The Gately Report: Barracuda Networks CRO Wants New Business

Barracuda Networks’ new chief revenue officer is focused on bringing new business to the cloud-first cybersecurity solutions provider.

Geoffrey Waters has joined Barracuda Networks as its chief revenue officer. He will lead worldwide sales and partnerships, helping Barracuda Networks accelerate growth in markets around the world.

He most recently was president of Americas sales at Check Point Software Technologies, where he managed the line of business across Canada, the United States and Latin America.

Prior to Check Point, Watters was senior vice president of global channel sales at VMware, where he spent 13 years building and leading go-to-market teams for several of VMware’s managed services and cloud businesses. And before that, he was with Intel for more than 10 years.

Top Priorities for Barracuda Networks

Waters said when he joins a company, he looks at it through a lens of four core principles.

Barracuda's Geoffrey Waters

“I always think about new business,” he said. “You can get new business through maniacal customer outcomes, and selling up and cross-selling the full platform within your customer base. The second piece is what I call customer prospect and partner intimacy. I'm always going to be pivoted toward customer outcomes, working with partners and leveraging partners in those outcomes, but also then prospecting. I think we're in a world right now where there are a lot of new companies that are coming out that need security solutions. And I use the word intimacy because it's not just engaging them, but it's really about understanding them.”

Water said his third principle is “sales excellence (SE).”

“The consistent execution within sales is always going to be a focus,” he said. “And then finally just doing everything through the lens of one team. That one team can be pulling together our partners and it can be pulling together our SE organization. It can be pulling together a renewals organization. And so I think just getting everybody swimming in the same direction is always important.”

Waters wants to strengthen Barracuda Networks’ partnerships.

“I think we're going to be maniacally focused on net-new [customers] and working with our partners there,” he said. “It's the shared success. So it'll be us with our partners looking at that. And then just making sure that everything we do is about getting the best business security outcomes for our customers.”

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