Barracuda Networks, the publicly traded cybersecurity giant, is growing—and has chosen once more to expand in Ann Arbor, MI.
Barracuda (NYSE: [[ticker:CUDA]]), which was founded in Ann Arbor in 2003 but moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 2007, plans to invest $2.3 million in its downtown Ann Arbor office and add up to 115 jobs over the next four years. To support the expansion, the state has awarded Barracuda a $750,000 performance-based grant, and Ann Arbor SPARK will assist in workforce recruitment.
The secret to Barracuda’s success, according to Rod Mathews, senior vice president and general manager of data protection, is its ability to solve complex problems in simple ways.
“All of our customers have one thing in common—they are constrained in some way, whether it’s budget, people, or skills,” he explains. “We make products that are easy to evaluate, purchase, deploy, and manage.”
Barracuda sells cloud-based cybersecurity and data protection services to more than 150,000 global customers across multiple sectors, including Samsung, Oracle, Shell, and Boeing. The company’s tools are designed to proactively neutralize security threats, such as phishing and ransomware attacks, and manage network performance.
Mathews says Barracuda is currently focused on the public cloud, which he describes as the fastest-growing part of the business, and building security products for platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
“We’re the number one firewall in the public cloud, and we were Microsoft Azure’s partner of the year in 2016,” he says.
Barracuda, headquartered in Campbell, CA, has a 250-person engineering team in Ann Arbor and more than a dozen offices worldwide. Mathews says the company chose to expand in Ann Arbor because of the city’s large pool of software engineers.
“The tech community is really thriving there,” he adds.
