Barracuda Acquires Start-Up Sonian That Raised $36 Million

Barracuda Networks, Inc. acquired privately-held Sonian Inc., provider of public cloud archiving and business insights. 

This acquisition will deepen Barracuda’s cloud archiving, and email security and management capabilities, as well as expand channel reach with the addition of OEM partners. 
 
Sonian’s archiving and analytics capabilities enable customers to preserve, access and act on communications data, and apply these insights to their business to reduce risks and increase productivity. Using those insights, businesses can identify potential threats in communications data before they escalate into larger problems, which has become increasingly important in today’s dynamic threat environment. Adding these capabilities to Barracuda’s security platform deepens the security and data protection offering to customers in their Microsoft Office 365 and other cloud environments.
 
“The Sonian team has done a great job of building and delivering a native cloud platform designed to meet the needs of partners and customers,” said BJ Jenkins, CEO and president, Barracuda. “The Sonian platform will enable us to continue to drive differentiation and leadership as customers move to Office 365. Further, we believe there is an opportunity to integrate Sonian’s analytics and AI with our data protection portfolio, which combined with our leading security solutions, provides a more complete solution to the market.”
 
“Flexibility, ease of ownership, and reliability of cloud platforms continue to drive significant market demand,” said Tim McKinnon, CEO and president, Sonian. “The potential of Sonian’s technology and go-to-market model combined with Barracuda’s scale and complementary products creates a powerful value proposition for both partners and customers.” 
 
Highlights of Sonian and the combination include:
• Purpose-Built Cloud Platform – Born in the cloud and designed natively to take advantage of public cloud scale and cost characteristics, Sonian provides a platform enabling rapid expansion and reliability via Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds.
• Cloud Archiving – The combined cloud archiving capabilities are powerful, easy-to-use for both customers and partners, which is important as companies look to SaaS-based solutions to fulfill their regulatory, policy compliance, and data preservation needs.
• Business Insights – Sonian’s technology illuminates data in email discussions and attachments and makes it actionable, proactively providing insights to customers. Barracuda intends to leverage Sonian’s analytics and AI across the security and data protection portfolio to give partners and customers actionable insights into their data.
• Extended Channel Reach – Sonian’s platform was designed for OEMs, MSPs and end-user customers from the ground up with white-label and administrative APIs for easy and automatic deployments.
• Customers – Sonian brings over 32,000 new customers to Barracuda as well as partnerships with large MSPs and software companies.