From the standpoint of one security partner, Microsoft Corp. is a very different company today.

As the current president and chief executive officer of Barracuda Networks Inc., BJ Jenkins (pictured) can recall a time when a visit to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, was anything but a welcoming experience.

“I joke with people that when I was at EMC and I used to go to Redmond, I’d go with battle armor on because it was not going to be a fun meeting. It was going to be how Microsoft was going to hurt our business,” Jenkins said. “Now I go to Redmond and you’re embraced as a partner; they want to understand what customers and partners are thinking, and they jointly plan with you. So it’s been a completely different tone and tenor.”

Jenkins spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed recent announcements by Barracuda to support Microsoft Azure and signs of consolidation among solutions providers in the security industry (see the full interview with transcript here).

Leveraging Microsoft’s scale

Microsoft’s interest in a partnership approach was on display during the Ignite gathering this week as Barracuda announced further integration with the Microsoft Azure cloud. The security solutions provider launched its new Cloud Application Protection platform, which features a scalable web application firewall as-a-service built on Azure.

In September, Barracuda also announced that it would support Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN service with its CloudGen Firewall, part of its continuing partnership that began five years ago, according to Jenkins.

“We were the first security company to put our firewalls in Azure,” Jenkins said. “What we’ve done is really leveraged Microsoft’s scale to run a very easy, simple-to-deploy web application security platform.”

While leading Barracuda since 2012, Jenkins has witnessed rapid expansion of the network security industry as multiple companies entered the space offering a wide range of solutions. Not surprisingly, consolidation in the market has already begun.

“I do think there’s consolidation happening,” Jenkins said. “There are going to be certain segments of the market where you don’t need 15 solutions; you really need one from a particular player. There’s 3,000 security companies in different segments, and that won’t last forever. It will get easier for customers over time.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE