People want to simplify and simplify in any way they can. People don't want to buy half a solution, they want to buy a complete solution.
If you want to do proper backup with Symantec, for example, it takes six vendors. You've got to buy the back-up software form Symantec, you've got to buy the deduplication software from somebody else, you've got to buy the disk drives from somebody, you've got to buy the operating system from somebody, you've got to buy the hardware that you're going to run it on from somebody else and then you've got to pay somebody for off-site storage.
You've got six vendors that you've got to glue together with the Barracuda back-up you get all of that from on company. How much easier to you think that is?
We know Barracuda is a great supporter of open source. What do you do with open source and what are its benefits for you?
We support it with money and we donate a lot of code. The products all have open source in them and you can't build a product today without using some open source.
It's got some definite advantages. We save a lot of work in many cases. We have a product which we haven't announced yet called Cudatel and it's a phone system, we're entering into the phone business. And a huge portion of that project is all open source, so it's a project that competes with Asterisk.
So what was behind the decision to move into IP phone system business?
There are really two motivations. One is I got fed up with my existing phone system, and two the pricing model for phone systems is egregious.
Those are the two reasons, because it's all about per-user licensing fees and it's just too expensive for what you get. So we have a phone system which doesn't have any per-user license fees. It's just a lot easier, its much easier to set up and use, and it does everything it does options, add-ons and all the crazy complexity that the phone guys are using.
You buy a phone system now... it's really hard to buy a phone because it's so much for the box and so much for the software and so much for each phone. You need a license for each phone and then if you want to voicemail it's extra and if you want call forwarding it's extra. By the time you're done, it's too complicated.
So we think there is an opportunity. It's six months to a year [from worldwide release]. We're selling it in the US already.
It's potentially revolutionary.
