In conjunction with Barracuda Ventures, the company is making an investment of $25,000 to the winning company in the LAUNCH Hackathon as part of the LAUNCH Festival, March 4-6, 2013, in San Francisco. This contributes to a combined grand prize of up to $75,000 investment to the winner.
"Over the years, Barracuda has invested in and incubated startups” Dr. Paul Judge, Chief Research Officer and VP at Barracuda Networks, told Infosecurity. “Barracuda maintains its entrepreneurial spirit through initiatives like this. We started as a small start-up and we still have that culture. We have maintained that way of thinking and enjoy exposure to new ideas”.
Barracuda is also offering the Barracuda startup security package free of charge to the top five finalists of the LAUNCH Hackathon. “Security is often overlooked by startups in the efforts to be lean and scale quickly. We want to give back by helping startups implement strong security as early as possible in the lifecycle”, said Judge.
In other news…
Barracuda Networks also announced the release of Barracuda Firewall, “with a full next-generation feature set designed to meet the needs of small and mid-sized organizations.”
Steve Pao, VP product management, told Infosecurity: “Next-generation firewalls allow traffic to be inspected more deeply than just at the level of network protocol and port”. Previously, Pao said, “[next-generation firewalls] have been expensive, cumbersome to use, and designed to meet the needs of very large corporations with dedicated IT security personnel. The Barracuda Firewall was designed from the ground up to deliver next-generation functionality in an easy-to-use, affordable package.”