https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/29/barracuda_investments/

Analysis Seven months ago Barracuda Networks was gobbled up by private equity biz Thoma Bravo because it saw latent possibilities that couldn’t be realized under public ownership.

It wasn’t one of your usual private equity buyouts, with a company brought down by weak results and acquired on the cheap, or spun off by a parent hobbled by it. Instead, Thoma Bravo saw things that some stockholders could not or would not. Firstly, that data protection and computer security for small and medium enterprises were inextricably linked and, secondly, that SMEs were transitioning to the cloud, via products such as Microsoft's Office 365, and data protection and security were as vital there as on-premises.