Barracuda Ships its One-Millionth Cloud-Enabled Product

October 13, 2003, was a big day for Barracuda. That was the day we launched the  Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall and announced our Spam Defense Reseller Program. Today we're excited to say that we've recently produced our one-millionth cloud-enabled product.   

The lucky product turned out to be a Barracuda Backup 390, a Purpose-Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) in our data protection line of products.  Our CEO BJ Jenkins pulled the product off the production line and had it customized in gold.

How did we get here? 

Barracuda was founded in Cupertino by Dean Drako, Michael Perone, and Zach Levow.  Barracuda was based on the premise that spam was growing at an exponential rate and was a tremendous threat to every company's productivity.  The optimal answer to this threat was a dedicated plug-and-play hardware solution that would offload spam and virus filtering and reduce the work of the email server.  The Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall was available in three models with no per-user license fees.  Hourly updates were available to Energize Updates subscribers.  The Spam Defense Reseller Program was designed to help Barracuda Partners quickly solve their spam and virus problems with an affordable and easy-to-use solution.

Four months later the awards started coming in, and we were opening offices in Germany, Mexico, China, and Australia.  We also expanded our headquarters to a larger office in Cupertino, CA:

“This move not only provides additional space for our sales and engineering teams, it also provides an environment that is more conducive to meeting with current customers as well as future business prospects,” said Dean Drako, president and CEO of Barracuda Networks. “Barracuda is committed to providing strong antispam hardware solutions for enterprises and large businesses and looks forward to continuing business from this new location.”

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.

What came next?

The Barracuda Web Filter was launched in 2005, offering many of the same benefits as the Spam Firewall:  it was a plug-and-play appliance that was affordable, easy to use, and required no per-user or per-feature fees.  We opened an office in Tokyo, moved our headquarters to Mountain View, and nearly tripled our customer base.  We were growing rapidly and the awards and industry recognition kept coming.  We moved from Mountain View to a larger office in Campbell while expanding research and development operations in Ann Arbor.  The Barracuda Load Balancer and Barracuda Message Archiver were launched, and we went into 2008 with tens of thousands of new customers.

By 2010, Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall was the world's most widely deployed solution for on-premises email security.  We continued to grow, add features and deployment types, and lead the way on email security and message archiving.