Bundled anti-ransomware will drive more reseller business
Acronis has launched the latest version of its data backup product bundled with automatic ransomware protection, and is predicting big sales opportunities for the channel as a result.
With the Acronis Backup 12.5 launch coming soon after last month's WannaCry global ransomware outbreak, the arrival of the upgrade was impeccably timed, if not actually planned that way. Acronis Backup 12.5 comes in two editions, with Standard and Advanced offerings, and both offering bundled automatic ransomware protection for on-premise and cloud-hosted data. Acronis aims its business solutions mainly at the small- to medium-sized enterprise space, while it also has a full suite of consumer products.
It competes with the likes of Veeam, Veritas, Commvault and Dell EMC in the business backup space, but these companies have a much higher chunk of large enterprise business. However, Acronis is not concerned about that. Over the last year, the Acronis EMEA region has seen its share of the Singapore-headquartered company's sales rise from 40% to 50%. Jakob Jersild Olsen, vice president and managing director EMEA at Acronis, told IT Europa: “90% of our business is through the channel and most of our partners are geared towards serving the SMB market, and the SMB market is more profitable for both us and our partners.
“Going after the large enterprise market takes a lot of investment and we have done this in some countries like Germany, where we have our own 50-strong sales team, but it's not an option for most of our partners.”
Olsen said Backup 12.5, with its anti-ransomware features and wider cloud protection support, would prove to be a profitable bonus for those traditional resellers looking to turn themselves into a service provider business. He said: “The resellers can help their customers operate their protection console and we can manage the back-end for them both. We are aiming to convert offline resellers into online ones with our products.”
Olsen also expects that Backup 12.5 will help resellers that currently specialise in the small business space move into the mid-size enterprise segment. “We are making it easier for the sales people when they walk into any sized business, as we have reduced the number of SKUs for our backup offering from 21 to just 9, and we already offer deal registration margins of up to 35% through our partner programme.”
Ease of sale and ease of use is at the forefront of the channel campaign, which has gone down well in some quarters already. “The new release is transformative for IT,” said Jason Buffington, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced is the world’s first enterprise-grade data protection solution with a consumer-grade user interface. It makes the complex job of data protection easy for any IT administrator or business owner.”
Holly Garcia, executive director, Advanced Solutions, Ingram Micro, said: “The flexibility, scale, security and transparent licensing offered with Acronis’ next gen backup solution will make it easier for channel partners to sell and deliver data protection-as-a-service.
“In today’s connected economy every business of any size stands to benefit from a secure and scalable backup solution that can be easily managed by a partner they trust. As a preferred distributor for Acronis, it’s great to see continued investment in the performance and usability of its data protection platform.”