A conversation with Barracuda Chief Product Officer Neal Bradbury on why proprietary data is the real moat when every customer's threat landscape is unique by Aly McGue Cybersecurity companies face a paradox. Their customers keep adding more security tools, expecting more protection. But the data increasingly shows that tool sprawl makes organizations slower to detect and respond to threats. At the same time, AI is accelerating both sides of the equation: giving defenders new capabilities while making it dramatically easier for attackers to operate at scale. For over twenty years, Barracuda has protected organizations from evolving threats with its BarracudaONE cybersecurity platform, which maximizes cyber resilience by unifying protection across email, ,data, networks, applications, and managed XDR. Barracuda uses Databricks for its enterprise data platform, consolidating fragmented data silos to power ML operations, real-time threat correlation, and business intelligence. Using Databricks Genie, the team quickly developed and launched features like natural language log search for its managed XDR solution, allowing customers to query billions of security events in plain language while maintaining strict data isolation. Neal Bradbury is Chief Product Officer at Barracuda, responsible for product management, engineering, security, and cloud operations. He has led the shift toward what Barracuda calls AI-native product development, in which intelligence is built into the core of every application rather than added as an interface on top. The thread running through our conversation was consistent: in an era where attackers operate at scale, the defenders winning with AI are those treating their proprietary security telemetry as a strategic asset. They aren't just adding AI tools; they are building intelligence directly into the data layer to stay ahead of evolving threats. Aly McGue: How do you define an "AI-native application" in your business versus a traditional application? What's the strategic difference for the customer experience?