We’re excited to share that Neal Bradbury has been elevated to the role of Chief Product Officer. In this new role, Neal will lead a unified product, engineering, and advanced technology team to steer the vision for Barracuda’s comprehensive cybersecurity platform and drive customer-centric innovation across the entire portfolio.
To help you get to know a little more about Neal and his new role, we recently sat down with him to talk about the insights and perspective he brings to the position, his initial goals for the team, and more.
Q&A with Neal Bradbury, Chief Product Officer
Tell me about your journey with Barracuda and your new role here
I joined Barracuda in 2015 when it acquired Intronis, a data protection company focused on MSPs that I co-founded in 2003. My years working with managed service providers at Intronis brought me a wealth of knowledge about the MSP market, and my time on the Barracuda team has given me exposure to so many different functions here, from sales and marketing to partner success, XDR, and more.
Over the years, I’ve learned that the most important thing we do every day is protect our customers, whether it’s through data protection or helping them defend against the advanced email threats businesses are facing today. I fundamentally believe in our purpose, and that’s why I wake up every single day to be on this journey and help protect our customers.
As Chief Product Officer, I’ll be responsible for product management, engineering, our advanced technology group, research and development, and innovation for the entire product portfolio. I’m excited to have this opportunity to bring all of these teams together and drive innovation focused on what will help customers the most.
What are you most excited to start working on as Chief Product Officer?
Barracuda has all of the right components to protect businesses from the threats of today and the advanced threats of tomorrow. I’m excited to take the next step and work on bringing those solutions together through the lens of the customer. How do we make it easier to get all of our technology into the hands of our customers, and how do we empower partners to deliver our cybersecurity solutions to their entire customer base? I’m looking forward to helping the team tackle these questions.
How have the different positions have had in the company helped prepare you for this new role?
Over the years, many of my roles have focused on partner success in one way or another. This taught me to keep the MSP business model top of mind and helped me better understand the challenges our MSPs and solution providers are facing.
For example, during the COVID-19 crisis, the entire partner ecosystem started to transform quickly from being a reseller or sell-through only motion to most partners now using both reseller and managed services models. Some have also added the hyperscaler model, transacting through cloud marketplaces. Being in the roles I’ve had allowed me to watch that transition, and now I’m able to take that knowledge and get it in front of our engineering teams so they can use it to deliver solutions that work for both our partners and our customers.
In addition, being the SVP of Barracuda’s managed service provider business gave me firsthand experience running the sales and marketing teams globally for MSP and seeing the challenges those teams face every single day. Now, as Chief Product Officer, I can take that knowledge and use it help our partners’ sales teams be successful. While I led Barracuda’s MSP team, I also worked closely with our security operations center team, which gave me a whole new perspective on what’s happening in today’s threat landscape, which will be helpful going forward.
I’ve learned that teams need to focus on understanding what problems we’re solving for partners and customers because at the end of the day, our sales teams and our partners sales teams need know how to articulate that value to a customer.
What are some of your initial goals for the team?
From a high level, my initial goals for the team are to help them understand the needs of our channel partners and to work on unifying the user experience in our SaaS portfolio. We want to simplify navigation and make it easier to go between the different products in our portfolio. I also want to continue work on Barracuda’s cybersecurity platform, bringing together all of our solutions, from email and data protection to XDR and everything in between. Continuing to expand the use of machine learning and our focus on efficacy will also be important.
How will you help foster innovation?
Encouraging collaboration across different teams is an important part of innovation. We want teams working together to protect customers from advanced threats. Instead of having individual teams looking at how to stop a specific threat that comes in via email, for example, it’s about getting the email, XDR, and network security teams all working together to understand the threat we’re protecting customers from and then mitigating it across the whole portfolio.
We also need to create time for the engineers to focus on innovation, so part of that is figuring out what we should stop working on to make that possible. We want them to have time to truly understand the problems and challenges we’re helping customers and channel partners address so they can build solutions with that in mind.
Photo: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.