuda customer for some time now. They provide email management products and services. They have been at the top of their field for some time. Other services have reduced the gap in recent times but I think it would be fair to say that Barracuda are at least one of the best if not the best specialist anti-spam service providers in the world. Many end users will not be familiar with Barracuda as they provide their services to support their own hardware. Their hardware is not cheap and therefore tends to be the domain  of smaller service providers or companies at least large enough to have a small I.T. department.
Today I received an email from Barracuda inviting me to join a Webinar. I (and probably most people in the data business) receive these emails from various providers and third party companies all the time. I hadn’t participated in a Barracuda webinar for some time and had a close look at the email. The gist of the invitation was that the webinar would present and discuss products and opportunities as a consequence of a recent acquisition by Barracuda. I was hooked. Who did they buy? The email didn’t say. I went on to the barracuda website. No big secret. Straight off I could see there were two recent acquisitions.

The most recent was that of 3sp. The 3sp website, 3sp.com redirects to Barracuda. This will allow Barracuda to offer security solutions in the SSL VPN market.
The second one was of more interest to me. Barracuda have acquired Bitleap. So now Barracuda will be in the data backup business. Yes, but in a different guise. Barracuda are in product and services industries. Their antispam solutions require the purchase of a product and the maintenance by subscription of ongoing services. Barracuda will provide online backup for a monthly fee if you buy a box from them.

This actually makes sense from a number of viewpoints but limits potential uptake due to initial costs and the requirement to make physical network changes. For just about any other online backup service provider, this could represent a well intentioned and brave move with the consequence of near zero uptake. For Barracuda, things could be quite different.
Barracuda and their clients are more than familiar with the business model of combined product and service solutions. In a nutshell, Barracuda does things differently.

Many online backup providers (including ourselves) have considered and to a point ventured in to product and service solutions for online backup. A limited number of our clients have hardware solutions provided by us specifically for the purpose of backing up online. Barracudas brave move allows no middle road. If you don’t buy the box you don’t get the service. They applied this to anti spam services bar the facility for end users to get the service from third party I.T. providers who bought the box. This won’t work in online backup due to storage protection costs so it will (outside of ground breaking technology advances) be a no product no servie offering.

If they apply this with online backup and do it successfully, they could literally change the industry. A player like Barracuda could open the door for all of us by making online backup product purchase a normal pre service procedure. Given the choice, most providers would prefer this for the following reasons.

Uniformity of client hardware.
Simple replacement.
Hardware scaled to backup requirement.
Client less likely to move provider (hardware may also be useless should they do so)
Remote support made far less complicated.

I don’t actually know if the webinar is about the 3sp acquisition or the more interesting (for me) Bitleap takeover. Will I report back after the Webinar? Of course I will.