Q&A: Barracuda CEO Dean Drako on cloud, the future and more

We've had lots of thoughts, no decisions. We're bigger than a lot of public companies and we like where we're at.

But there's stuff the future holds for us in that realm.

You bought phion around nine months ago now to bring in traditional firewall capabilities. In terms of your strategy, how do you approach acquisitions?

Phion was the ninth acquisition we've done. There is a lot of value that phion has built in this region. We've got people who know how to do business here [in Austria].

I've hired a lot of people in Europe and every one of them tells me I'm a Brit I know how to sell in France and Germany, and I can manage the whole thing no problem.' I'll hire a German guy and they'll say I know how to sell in England and France' and the French guys think they can sell everywhere.

The reality is that none of them can sell out of their region. They can get by, but they cannot do a good job. It's a lesson I've learned over the last 10 years.

So we're basically we're getting folks in each country to do it right in each country.

Are there plans for more acquisitions?

Clearly we are always looking for things that our customers can use and need. There's a couple of places [we could fill gaps].

We've kind of got our hands full right now. The NG Firewall and the cloud stuff we're doing, we've got a lot of work to make that even more successful, so we're not out scouring the planet right now, we're focused on building.

There have been some big buys in the security industry this year. Are you completely closed to selling up?

It is not our objective to be sold. Some people have an objective to sell. We've actually gotten pretty big, so it's pretty hard for us to sell, there's only a handful of companies that can buy us, companies that make sense like HP, Intel, Motorola, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec.

So it's not an objective, our objective is to build a great company, build great products [and] take care of customers.